I’m a little surprised at how hard I’m taking this.
I talked with a micro-biz owner today who reached out to us after being referred by a networking contact. (Goooooo Networking!) He started off with a phrase we’ve heard quite often over the past couple of years…
“I need help with my marketing…”
Which is great, because that’s right up my alley. But because marketing means so many different things to people, and because people often include sales in their definition of marketing, I dug deeper to find out what he meant.
In this case, it was a mix of both marketing and sales – outright commission-paying sales help, plus building top of mind awareness with centers of influence in his field, plus creating marketing collateral.
Now for the Catch 22…
On the one hand, he’s good at what he’s good at, which is creating his product. He’s not interested in learning how to market his business. He knows that ultimately, as he grows his business, someone else should be doing the marketing for him, so he can focus on what he does best.
A fair point, indeed.
On the other hand, when it comes to resources, he has his time. As for money, there’s no budget established for marketing spending. Which means that, by default, he’s the only one who can do anything marketing-related for his business.
Which means he’s stuck. And I can’t help him.
Sure, I can throw a few ideas his way as part of a free consultation, but if he can’t get the help he needs to strategize and plan out the action steps, then it gets him nowhere, no matter how good the ideas may be.
He’s said that he needs to see a decent return within a year or he’s going to drop the business. But until and unless something changes, he intends to keep plugging away the way’s he’s been doing it, even though it’s not delivering him the results he wants.
Next time – if there is a next time – the consult will be billable. But without a budget, chances are he won’t ask for another consult. And besides, another consult just means that, even if he gets the strategy and the action steps and even the calendar to know when to take those steps, ultimately he’ll have to take those steps.
But he wants someone else to do it.
But there’s no budget for it.
But he can’t/won’t change the way he markets his business by improving his own skills.
Catch-22.
I sincerely hope the conversation we had sparks some action on his part that works wonders for him. But right now, I’m sitting here blogging about the conversation, and there’s no reason I should be so upset about this.
But I am. It’s been hours since we talked, and I still can’t let go of this absolutely unreasonable sadness.
I think I need to get outside for a while….
