Did you hear -or maybe even fallen for – any of those?
(I know I did. )
3 extremely dangerous pieces of business advice, while essentially true and helpful -that could actually sink your business.
1. The first advice you get about your business, is that to make more money you need more clients.
And it’s true, but it’s one of those half truths, only part of the story – in isolation it doesn’t make sense at all!
Attracting new customers is actually the most expensive way of growing your business.
Getting new customers requires massive effort and takes loads of time. It also often means more expensive infrastructure, more admin, and let’s not forget, more customer support = more staff.
Could you think of a way to grow your business with less clients?
2. The second part-truth is that you need to work harder in your business and eventually it will pay off.
Why is it dangerous? You can work yourself ragged, many hard-working people can attest to it, and your business will still flop.
You don’t need to work harder, you don’t need this massive, herculean effort – to succeed, you need to work smarter: automate what you can, delegate, create systems that will work for you.
3. The third commonly misunderstood advice is to spend more on marketing.
While essentially true – spending money on marketing is a wise decision, spending the time and money ineffectively will do more damage than good. Namely, you could run out of marketing money, paying for either boring or too fancy, but both equally unprofitable.
It’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.
Marilyn Monroe
The basic understanding of marketing is … to have promotional materials, like business cards, leaflets, ads and somehow put them in front of the potential buyer.
Wait, isn’t that good?
On the surface, yes. Looking closer, not so much.
Somehow is tactics, not strategy.
Facebook ads are great, but won’t fill a leaking bucket.
Somehow is the reason you get discouraged and overwhelmed.
The typical marketing strategy consists of:
1. get some customers in and
2. get some more customers in.
As far as strategy goes, it means that most business owners spend their time on trying to get new customers, trying to find some new leads, uncover new markets in the hope that a percentage of them will become regular clients. But after initial surge of customers after each offer or promotion, the leads inevitably dry up.
Hope is a very expensive way of doing business, especially if you have no systems in place to ensure that you maximize lifetime client value.
So you need to keep paying to keep getting new customers in, barely break even on offers you do and keep watching them walk in, grab the discount and never come back.
Wouldn’t it be easier to have a group of regular clients on long term contracts and a waiting list?
Wouldn’t it be nice, if customers already knew about you, before you ever spoke to them?
To Be Continued..