business planning Archives by Mark Murnahan

Stop Fighting With Time and Build a Better Marketing Plan

If you pick a fight with time, time will always win. When it comes to your marketing and business strategy, time is not a good excuse for failure, but it is a popular scapegoat.

I often hear people say they just don’t have enough time. I want to inspire you to question how you are using your time, and how you could be doing it better.

You can scale this however you like – from an individual to the largest corporations – time is a very precious business resource. I want you to take this personally, so I’m scaling this down to just you. That’s because you are responsible to yourself, first. It’s easy to scale this up and see how it can affect any company of any size.

If you are wasting time doing the wrong things, you can stop complaining right now, because you are getting exactly what you asked for. You must defend your time, and treat it like the valuable asset it truly represents to your business.

Why Do Competitors Always Have More Time?

Lack of time is one of the most common excuses I hear from people about why their marketing is in shambles. It is an especially popular excuse that people will use for neglecting their online market. They will say “I don’t have time to understand and use social media” or “I don’t have time to write a blog.”

Others will sit and gaze into Twitter or Facebook for hours on end while deluding themselves that they are actually being productive. Worse yet, some will spend countless hours trying to get more people to click on their website links, without a productive marketing plan that addresses who is clicking or why they would want to.

People who are using the excuse of time will seldom like to accept that although they “don’t have the time”, their competition does have the time, and they are using it to win market share. Let me tell you, it’s not about the amount of available time – it’s how they prioritize the resource.

Time and Money Are Friends on Facebook

It’s tragic but expected that I hear the excuse of time-shortage from the same people who say they don’t have enough money. That’s more than just coincidence. Using time poorly will usually have a pretty devastating affect on finances, while using money badly creates a huge drain on time.

Just imagine how much more you could afford to delegate to others if you just started using your time better. Then you could surely get a lot more done. Yes, indeed, time and money are deeply connected.

The challenges of time and money cause an ugly and wasteful dilemma, and until priorities are sorted out, the cycle of waste will continue. Here’s the kicker though – you have exactly the same amount of time as everybody else.

Don’t Let Yourself Off the Hook!

I’m not going to criticize others about their poor use of time without accepting my own guilt. I shudder to look at how many useful or interesting things I see on the Internet, but only make minimal use of. I have a huge stockpile of links to articles I mean to finish reading – but I’ll have to get back to them after I follow up on some email. It all gets pretty messy without a solid routine – and a whole lot of discipline.

Discipline is especially important once you click open a web browser. There is always something shiny, blinky, and time-robbing just a click away. Controlling those urges to try and see and do everything is a big step toward productivity. You simply have to shut some of it off, and if you miss a few things, it is likely for the best. You cannot do and see it all, and you should stop trying. Focused and highly disciplined use of your time at a that computer can make a huge difference in the outcome of your goals.

I don’t have it perfect, and neither do you. What I can claim is that I’m trying, and I hope you are trying, too.

Stop Being Defensive and Delusional

People are often reluctant to accept that when they use the “not enough time” excuse it is largely because they are using their time poorly. Many people are quite defensive about their inefficient use of time. After all, who likes to accept the reality that they are messing things up, and it’s all their own fault? Denial is a wicked thing, so it’s best to just accept it – you can do a better job of time management.

Accept this fact: Time levels the playing field, and it is one way that we really are equal. It is 168 hours since this time last week, and 168 hours until this time next week. Spending those hours wisely is a huge factor in success and failure.

If you don’t have time to do things you know you should be doing, it is time to take a closer look at what you are doing that wastes your time. Since we each have exactly the same number of hours in a day, days in a week, and weeks in a year, time is not the problem. Priorities … now there’s the real challenge!

How Was Your 168 Hours?

It’s another Friday, and I’m gazing back through my week at what I have done – and also what I have not done. This week was not any longer than last week, nor shorter than next week. As expected, 168 hours have passed since this time last Friday, and I have 168 hours until this time next Friday.

I didn’t complete my recent objective of finding the job of my dreams this week. I’m willing to accept that it is largely my own fault. I made a lot of progress, but I took my eyes off the prize at times. I can make plenty of excuses, but I know that each excuse really comes down to priorities.

So now I wonder, how was your week, and what have you done to prioritize the next one even better? If you have any ideas for the rest of us, please share your comments. If you have a helpful tip, or a link to a helpful tip, please share your comments with the rest of us guilty time-wasters.

Thank you for granting me your time today. I know how precious it is. I’m glad you spent this moment to consider how easy it is to waste.

I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot lately, and I want to share a link that helped push me to share my thoughts with you. It is an article by my crusty, foul-mouthed, and respected peer, Erika Napoletano titled “The Part Where I Kick Your Ass“. Maybe you need your ass kicked, too. 😉

The next time you catch yourself in a loss for time, consider how you are using it. Are you making a list of priorities? Are you following a defined plan? Are you doing what it takes to use your time efficiently, or are you just making flimsy excuses like most people?

You may think I should give you a bunch of resources to free up your time. There are many good ideas in my blog archive, but most importantly, you must first recognize that there is a flaw before you can fix it.

Photo Credit:
it’s being time by Gisela Giardino via Flickr

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Vision: If You Don’t Have it, You Can’t See It!

