After yesterday’s post, which ended in a frustrated Catch-22, my lovely wife and business partner Lani gave me a challenge.

(Side note: She was at the 6th Annual MicroCredit-NH Artist Exchange yesterday, connecting with artisans and checking out presentations by Nancy Clark of Glen Group, Jim Horne of Beacon Business Advantage, and Linda Faranas of Millenium Advertising.)

Here’s the refresher: If you don’t have the budget for marketing, and you don’t want to learn marketing because A) it’s not your specialty and B) you know as a business owner you should leave marketing to someone who knows how to do it, then you’re stuck.

So Lani challenged me to answer the question: How do you get unstuck?

Whether you go the Michael Gerber, E-Myth Revisited, employee-based model for your business, or you go the Timothy Ferriss, 4-Hour Workweek, totally-outsourced model, the answer is the same.

You have to start by doing it yourself. Period.

That means you have to do your own learning, purchase educational material, hire a coach/consultant, join a mastermind group, or some combination of these. You have to commit to this.

One of our mentors, Adam Urbanski, says (and I’m paraphrasing a bit) that if you’re a solo professional who sells a product, then, stop saying “You’re in the [product] business,” because it’s not that simple. The reality is that you’re in the business of marketing your product.

Gerber’s business planning acknowledges that, when you’re starting out, you’re doing everything. So he advises you create complete job descriptions and manuals for an employee’s duties. That means you have to know your own marketing cold, so when you get big enough to hire in-house marketing help, you can hand off the duties and know the person will be successful. Why? Because you already did it, and you know it works, and you documented it.

Ferriss lays out the process for building the outsourced model, but you have to do the research to find the product, you have to do the testing to make sure it’s viable, and you have to be able to give the proper direction and guidance to outsourcing firms or freelancers you hire to do the work down the road.

Bottom line: If you are a one-person shop, whether you’re selling a product or service, you have to learn how to market and sell your product or service. YOU. No one else.

And if that means you have to pay to learn, or pay to get coached, then get a budget together, set your expectations, put your money where your passion is, and take the leap. Because you’re not really “paying” - you’re investing with an expectation of return on your investment.

Take advertising as an analogy. Are you spending $100 on an ad, or are you investing $100 with the expectation of getting $500 in new business? That’s the only smart way to look at any marketing expenditure.

Sure, there aren’t any guarantees with marketing. There aren’t any guarantees with business, or with life. What is there, then? Numbers that can be tracked, and campaigns tested and tweaked, until you get the results you’re looking for.

Again: It’s you, and ONLY you.

Take the leap.

Posted in Call in the Coach, Entrepreneur Diaries, Lessons Learned |

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 11:57 am and is filed under Call in the Coach, Entrepreneur Diaries, Lessons Learned. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.