Marketing for Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners

There is a certain romance to the “hunter/gatherer” lifestyle. You wake up in the morning not knowing exactly what you’ll eat, or even IF you will eat. It is only through your skill and determination that you are able to put food on the table each day.

But if you can get past the need to have that sort of drama in your life, the farming lifestyle has a lot to offer. A farmer wakes up and with almost complete certainty know EXACTLY what he is going to eat and exactly how much of it. A farmer has almost complete control over which crops he grows, which animals he raises, and how many of them he decides to take care of. In other words: fate, destiny, luck, and fear have little place in a farmer’s life, at least significantly less than in the life of a hunter.

I’m not talking about REAL farming or hunting. I’m talking about how you run your business. You can run it like a hunter, where each day you have to set your sights on a new prospect and hope that you are able to make the close. If you spend a disproportionate amount of your time marketing then you are probably a hunter. If you have to constantly revise your marketing materials you are probably a hunter.

Farmers on the other hand sow their seeds and then watch as handfuls of seeds explode over time and become enough food to fill a grain silo. When every job you do systematically and automatically turns into two, three, five, or ten additional jobs (through referrals, repeats, and word of mouth), then you are a farmer. If your marketing expenses keep dropping year after year and your income keeps growing by at least 20% each year, then you are probably a farmer.

I’ve had the good fortune of working with several excellent business owners who kept their bank vaults full because they were great hunters. But once I showed them how to become great farmers, their worlds were changed just as dramatically as when mankind left the Stone Age to begin the transition to modern society.

Farmers would NEVER allow their family to eat seed, no matter how hungry they were. To eat the seed is to doom your family to hunger. Instead that seed is put into the ground where it is tended, kept, watched over. The dirt is watered, and fertilized, and weeds are pulled. In short, there is a lot of effort up front and not a whole lot of payback in the beginning.

But we are coming into a time where many people have more time on their hands than they used to. Use this to your advantage. Begin building the systems into your business that allow you to grow and provide more to your customers and clients. I’ve got some very specific examples, including several interesting twists that are happening in my own business that I’ll be sharing with you in the next issue. Stay tuned!!

Julian Customer Service, Marketing