Wednesday, November 19, 2008

A kick in the butt from IttyBIz

Some kick in the butt advice from Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz (yep, another Facebook friend of mine but since she's moving to the UK soon may become a real friend). I have taken a chunk verbatim from her latest blog post:

If you run a service business — and in service I include coaching and consulting — and to a degree if you run any other kind of business, here’s the best piece of advice I’ve got.

Spend 4 times more time on MARKETING than you do on DOING.

I could give you the list and litany of people who are the worst at this, but basically everybody is the worst at this. Except maybe life coaches. They’re the REAL worst.

You bust your ass creating this wonderful business that is going to change lives. You get the certification and you spend the money on the website and you give the free sessions to get the testimonials. You create something that will quite honestly make it so people will not even remember what their life was like before they worked with you. And then what do you do?

You sit around and wait for people to find you.

Unless any of the other aspects of your business are absolutely tragic, you should not be spending your work time:

- tweaking your website
- responding to comments
- reorganizing your accounting methods
- taking skills upgrade courses, including mine
- reading ebooks
- chatting on IM
- telling people what you ate for breakfast on Twitter

There is nothing wrong with any of the above activities, but those are the things to do in your SPARE time. And if you’re not getting clients right now, you don’t have spare time during the workday. The time that you THINK is spare should be spent getting your name out there, all over the place.

If you are not getting enough clients, your only priority is getting clients.
That is all. Now stop reading blogs and get back to work
.


Original post at IttyBiz

2 comments:

Rebecca Klein said...

Thanks for the post Gillian! Any specific recommendations on how to reach your clients?

Unknown said...

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