If it ever seems you’ve tried “everything” and it is not working out the way you planned, there is probably a good reason. A very common cause for a plan to fail is lack of planning.

Consider something as complex as a space ship for a moment. Space ships don’t always launch as planned, but they have an overall good record, considering their challenges. That’s because of careful planning. It has to begin somewhere, and it begins with a vision.

It is more than a coincidence that most successful companies have a vision statement. Those visions can change, but there should always be a vision. Vision is what guides people and keeps them on the right path to achievements.

You have undoubtedly heard somebody express the importance of setting goals and envisioning the outcome you want. It can sometimes sound far-fetched, and even a bit hokey. If you reverse-engineer this notion of having vision, the reality may not be as you expected.

I want to explain why those people who talk about having vision are not just promoting a dream world filled with unicorns and cute kittens. It is not just about dreaming up a hallucination, either.

The reason it is important to have vision, whether as a huge corporation or as an individual, is that it becomes a basis for your goals and expectations. With vision, you will begin to do the things that bring you closer to the desired outcome. Your vision is what helps you to develop a subconscious reflex to do things to affect the results you want.

Vision Doesn’t Work for Skeptics

There are a lot of skeptics who may consider the value of vision as hogwash. We are each skeptical at some point, and to varying degrees. Being a bit apprehensive about a positive vision and creating goals is what preserves us from failure. If you don’t hope for much, you are less likely to be let down. That kind of apprehension also preserves us from success.

I believe that lack of vision is one of the greatest causes for failure in business and personal pursuits alike. The fear of creating a vision and doing what it takes to follow that vision is simply more than some people can overcome. I have witnessed this for decades as a marketing consultant.

To a skeptic, the people who talk about vision are often the ones who somehow “got lucky”. They hype the whole idea that everybody should have a dream for their life. It must sound totally crazy to a skeptic. For the skeptical type, the very notion of “vision” as it applies to getting what you want probably sounds like some kind of mystical new age idea complete with smoking the wrong stuff, waving a magic wand, and other hokus pokus that makes people want to go chase unicorns.

I’m talking about the real world. This is not about some fancy notion that if you can dream it that the obstacles will magically fade away and you’ll get everything you ask for. That’s usually not going to happen, but you can definitely get a lot closer.

I realize that many people do not want to be inspired, but instead, they want to find their own inspiration. I will not pretend to inspire you, but I do believe I can show you a couple points on the map to help you find your own inspiration. Here’s a nutshell story of why I know and strongly believe in the value of having long-term vision. I hope you’ll find ways to relate and think about instances that worked for you.

A True Story of Vision

There was a time when I was not expected to make it very far in life. I was frustrated with school, and my grades showed it clearly. I was bored to tears, and I hated sitting in a classroom to be drilled with the same information, over and over again. I had previously been a top student, but my teenage vision obviously did not include my grade point average.

This was hard for my mother. Despite her previously high hopes and continued business mentoring, my future was falling apart. I was becoming an outcast, and a disappointment. She was giving up on me. All of the sudden, I was not just letting myself down, it was tearing my mother apart. I did not feel good about that.

When I was 15 years old, I left school to start a company. Throughout my earliest career years, I was a bit fixated on somehow making my mother proud. It became a very clear vision for me. I imagined how it would be for her to not look at me as her biggest failure. Of course, at 15 years old, I only really knew one way, and that was to prove my lack of formal education would not hold me back and I could be successful in business.

My vision took me far beyond expectations. I did very well in business by fixing under-marketed companies in exchange for ownership equity. Ten years after leaving school, I was comfortably retired and enjoying Mother’s pride … and a bit of my own. My vision was complete.

Caution: Completed Visions Are Like Poison

Once my earlier vision was completed, I became a 25 year old retired bachelor with no vision of my future. I dated the wrong ladies, I made the wrong investments, and I connected with the wrong business partners. Things pretty much fell apart, and I needed a new vision to get back on a good track.

I discovered that without a continued plan – without a vision – life simply would not take me where I intended. It became obvious that it would be impossible to get what I wanted if I couldn’t define it.

I eventually became inspired again. My new vision came in the form of another lady. Call me a ladies man. She wanted to quit her mid-level job in the banking industry to grow her sideline Internet services company. We merged companies and I went back to work with a vision. There was nothing easy about it. It took a lot of time and effort, but the vision came to life.

This vision worked, because there was a goal. We expanded the goal as needed, and our vision was flexible. It turned out that we took a website development company and spun it into one of the largest wholesale providers of Internet access and web hosting in the world. Yes, a high school dropout can have a successful vision, too!

Visions Should Be Flexible and Failure is Always an Option

Years later, I had a vision of sports car racing. I bought some brand new Corvettes, spent a quarter million dollars per year, and invested countless hours of hard work and training in that vision. It was very important to me. I got quite good at it, too.

When I consider all of the things in my life that require vision, auto racing has got to be on the extreme side. It would be nearly impossible to make it around a two and a half mile race course with 14 turns in under a minute and forty seconds without a vision.

