After being in business for 20 years, I’ve come to appreciate the value of a marketing mind - because it doesn’t necessarily come natural to me. Therefore, from time to time I bring in a  marketing wizard to help me get focused. Their valuable advice can be phenomenally helpful. But for businesses just starting out, perhaps the best advice I’ve heard is this:

Buy a little bit of your marketing person’s time; don’t buy his whole calendar.

This advice is echoed in a column entitled 7 Strategic Tips for Small-Business Start-Ups, by Karin Abarbanel. In that piece, Abarbanel says

“One of the biggest traps you can fall into is buying costly advertising or hiring a professional PR firm to make a splash in the media. Costly outlays on this front are rarely a sound start-up investment.”

And a great perspective she points out is this: When you get in business for yourself, you’re not in the business you think you’re in. You’re in marketing.  [empahsis added]

It’s kind of like what Bo Peabody says in his book Lucky or Smart?: Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life – the business owner needs to constantly be marketing and selling his products or services.

Some people say forego marketing firms altogether.  I say think twice about that. If you’re not a natural born marketer, then some advice from a professional can pay off big time.

Like I said – just don’t buy the whole enchilada.

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Filed in Business, Leadership, Selling, Advertising, Workplace