Just follow these simple steps

You can plant the seeds and cultivate the plants, but you can’t predict the yield. (Image by wiselywoven)

When I started this blog, I thought I’d be talking to the parents of my students.

Instead, it’s turned out to be a lot of entrepreneurs and creatives. And that led me to start coaching and consulting with said entrepreneurs and creatives, which has become a career that I’m really enjoying.

But I’ve resisted going all in on gearing my topics exclusively to the small business owners who might be prospective clients.

For one thing, I don’t want to be selling all the time. But there’s another reason: I don’t want to get too tactical in what I write about. It’s boring.

I never want to be prescriptive and say, “Just follow these simple steps!” or “I’ll show you how to do exactly what I did to grow my business to X level.”

I think that growing or marketing a business, just like life, is more complicated than that. You can’t “follow these simple steps” in parenting, teaching, making art, or anything else that is built on the staggering variation in and unpredictability of human beings.

There are plenty of marketers who share aspirational images and stories and tell us how easy it is to do what they do — without advertising. Often, the backbone of their message is that you need to put together a compelling offer, and then magic happens. You don’t need to spend every day promoting it on social media.

This is terribly disingenuous. All they do is teach you how to build sell the offer (and by the way, they do use advertising and social media to promote their offers). But they don’t teach you how to deliver on this “offer” or help you to generate the skills and expertise you’re supposedly offering.

Worse, if your target customer happens to be someone who wants to learn how to build and sell high-ticket offers, boom! You’re now part of a Ponzi scheme.

My approach to business is a lot less glamorous. Without formulas, we test and iterate our way toward figuring out who we want to serve, what we want to do for them, how we want to do it, how much we want to charge, what approach will be best to reach these people, and how we will build their trust. And then we gradually expand the enterprise, bringing on a team to help us. It’s messy, unpredictable, and full of false starts and uncertainty.

I wish I knew how to do it another way. (Hey, maybe I should take one of these courses to learn how to put together irresistible high-end offers!) Maybe someday, I will have a formula or framework that removes uncertainty and generates predictable, replicable results. But until then, it’s my job to help people accept and navigate the challenge of building a business, not bypass it. I can’t give them a formula for launching and running their own business any more than I could give them a formula for finding true love.

There are certainly best practices to follow and principles to go by. We can do our best to learn them (and I do my best to teach them). But no one can skip over the hard work of getting good enough at something to sell a service or make a product to sell. No one can skip over the challenge of deciding what to focus on and commit to. No one can avoid the necessity of showing up consistently to deliver on your promises, getting better and better with practice. I don’t think there’s a shortcut.

It would be nice if we could achieve great things working from a checklist. We can’t, because that would make them so straightforward that they would be regular things, not great things. So we accept the burden and opportunity of forging ahead with only a vision to guide us, not a tried-and-true formula. It’s tougher that way, but also much more interesting and rewarding.