Since the vision of our Internet company was as developed as we thought it would ever be, we created a new vision of selling the company and opening an upscale bed and breakfast and racing school. It was a mutual vision to pursue our culinary talents and my racing passion. Indeed, my business vision had led me to a full-time career in automotive racing. But there was a curve in the road!

I want to note that failure is always an option! Failure can teach many valuable lessons. A person who has not failed, is missing those lessons.

Anybody who believes that failure is not an option is leaving a lot of their potential to waste. Having a substantial vision requires being willing to step outside your comfort zone, and until you do it, you’re missing out.

Consider it like this: Failure is a side-effect of success.

The crash of the economy was not good to us, and it changed our vision. Change can be a good thing, when you have vision. Following my wife, Peggy’s culinary passion, we opened a wildly successful bakery, Mad Eliza’s Cakes and Confections.

Racing ran off the track for a while, but guess what? The vision is still there!

The Best Visions Bend, But Don’t Break

With a well-conceived and longer term vision comes flexibility. By its very nature, vision should be flexible and open to changes. It is not a formula for instant success, but rather a guideline. The best vision will create an overall look at what is to come, but it is not a predefined paint-by-numbers view of the future.

What got me thinking about the importance of vision today is because I’ve noticed my long-term vision coming clearer, almost without even consciously recognizing it. My earlier vision began to drive me to focus on what I really want.

In December, I announced that I would stop accepting new marketing consulting clients in January. That was because I decided to stop trying to be great at everything, as a CEO, in order to focus on my best talents and the things I am most passionate about.

I realized that my refined vision is to work for a company I will love. I started imagining how it would feel to settle into a new job with great coworkers and a new home in a new city. Then I imagined how amazing it would be if that company was one that fits into my larger vision. That means a company that is involved in racing, has a race team, or would have a good case to sponsor a race team if their marketing success – based on my hard work – could justify it.

The vision involves racing, and it involves marketing. I’m not shopping for my next race car just yet, but with vision on my side, it’s definitely in the works.

Almost without even realizing it, my efforts began to focus on companies that I could believe in and where I could improve their vision and feel proud to bring them success. I found myself researching companies based on their vision, and how it would fit with mine.

I’ve developed my vision, and I’ve noticed that I am making many renewed efforts, both consciously and subconsciously, to make that vision come true. It may sound pretty lofty to some people to find a job they love with a company where they can feel devoted. What I know for certain is that without a vision, I would fall short of my best outcome.

My vision may not come out exactly as planned. It is flexible – and negotiable. Then again, I was somehow able to make my mother proud. So I’m going with it.

Great Visions Are Shared

When you have a vision that others can share, it builds synergy. The vision becomes larger than its individual parts. Sometimes the hardest part is to share your vision with others, for fear of being shot down.

You should feel proud of your vision. Some people simply don’t have any. You may be amazed by the outcome of sharing your vision with others. If you don’t feel good enough about it to share it with others, it probably just needs more development. Even if this is the case, vision is always best when it is shared.

So now I ask you, what is your vision? Please share it.

Pssst! Here are links to my résumé and a little more about me.

Photo Credits:
Through the Glass by GoRun26 via Flickr
Seeing Truly by Joel Penner via Flickr

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Hard Lessons I Learned About Marketing and Success

Some people say that you can learn a lot from successful people. I think it is largely true, too. It makes more sense to learn from somebody who has been successful than to learn from somebody who has not. At the same time, one thing that becomes very valuable is to learn from the mistakes they made, and use those things to avoid repeating their mistakes.

Some would say that I took a bit of an uncommon direction to learning about marketing. I dropped out of school about 25 years ago at age 15, regularly held 2-3 jobs as I built my first few companies, and nearly worked myself to death by the time I was 25. It sounds glamorous, doesn’t it?

My career path would certainly not be comfortable for most people, and I would never encourage it for my own children or anybody else I care about, but it worked for me. I learned my way through it the hard way. I read a lot of books, and I studied a lot of concepts from successful people. They were often people I knew first hand, and there were many instances when I should have listened more carefully. Since I was stubborn, I still had to learn some things the hard way, by making my own mistakes.

Lesson one: Don’t be stubborn! There really are people who know more than you about a given topic.

OK, I’ll admit, my path to learning was not totally awful, and there were a few benefits along the way. I earned more money by the end of those ten years between 15 and 25 than most people will in a whole lifetime. I retired for a few years, and it mostly seemed worth it. Yes, indeed … I had become one of those successful people like the ones I worked so hard to learn from.

Some of the greatest benefits I received were the marketing lessons I learned. Those tough lessons about marketing taught me how to bounce back from nearly any business calamity. That is because if you can market something, you can sell something, and if you can sell something you can earn profit, and let’s be honest … the majority of things that can go wrong in business can be improved with more money.

I want to share some of what I learned with you. I’ll offer a glimpse of my early years in business, and some valuable lessons it taught me about marketing. I hope it will save you some of the frustration of my mistakes. At the same time, it may scare you to imagine what it really takes to build success in a business. It is not for everybody … “average” is for everybody.

