This is Week 32 of a 52-week project/experiment in DIY marketing. Armed with nothing but a copy of the 2009 Grow Your Business Marketing Plan + Calendar and my bare wits, I’m applying the skills you need to grow a business in real time, day by day, and reporting on them week by week here and at the Marketing Mix blog.
There’s a flip side to growing your business with marketing: the inevitable aches and pains that accompany growth.
I’ve chronicled my crash after working too hard for too long, and how my more recent experiences with overwhelm (because let’s face it, there’s a pattern with me and overwhelm) led me to finally get some help in the form of service providers and counselors.
There’s another kind of help that I’ve been suspecting I need now for some time, of a slightly different nature: help freeing up my time. I’m close to maxing out on efficiency hacks and I know I can’t increase the number of things I’m doing in a day, just the nature of what I’m doing. In other words, while I’m thrilled that my consulting business seems to be taking off, paradoxically, the more I get into it, the more I see that ultimately, I’ll have to do less of it. It’s incredibly rewarding for me—I’m learning by leaps and bounds, and the work I’m doing seems to be really helping my clients*. Plus, you know, they pay me and stuff. Woo hoo!
So, what’s the next step—baby or “Mother, may I?”-giant—for a business of a certain size?
What work is vs. what forms it takes
I see consulting more as a great, rewarding outlet for my work than as my work itself, which, as I’ve described elsewhere, is to be a joyful conduit of truth, beauty and love (woo-woo flavor) or, slightly more straightforwardly, a translator of ideas into various languages (performance, design and words, not actual languages, which, sadly, I suck at.) It’s a vocation/avocation distinction, only (thank WHOMEVER), for the past 15 or so years, my vocation and avocation have been so closely aligned that they feel more like one and the same.
Getting the word out there about your business, then (or me helping you get the word out about your business, then) becomes a kind of holy work, minus the religion. Something to be taken seriously. As do all the support systems for your life and your business, because they help make it possible for you to do your work. As does (stay with me—we’re getting there!) your actual business model, because, to play off a popular truism usually applied to mothers, if it ain’t workin’, ain’t nothin’ workin’.
For now, my business model is working, or at least, seems to be, given my own, crazy, such-as-it-is measurement techniques. More work of the type I enjoy coming in, more money coming in, more excitement about the future as a result of it. (See what I mean about the such-as-it-is part? An MBA, I’m not.) I can already see how it will not be working, however, and in the not-too-distant future, unless I tweak it a little. Or maybe overhaul it a lot.
The non-skeevy making-of-money while asleep AND awake
Passive income of some kind is going to have to figure in somehow. I’m very slowly and cautiously looking at affiliate stuff, but given my weirdnesses around it, I’m not sure if it can ever be a huge part of my income mix. For one, I don’t find too many products and services I can unreservedly recommend. For another, I’m still not sure if receiving money for a recommendation doesn’t besmirch the reco, and my sterling reputation for doing it. Somehow, I’ve made peace with the Amazon thing; maybe it’s because it’s not a one-to-one sale, and because there are many other options for purchase (or even non-paid use) that I’m usually the first to pimp. Anyway, the jury’s still out on that one for me.
The other thing I’m resigned to is that I’ll need to be making more money per transaction for “high touch” stuff and/or spreading the costs out among a much broader audience. With 2,350 newsletter subscribers and 1,650 blog subscribers** as of this writing, I’m a far cry from the 1,000 True Fan model Kevin Kelly suggests as a viable option for the one-man-band creative type. That can’t stop me from working toward it, though, or at least fail-fast testing some of it. So I’ve got one book in the pipeline for a Holiday/2009 release*** and am sketching out my marketing plan and proposal for a book-book that I’m going to shop to major publishing houses. It’s not the first, second or third book that I thought I’d write, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be the one that will move my business forward if I do it right. Plus, it’s the one that I think will actually help the most people at the lowest price point to receive whatever useful knowledge they only have access to now via one-on-one consulting, or being related to me.
Seth Godin, bandwidth issues, and the best business graph you’ll see all year
Seth routinely startles and inspires me with his insight and the seemingly effortless—not to mention joyous—way in which he serves it up. I stumble, tweet and otherwise shout-out more of his stuff than anyone else’s (Merlin runs a close second, but he’s more privately prolific now, so there’s less to bookmark.) But this post, with accompanying graph, blew my doors off. Slowly. A slow blowing-off of doors. I had to read it a few times to really get it; I’ve kept the page with the post on it open in my browser for four days now (a personal record) because I had to keep dropping back in to look at it.
