In a recent discussion with a business owner I asked “what would you like to be different in your future than it is today?”
Whenever I ask this question invariably the response includes the word “freedom” or “flexibility” (and usually more money)
What people are actually asking for is the ability to have choice. Choice to work, choice to go pickup the kids, choice to take a couple of months to tour Italy on a vespa.
Whatever the reason, almost no-one ever has that kind of freedom or choice (yet).
The reason we get ourselves trapped in our business and feel like we are strapped to the rocket is that we don’t build resilience into our operating procedure.
More specifically we don’t build the ability to scale our sales and marketing as we need and what that really means is that we are stuck with today’s capability rather than the future we are trying to build ourselves.
My advice, build a much bigger sales and marketing engine than you need today (2 to 3 times bigger in fact and if you are not ready for the scale, just be a lot pickier with the clients you do take on.
This does 2 things:
- In the short term it gives you the ability to just take on the best clients rather than settling for anyone with a credit card.
- In the longer term it allows you to scale quickly when you are ready to take on more clients and build out your capability so you can ultimately take the extra time you need to do the things you really want.
Take a close look at your sales and marketing efforts and ask yourself; are you barely surviving on the leads coming in or are you over filling your pipeline giving you choice?