If The Doors Aren’t Swinging, The Cash Register is Silent

In my early days of business ownership, nearly 25 years ago, it was pretty easy to recognize that my business was much better when the doors were swinging open, or the telephone was ringing. Without enough customers, I wasn’t selling enough, and selling something was how my company generated revenue … money … profit. You know, the stuff that sets the difference between a hobby and a business.

I needed to attract customers, and I knew it would take some pretty clever marketing to keep my company moving forward. Without marketing, even the best companies fail. I had seen such failure in other companies, so I knew I needed to get that part right.

Of course, marketing comes in many forms, and it involves many aspects of a business. It includes product assessment, pricing, merchandising, public relations, and more. Focusing on just one area of marketing is short-sighted, and leads to a lot of waste. What I knew for sure was that if I didn’t do something and do it right, I would never grow the company into anything sustainable. First things first, I needed to generate some money to make the whole thing work.

Sales reps were not worth a garage sale necktie to me if I didn’t have the right product offering. So, I worked on our offerings to be sure they were better than the competition. The sales reps were also no good to me if I could not legitimately define why the offerings were the best option in the market for our given customers. That meant I needed some product research. That’s when I realized the product research and the customers had to match up just right. It would not matter how awesome the offering was, or how well we could merchandise it, if we did not understand who would benefit from it the most, and would have a greater propensity to respond to our efforts. That’s right … “everybody” is not a target market.

I researched like mad to put all the pieces together. I got the products just right, the pricing was attractive, and I ran great ads to get bodies through the door, but then I figured out that there were good customers, and then there were great customers. I needed to determine how to get the right customers through the door. When I learned how to do that, our profits grew like mad. With all that research to my advantage, advertising cost went down because it became more effective.

You see, it took a lot of little pieces to be put in their proper place in order to grow. It took a lot of very time-consuming and often high-investment efforts to create success.

Putting all those little pieces in the right order and in their rightful place is even more important now than ever, in the digital world. The competition is broader, the offerings are sharper, and getting people to a website is not at all the same as getting the right people to a website. Once you get them there, you will need very compelling reasons they will want to do business with you. My early experiences really helped me to understand this.

Here comes a lesson that came really hard for me, but it makes a huge impact once you get it right.

Who You Are is Not a Microcosm of Your Market!

You are not the same as your customers and potential customers. You may try to be like them, you may try to speak their language, and you may even be part of a very similar demographic, but the truth is that they are different. We each want to believe those warm and friendly lines like “people are not so different after all” … but they are!

It is very challenging to try and understand your perfect market segment, and how to reach them with the right message. It is a bit unnatural, because it requires thinking in a way that is not your usual way of thinking. They are the customer, and they will always have their own perspective, their own experiences, their own mindset … and you will have yours.

During my earliest days in business, I remember a constant nagging question of “Who are these people?” I’ve got to say that as much as I tried, I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I understood them in concept and in statistics, but I still could not relate to their ways of thinking. Fortunately, I didn’t need to nor want to become more like them. It is true but misunderstood that you do not have to “become your customer” to provide their best option … but you will need to know a lot about them. I was selling very expensive things to very egotistical people. I knew exactly why they would buy, and I knew that it was all about stroking their ego.

What I couldn’t grasp was why they were so willing to endure all of that opportunity cost just to splurge on luxury items. They were buying things that I felt I could never afford. The crazy part was that I would constantly find that my customers were actually earning only a fraction of what I was.

The big separation for me was that I was in a different stage of my life, and in a different mind capsule of my own. I believed in taking every dollar I earned to further build my businesses, and buying showy things just didn’t fit into my model (until much later).

There are many things which can separate us from the mindset of our customers, and it is usually not a simple task to figure it out. In my case, it became my most monumental career objective to understand the gaps between customer and seller perspectives … and to bridge those gaps.

One of the best and hardest lessons I learned was that it usually takes a fresh set of eyes looking from outside. That means outside of the buyer’s perspective, and outside of the seller’s perspective. Analysis from a complete outsider is one of the best ways to understand the gaps between sellers and customers. I am lucky I learned this early, and I will always value the outsider. This can be a friend, an associate, or a trade organization, but it is even better when it is their job to serve your company needs and expectations. You can be afraid of the truth, but it will not change the truth. The best outsider is often in the form of a trained and experienced marketing consultant.

The funny thing is this: I am a marketing consultant, and in fact, I am a very accomplished marketing consultant … but knowing what I know, I will never stop using them. Yes, it probably sounds totally nuts to you, but I rely on outsiders to provide the same services that others pay me to provide.

The reason I use outside marketing consultants is that for as much as I can do the research, bring you to discover me, know your hot buttons, and even address them fairly well, I will never completely understand you, or why you are not buying my services. If I tried to understand you all on my own, without influences from the outside, I would destroy many of my greatest opportunities. I would also likely go even crazier than I already am.

You really must have a plan if you want to get ahead in business. I started with a plan, but I found a lot of changes to make along the way. I also found a lot of roadblocks, and often by being hard-headed and not taking good advice. I cannot share all my best advice in one blog article, but I have a pretty lengthy blog archive full of good information.

Delegating Saved Me More Than Once

I learned that one of the most profound commonalities of successful people is knowing when and how to delegate things outside of their expertise. They realize their limitations, and the value of concentrating their efforts on the things they are best suited for. They recognize what they don’t know, and they become good at finding the right people to handle those things.

