One of the things I keep thinking about is how important marketing is to really running a successful business. As I’m fond of saying, until you sell something, you don’t really have a business, you have a hobby.
If there’s something that you really enjoy doing like, for example let’s say that you really enjoy pottery. Further, you want to make a pottery business.
So let’s say that you go out, you design and make a lot of pots. They are absolutely beautiful works of art. Until you sell them, you don’t have a business yet. Once you do start selling them, then the business aspect starts coming into play.
I think the important thing when we’re talking about marketing and branding is the top of that funnel for your business, is bringing the revenue into your business. And I think that’s a really important part that a lot of people, when they start in business, can have a tendency to overlook.
The reason for this is because most people, when they decide they’re going to make an entrepreneurial transition, they will start by doing something that they really enjoy or that they really love. It becomes a passion project, which is outstanding because a business that you are not passionate about will be difficult to sustain through tough times.
A lot of us have to figure things out as we’re going along or have to go through a very abrupt transition. That’s actually what happened to me is I was laid off for my corporate career right at the beginning of the covid pandemic. On April 20 of 2020, I was terminated with no notice at all. So the result of this was that I had to figure out what I was going to do in pretty short order, and I did not have the benefit of having a plan already together or an audience built or a platform set up.
Since sales and marketing are the inevitable first steps of a new business, it naturally flows that this is where the trial and error concentrates.
As we look forward to next week’s podcast episodes, we’re going to be doing is we are going to be moving off the topic of marketing and branding and going toward more of a finance and operations focus.
There can be a tendency to overlook the importance of finance and operations because it’s viewed as turning the crank. However, I think that’s actually a really big mistake, because if you have really efficient, effective, well run, well documented operations that can let your business scale very effectively.
With that said, stay tuned to next week’s podcast episodes to gain some of these insights on the financial and operational side. We’ll be talking about some of the things having to do with legal aspects of the business of data literacy.
