The Six Biggest Small Business Lies – A Countdown: #5

Growing a small business is the most complex activity a human being can undertake. The number of elements we must control and the number of elements out of our control, are staggering.

No surprise then there is a ready audience for simple, silver-coated, comforting truisms that promise easy ways to success. And no surprise those ways are false.

We are doing a count-down of the top six deceptions trotted out in the small business world. Number 6 was “Social Media is great free advertising.”

Here’s number five.

5. “We have a marketing problem.”

Probably not.

When asked their number one challenge many business owners will respond with ‘marketing’. What they mean is they aren’t getting enough sales. So we ask them “If you had all the time you needed to get to all your advertising, networking, follow up, and lead generation priorities, would you still have a ‘marketing problem’? “

90% of the time the answer is “No. That would be awesome”. Which means we don’t have a marketing problem. We have a capacity problem.

We ONLY have a marketing problem when someone isn’t buying what we’re selling even when they’re literally or figuratively sitting right in front of us.

Why is this a serious deception? Because as any engineer will tell you the only thing more dangerous than getting the answer wrong is getting the question wrong.

Throwing massive resources at business development through marketing without first understanding the capacity problems means our business will starve even as we are frantically dumping resources into it. We are attacking the wrong problem.

Marketing is the business discipline (with the possible exception of management) most filled with unicorns: shiny solutions that promise the sky and deliver nothing. I don’t get a lot of SPAM encouraging me to tune up my cash flow or understand Employment Standards legislation better. 90% of the SPAM I delete is marketing-related.

Real business growth, real business development, treats marketing and capacity as two sides of the same pancake. To get past the deceptive and simplistic pitches of many marketing solutions providers, dig down deep and understand your human and systems capacities first.

90% of the time, capacity is where our REAL challenges and opportunities lie as small business owners.

Stay tuned for #4: “Growing sales fixes everything.”

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Clemens Rettich develops tools to grow small and medium-sized businesses. He has an extensive background in the arts, community, education, and business that helps him craft solutions for his clients that create real growth and real change.