I learned to delegate. It was terrifying to me, and I never got really comfortable with handing the controls over to somebody else. I hated that my accountants and attorneys often knew more about me than my own mother. I also hated the thought that my marketing consultants have often known enough about my businesses to try and mirror my company and become my competition.

I thank my lucky stars that I got over it and realized that I cannot be the very best at everything. I am absolutely terrible at accounting! All I want to know is that there is enough money in the accounts to carry out my purchases. I generally grasp the whole legal thing, but I hate writing my own contracts, and I understand why they say that “the lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client.” A similar principle holds true in marketing. If you rely on your own brilliance, without outside influence, you will make mistakes … and often very costly mistakes.

Whether it is a friend, a colleague, a trade association, or a trained marketing professional, you will need to trust and learn from an outsider at some point. Tell them your goals, tell them your business pains, listen to them, take their guidance, and grow your business. Otherwise, don’t be surprised that if you keep making the same mistakes, you will get the same results.

If Building Success Was Easy, Wouldn’t Your Market Share Be Higher?

Building a successful business is not easy, and it requires a lot of uncomfortable decisions. If it was easy, it would be easy for your competition, too. A key factor lies in your will to achieve more.

There will always be people to dislike you for doing the things they are unwilling or unable to do. There will always be people to try and roadblock your success. You may often create your own biggest roadblocks based on other people’s frustrations. I know this, and I can almost bet that it is like fingernails on a chalkboard to many people when I say I’ve spent much of my adult life in the top fraction of a percent of money-earners in the USA and in the world. Yeah, that’s annoying to the people who have not joined me there, and have no hopes of achieving the same or similar results.

I really enjoyed and related to an article my friend John Falchetto recently wrote titled “5 reasons jerks are successful“. I hate to give away the ending, but the fact is that they are not jerks at all. They just work very hard and have very strong commitments. I encourage you to read it and also read the comments on the article. I had a lot to say about it.

I know that there is a huge deluge of information telling you that you can do it all yourself, and that you can reach a huge audience of all the right people with the perfect message about your company and make your product or service offering so popular the phones will ring all night and day.

If you really believed it was so simple, I think you must ask yourself “Why isn’t my market share higher?” or “why am I still reading this blog?” You want more business … that’s why.

Let this roll around in your head for a while: If you were given all the right resources to market your company, would it become as successful as you hoped it would be? Either way you answer, this should require you to consider what mistakes you are making and which required resources you are missing. It very likely has a whole lot to do with your marketing.

Photo Credit:
Separation Anxiety by j bizzie via Flickr

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Marketing ROI Factor: Are You a Client or a Customer?

Planning is a Critical Marketing Component

I often ask people what they want to achieve in their business. Much of the time, they really don’t know. I ask questions relating to the sales volume of their industry, the volume they want to achieve, the market share increase they seek, and what they are doing, or willing to do to reach those things. It gets me a lot of blank stares and long pauses on phone lines. This is because they really don’t know.

Many companies don’t have goals, or even the right information to understand what goals are achievable at a given level of marketing effort. They don’t know what it will require to get the results they want, and many times they are entirely shut off to finding out the frightening truth of where they are and where they are headed. When this is the case, they simply do not have all the pieces of marketing math and science in place to make good decisions that will optimize their success.

Relax! If you don’t feel like reading right now, at least push the play button and listen to the audio version. I think you will gain something from this.

If you are a marketing professional of any decent calibur, you surely understand this, and deal with it all the time. You will appreciate this story, and wish for each of your customers to understand this. Otherwise, if you are a business person who is not involved in marketing, I will explain why you need to pay attention to your marketing people and stop trying to butt heads with them over things you don’t fully understand. If you don’t understand something, you should work with your marketing people to make things more understandable, and know this: Marketing professionals do a much better job when they are not getting roadblocked by you standing in your own way. They also perform much better if you are not having chest pains over every decision and over every nickel and dime. So, it is best that you pay attention and use what they know to your advantage. That is what they are there for!

The market information I mention here is not intuitive for most people. It is the data that a marketing director or consultant can deliver for you, digest for you, and provide continually updated measurement. Tragically, it is often overlooked when somebody chooses to kneecap the marketing department because they don’t understand the work we provide. It is important to have this information in order to build your strategy, or it will be much harder and usually impossible to achieve optimal results. If you overlook these fundamentals, you are building on a weakened foundation. It makes perfect sense, right? Fine, maybe not yet … so I’ll continue.

Without accurate information about market potential, a defined set of business objectives, and a clear knowledge of what it will take to meet your well-planned goals, a marketing campaign is often little more than an experiment in wasting money. Marketing should never be a “shot in the dark” like this, but I see it very often that this is the way companies, large and small, approach their market. It leaves little wonder why some companies view marketing as a risk, while others understand the sound investment it really is. When this miserable fate of marketing fear gains control, companies suffer in huge ways. The common cause is lack of research and planning. The common outcome is that somebody makes an executive decision to slow down the marketing train and pull it off the tracks.