The graph seems designed to point out the differences in energy output and impact for creating businesses, but it’s just as useful for mapping where you’re at with the business you’ve got, if you’re a service provider with one of those more fluid-type businesses. Where you’re at and where you want to be. The lower-left quadrant is a sinkhole for most commercial ventures, while the upper-right offers potential high returns but at a high personal cost. I’ve been thinking a lot about work in terms of making a difference while I make enough money to keep making a difference; looking at this graph, it seems obvious that I need to spend more time in the green satellite if I’m going to die without leaving the work in me. A tad morbid, but you see my point.
What a crazy bandwidth graph has to do with marketing, besides everything
For them of us what’s interested in creating meaning that lands as much as money, a huge part of making that happen—the landing part—is clearing runways and building airports. That’s your marketing, in a transportation-metaphor nutshell: making it easier for people to get to the messages and meaning, and to take it on to their next destination. If you can build a good airport with great runways that’s safe and efficient, people will flock to it, enjoy the (hopefully) brief time they spend there, and tell their friends. If not? Well. Burbank is a great little airport, but it can only serve so many people per day. LAX is a shit airport that people use because they have to. Somewhere, there’s either an airport that hasn’t been made, or one that needs to be remade.
I wish I had a hunk of time coming up to meditate on this stuff. Instead, since I don’t, I will likely keep that browser window open for the foreseeable future, dropping in now and again to see where I’m at with the information, what’s speaking to me, and what are the likeliest next steps.
In the meantime, if you’re still with me, I’d love to hear your thoughts on balancing stuff inside and out of the green saucer.
xxx
c
*Which, of course, you’d have no way of knowing, since I have had no time to update my consulting page to more accurately describe what the work is, much less add any of the lovely testimonials I’ve gotten from people who seem to genuinely like what they’ve gotten from the sessions. Hell, I haven’t even taken the Monty out of beta yet!
**Those are communicatrix.com numbers, of course. I appreciate the stalwart 80 or so of all y’all who subscribe to this one, but I’m wise enough not to rely on you to keep me in peanuts and rent money.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Ah, the quadrant graph. Stars, cash cows, and their like.
The only quibble I have is that I’d say art is perhaps the highest bandwidth of all, if you expand your concept of bandwidth beyond information to meaning and feeling. The remunerations for successful art would appear to support my claims. There. Now. Does someone show up and make me famous for my profound insight? No? Well why not?
Somehow, I’ve managed to be successful in the high-bandwidth end of things with a pretty small audience. But as I’m idea-izing about more low-bandwidth stuff, I’m realizing that I need significant growth in the audience department.
Isn’t that weird? You’d think that you’d need a large audience to succeed at the more expensive high-touch stuff, and that it wouldn’t take as many people to make the low-touch stuff spread (it’s cheaper, after all), but I’ve heard it’s exactly the opposite. Why is that?
LPC – I had the exact same reaction to art’s place on the graph. I’m probably going to mull it over a bit longer to see if I can’t make sense of it on my own (so much value in that—thanks, Mom, for making me look up every goddamn word I didn’t know for myself in the dictionary) and it I can’t, I’ll beg Seth for a follow-up.
The best I can make of it is this: art the way you’re thinking of it—the enduring stuff, the brilliant stuff, the stuff of truth AND beauty—that’s up there with the high bandwidth stuff, for exactly the reasons you state by looping in meaning and feeling. If Seth’s talking about that kind of art, in addition to the flat-out difficulty of making money with it (same as with stuff in the upper-right quadrant, just for different reasons), there are so many opportunities for misinterpretation or non-interpretation that it’s not really the ideal communications vehicle. Except, as you say, when it is, and then there’s none better. A perfect poem does that, as do a number of Van Gogh paintings. Wasn’t much money in either of those.
A lot of the money-maker artists make art, but I’m not sure they’re selling their meaning as much as they are leveraging the zeitgeist. Which is not to take anything away from them! There’s money to be made in art and messages to be spread in art just like there is with speaking and other high-touch stuff in the UR quadrant. It’s just harder to do both: make money and reach a lot of people with your message.
Sarah – Is it really weird? You make money in the high-bandwidth area b/c you’re astonishingly good and working in a field where people who are skilled with the work and the handling of it are rare.
On the other hand, getting a lot of interest and attention for your blog or your PDF (or your movie, for that matter) can be hard as hell. It’s just that the potential for reach is much greater.