When Return on Investment Goes Negative

Positive return on investment (ROI), is the magical part of marketing that keeps a business steaming forward. Sometimes companies accidentally stumble on a positive return on investment. After all, even a broken clock is right twice per day. When the return on investment comes without good planning, it is often just out of “luck”, and that “luck” runs out. When it is based on yesterday’s market information and yesterday’s strategy, a similar drop in ROI can be expected.

If you have encountered this in your company, let’s look at this again and reevaluate the importance of marketing. Marketing is what makes companies successful. Without good marketing, many phenomenally great companies have failed. Conversely, many presumed failures have become successful because of good marketing. There is a strong correlation in the outcome of a company and the quality of their marketing. Not just quantity of their marketing … I said quality. This requires providing your marketing people the resources they need so they can deliver what the company needs.

Marketing provides the math that runs the machine, and has a huge influence in everything from determining the right selling price of goods or services, to the CEO’s salary. It is a lot more than just advertising, branding, or updating your Facebook status. When marketing is done right, it is approached as a holistic strategy to make the company stronger and more profitable.

Notable Considerations: Starbucks was a little coffee company and Subway was a little sandwich shop in the beginning. Because they understood the principles I am expressing here, they have become some of the most successful companies in their fields.

Call for Marketing: A True Story

I received a telephone call from an existing client. Actually, he is more like a customer, because he thinks like a customer and creates his own roadblocks like a customer, which is unlike a client. I consider customers and clients two entirely different things.

Let me explain this: In my business, clients view me as an integral partner in their success, and not just a person who completes a series of tasks. They understand that my knowledge and experience is what brings them success, and not just my performance of a set of prescribed deeds. They pay attention, and they take my advice very seriously. Clients don’t tell me what to do about their marketing … they ask me what to do about their marketing.

To be a client, a person cannot nickel and dime their way through and stumble along an undefined path until they make it. We set goals together based on solid facts and market data, and we adjust them as needed. We create a finely polished plan and we work together to make that plan a success.

So, about the person who called me, I like this guy. He has been a customer for about four years, and we have built a relationship in that time. I consider him my friend. He has been to my home, and he has met my family. We are not strangers, and we have a mutual trust. If he says a check is in the mail, I trust him (unlike this example from Suture Express). I believe that he trusts me, too, but he gets in his own way. He likes to be in control, and he likes to prescribe specific marketing tasks. That is fine, because if he has less than optimal results, it is ultimately not my fault. On the other hand, it kind of makes me feel a bit dirty and icky to just do what he says when I know he is making a mistake.

The troubling part is that when I explain why he should be doing something differently, the train gets derailed. It is not really because he does not have faith in me. As I said, he has been to my home, and he has witnessed first-hand that I am more than just a little bit successful in my field. What I have determined is that he has a hard time putting faith in his own plan … because he doesn’t really have a plan. He just knows he wants to make more money, but he refuses to take a strategic approach, regardless how sincerely or logically I urge him to do so.

In our recent discussions, he has explained that he wishes to market a product that he believes in very much. The product is in one of the most competitive industries in the world, and includes a line of very exclusive products with a specific market that is typically affluent. I asked him the common questions, and he does not yet have all the answers. What he could tell me is that he wants to hit the market at full strength. In his own words, he wants to put 100 percent into the marketing effort. When I told him that he had better prepare to mortgage his oceanfront home, his boat, and his first-born son, he probably thought I was joking.

Let me insert a bit of fact so that you can really understand this. My customer recently experienced a common fate as his employer of 20 years sold off his division to an overseas company and he became jobless. Because of his age and his specialized experience, he decided to avoid the underwhelming job market and take a new focus. He has chosen to sell a line of products that he and his wife’s other company has had some success with.

My friend and customer is an accountant by trade. In fact, he is a damn good one, who has been charged with accounting for a whole lot of millions of dollars by a sizable corporation. He has his Master’s degree in accounting and I believe he has done a great job with it. He is not a marketing professional.

His idea of putting “100 percent” into the new business venture was still expected to be manageable with a budget of under $10,000. Ten thousand dollars?! Can you even imagine that? His goal is to replace his full-time income of a senior accountant of 20 years with an investment of less than a month’s income. If that level of investment success was possible, don’t you think McDonald’s, Wal Mart, Microsoft, and Google would have already cornered that market?

So, in order to try and keep his perception of risk low, I introduced the idea of a partnership of sorts, whereby I would provide marketing on a contingency basis. I would not have done that if I didn’t have a degree of faith in his idea, and trust for him as a businessman. I also normally do not provide such a service with woefully under-capitalized companies, or those which are unwilling to listen and take good advice from an experienced consultant.

What I realized, as I considered this a little closer is that such a partnership is really not a good idea for me, simply because of his unwillingness to understand the importance of marketing. After all, the emphasis of his new company is nearly entirely based on marketing. Instead, I will offer him the opportunity to prescribe a set of tasks, pay me as a customer, and tell me how he wants to handle his marketing.

The way it turns out, he mostly believes that the emphasis will be in the production of a really great website and some social media exposure, but gives little thought of what else it takes, and what else I know. He wants me to produce his ecommerce website development, initial search engine optimization efforts, and set up a social media presence. The four-digit budget will be exhausted long before I can complete these tasks at an optimal level, but since he is a great guy and existing customer, I will stretch my work out beyond his spending cap. I will do a an exceptional job for him, and I will not let him down.

My customer’s chosen direction will leave no room for strategy development, data acquisition, customer modeling, industry market research and forecasting, or the many other things which need to be done to create a successful market penetration. However, it will provide a sense of control and security for my customer. He will fall far short of what he could achieve if he actually could bring himself to put forth a 10 percent effort, but I cannot tell somebody how to run their business. My job is to tell them how they could run their business, what they could achieve, and help direct them there. As for the 100 percent effort he talked about … he has no concept of what a 100 percent effort looks like in a competitive market. He has only seen that in movies.

Summary: You Cannot Save Your Way to Prosperity

If you approach your market like the customer I have described, you will miss a lot of potential. In fact, it is a good recipe for failure. A reality of marketing that is difficult for many people to grasp is that you cannot save enough money to become prosperous in business. To become prosperous, you have to invest it, and do so with good direction and dedication.

I like the way Thomas Jefferson put it with the inspiring quote as follows:

“The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time.”

–Thomas Jefferson

Don’t just take it from me, look at your own company. If you are investing wisely in your business, you know that I am right. On the other hand, if you are trying to save money in order to keep your cost low, your profit is undoubtedly much lower than it could be, too.

I shared my description of what I call a client versus a customer. The question that I really hope you can answer for yourself is which makes more sense in your business. Would you rather be a client or a customer?

Other Related Articles: I believe that a lot of shortsightedness comes from fear of loss overcoming hope for gain. The fear of loss is often due to the cost of doing things right, versus just doing things. Here are some related articles you will appreciate if you liked this topic.

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Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Impending Economic Apocalypse

Have you heard the latest message of doom? Did you listen to it and soak it all in? The recession we have all talked about is not over, and there are a lot of very bright people saying that it is about to get a whole lot worse. Of course, bad news travels a lot faster than good news. So we must ask, what is the good news?

If you own, manage, or work for a company with under 500 employees, please pay attention. If you want to avoid economic apocalypse, I welcome you, too.

I have some words for you that I believe you really need to hear. I may not tell it just right, but I believe very strongly in what I am going to share with you. If you are too busy to read this, my blog has a “play” button, so at least listen to the audio version.

The economy is what you make of it. I mean “you” as an individual, and I also mean “you” collectively. I know that it may seem awkward for me to call intelligent humans “pack animals”, but let’s face it … we live, work, and operate as a herd of sorts. We make good decisions in groups, and we make bad decisions in groups. Not so differently than a herd of gazelle, when we sense danger, we run. We run far, and we run fast.

The things we envision, whether it is greener pastures on the horizon, or a pride of lions sneaking up on us, each lead us to take actions as a group. Some of us lead, and some of us follow, but when the herd makes a move, it affects us all. When we adapt a defeatist mentality as a group, we quickly create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Today, we see the lions in a large scale in the stock market, and we see them on a smaller scale in our cities and small towns. It makes me question who is standing up for our herd, and to our herd, with a voice of reason, and possibility? I mean the possibility to stop running and resume peaceful grazing, even in our somewhat wilted and dangerous prairie.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Observed

Whether you like this example or you despise it, it is relevant to today’s market condition in America. An example of a self-fulfilling prophecy that recently occurred was in the ammunitions market. Americans heard a rumor that due to political unrest, potential legislative changes, and supply prices, that the cost of bullets would rise during the months of April and May 2011. What did gun owners do? We flocked to stores and bought up every bullet for every gun we own, and even guns we don’t own.

We heard the same things about gold and silver. The rush on silver has skyrocketed the price of silver to astronomical highs, while gold has become precious enough that if you have any gold fillings in your teeth, you had better sleep with your mouth closed.

These are not good signs. They are signs of people collectively fearing economic collapse, and chaos. Is this ridiculous or just nature? Actually it is a good mix of both. It is what happens when nature becomes ridiculous, but yet, it is nature, after all. So it is actually very “normal”. When it becomes completely ridiculous and out of control is when a big enough section of the human herd runs scared, and scares the whole bunch of us to run off a cliff.

Politics Schmolitics … Who Cares?

I don’t want to introduce formal political ideology here, because it is far beyond “who did this”, or “who said that”. If I talk politics, a whole lot of you will love what I have to say. A whole lot of you will hate what I have to say. Many of you will hate me just for the country I live in, or the style of my hair. Let’s face it, we each have a lot at stake, and we each have something to gain by working together.

This running of the human herd, not just in my country, but worldwide, has come to a point of complete turmoil. It is like an economic terrorism with every participant being a little bit of a terrorist in their own way.

The big question today is about how to calm the herd. How do we put things back in a comfortable place where we are not all scattering every time we hear another potential cause for alarm? This should matter above all others, because it ultimately relates to our survival, and the future of our society. That is not an alarmist speaking, but rather a number-analyzing businessman with a very good view of the business environment.

Sure, maybe some things are messed up. Maybe things will be different for a while. Should we really let speculation destroy us, or should we collectively change the speculation? I welcome your words, but don’t answer with words alone. Learn to embrace the control you have, and use it for action.

Maybe the Mayans, Hopi, I Ching, Nostradamus, and other predictions and promotions of the “2012 phenomenon” forecasting the end of humanity are spot on. If the end of the world is coming, wouldn’t it be be worse if it came and went, and the only result we saw was the loss of trust and friendship of every person around us, because we were the gazelle who didn’t stop the one beside us and say “Stop! Snap out of it! You’re scarier to the herd than the lions!”

Precautions Are Fine, but Paranoia Grows Exponentially

Go ahead and buy a few non-perishable foods, buy some more gold, silver, and ammunition. Heck, these are good things to have, anyway. I have enough guns and ammunition to start my own war, and I don’t have plans to stop eating anytime soon. Everybody has a certain level of security that makes things feel “right” for them. I have been just a touch on the extreme side of caution all of my life, so that is just “normal” for me.

When precautions become so extreme, and promoted widely, that it scares the herd, it is worse for each and every one of us! Sure, there are websites currently projecting a 4,000 point drop in the stock market by Summer 2011 when corporate reports come out. There are websites speculating that the U.S. Federal Reserve will collapse, USA will come under Martial Law, and banks, utilities, grocery stores, and all other businesses will cease operations while the U.S. dollar implodes. I would not even begin to start listing all of the doomsday projections I have seen lately promoting such a “flash point” in the world’s economy. Many of them are even quite persuasive and well-researched, but is that what you really want to believe, and hasten?

If you really want to start living under those conditions, just start believing it, acting like it, and then we can collectively make that happen, without fail.

How Can You Slow the Herd?

This is where you have a chance to stop your running and make a stand. If you own a company, work for a company, or buy from a company (and we all do), you have the power of choice.

Small business makes up the lion’s share of our economy. Small businesses, then, really do make up the herd (the masses), and the lions (the biggest segment of the economy) all at once. If you reach out to just one small business to make your purchases, and you spread the word to do the same, we can collectively stop the running. If you own or manage one of those small businesses, and you spread the word to other small business people and their employees to stand up and work together, we can make a monumental impact. When these things happen, we influence business and economy on all levels.

If we all stop spending, or keep spending fearfully, as if the economy is doomed to collapse, it really will. On the other hand, if we begin using our purchasing power wisely, and grow the strength of small businesses, we have the power to slow the herd before more of them run off the cliff.

Impending Economic Apocalypse in Summary

There is a whole lot of gloom and doom, but there are also websites and people who say that we can prevent complete chaos before it hits a flash point. Yes, I mean this website, and I mean this person, and I am not alone.

You can call me crazy, and you can keep stuffing your dollars into a coffee can buried in your back yard and see how well that will work for you. Maybe you will think that I am a radical on the side of positivity, and that you really don’t hold the power that I suggested above. The fact is that if you keep neglecting small business, and if small businesses keep rolling over and letting fear win, fears will come true.

You are right if you think that you, alone, do not have that power to slow the herd, and help small business stop operating from fear. I don’t either … no, I am just a small businessman who listens to small business people every day. I have over 20 years of marketing experience, and I know how to spread the word about growing a business, but this time, I am not just talking about a single company or a small handful of clients. I am talking about standing up as a complete herd to stop the stampede of failure.

I do not know it all, but what I know, without a doubt, is that if something important is promoted in a convincing way, to enough people, an exponential growth happens. That exponential growth can happen for our benefit, or for our demise. We are the ones, each of us, who choose to grow a more productive and peaceful herd.

Do You Want a More Peaceful Time in Business?

The way I see it is that we each must choose one of two outcomes, but when we chose, we should be committed to that decision. The overall choices as I view them are as follows:

A.)We can all be cautious, keep running like gazelle from the lion in the prairie, and fulfill the prophecy of an economic doomsday. This is what you can expect when small businesses continue to operate with fear, and stop making smart decisions about their future growth.

B.) We can form a pact to stop running scared and remind the others to “Stop! Snap out of it! You’re scarier to the herd than the lions!”

I cannot slow a herd with a few words from just one guy at a computer in Topeka, Kansas, USA. For that, my fellow herdsmen, I rely on you. I hope that you will see the lions of economic failure as a real hazard, but that you will also see the value of not running from doom, and begin preventing it.

If you really want disaster, just for the drama, give yourself a moment of reflection about those who will be here, and who tried our best to benefit others. If you keep running and stop trying, we will no longer share in your misery, nor appreciate your words. We are the people who speak with our deeds, and listen to yours. Yes, we are the people

That is how I see it. My name is Mark Aaron Murnahan, and I am glad we had this chance to meet. I hope that you will share this with the herd beside you, and help stop the stampede. Please add your comments here and get to know me.

How many people are in your email address list? How many friends do you have on Facebook? How many people follow you on Twitter? Don’t you think that between the bunch of you, and their friends, that we could start fixing things for all our benefit?

You may share this with the short web address: http://wb.gy/fix or by using the sharing links below.

Photo Credits:
Thompson’s Gazelle by fwooper via Flickr
Thompson’s gazelles, Masai Mara, Kenya by Paul Mannix via Flickr
Serengeti 2007 by Tony Young via Flickr

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