The guru business is very similar to the supplement and home exercise business for fitness. A supplement may have contributed to someone getting 6-pack abs, but it was part of the solution, how much or little is difficult to tell. The guy may have transformed his life, eating a no-sugar diet and going to the gym daily. Maybe the supplement was a placebo that simply triggered a routine that got him to eat and exercise and be committed since he was spending real money on buying it every month.

If each person’s body type, health history, habits and motivation are completely unique and impossible to assign one specific supplement or exercise to their new found fitness success, then your business is a million times more complex to assume that one new tactic or campaign is going to turn the ship around and make you a massive success.

Your market, industry, business model, staff, suppliers, ability to deliver, pricing and your own management and strategic skills all contribute to a very unique situation that cannot be solved with a magic, one-size-fits-all silver bullet solution.

The only commonality across the board is that there are gaping holes in the fundamentals needed to build a growing company upon that nearly every small business has. These range from not having the right staff trained and equipped to do specific, high value tasks to not having at least one consistent way of generating new leads week-in and week-out.

The problem with focusing on fixing these holes to have a strong foundation to build upon is that they are boring to fix. They require a manager personality to execute since they need to be developed, trained, followed up, revised, followed up many more times, and measured to make sure they’re continually improving. That’s boring work for most business owner’s that like new ideas, like meeting new people (to sell to mostly), and have a strong case of ADD.

Since very few small businesses have manager’s, this work never gets done and the business owner simply continues chasing new ideas and going to hear the latest innovation from the silver bullet manufacturer’s, handing over thousands of dollars at a time.

The worst part about this whole mess is that the guru’s know that less than 3% of their clients will ever execute what they’ve been sold as the latest and greatest solution to all of their problems. They justify this by saying it’s not their responsibility to force them to execute the solutions and if they were really motivated, they’d get it done. What they don’t realize is that they are simply padding their wallets because the business owner is not sophisticated enough to diagnose the root of their business problems and get caught up in the hype that a silver bullet is the effortless solution.

If you’ve gotten this far and haven’t slit your wrists yet after realizing how much you’ve spent on silver bullet’s, here’s a quick action list that should help you immediately start honing in and solving your most pressing business challenges:

1. Stop spending money on silver bullets, IMMEDIATELY!
2. Break all of your daily activities for everyone in your company into the following categories:
   a. Creating prospects: Having people raise their hand that they’re interested in what you have to offer and want to know more.
   b. Selling prospects: Answering their questions and demonstrating that you can effectively meet their needs, which results in them giving you money. They’re not sold until they have given you money.
   c. Fulfilling clients: This is probably what you’re great at already. If not, you won’t be in business much longer.
   d. Building a team: Even if you’re a solo artist, you need support at various points to help you. Recruiting, training and retaining a talented team is the key to growing a business, so this area needs to be developed as much as fulfilling clients.
3. Look at the four areas above and think about which one gives you the most headaches or generates the most complaints from staff or clients. Focus in on that area and you’ll find your bottleneck that is holding you back right now.
4. Focus on that one problem every day until it is fixed and doesn’t break any more. You can even space it out to only focus on once a week instead of daily if you can’t make the time. Involve your team in coming up with the solution, too. You should not be the arbiter of all solutions as it’s impossible to know everything. Your staff will buy-in to the solutions better, too, if they had a part in creating them.

If you use this outline, please leave a comment below to let me know how this works for you and what results you start getting from focusing on your bottlenecks, one at a time.

The problem with it is that Old Marketing isn’t targeted, can’t be changed quickly and typically interrupts people and bugs them to get their attention.  Look at newspaper advertising for example, it’s targeted by what section of the paper the ad is in.  At best, you can target what gender the reader is and nothing more.  Put an ad in the sports section and you will have men reading it.  They could be 16 or 60, could make $10k/year or $150k/year, are black, white, hispanic and asian and could have any level of education.  What can you advertise in the sports section that would appeal to the majority of the readers there?  A sandwich?  Not much else would appeal to the whole readership and anything more niched would be too risky to find out if that particular paper had enough ideal readers that would be interested in your product.

Old Marketing is coined by Seth Godin as the mass advertising that sold average products to average people in large quantities.  This was epitomized by Tide detergent running TV ads in the ’50′s and ’60′s and making a fortune doing it.  Godin relates products like that to ‘meatballs’ since they’re plain, made for everyone and the marketing plan that goes with them is equally as plain.

Now enter the world of New Marketing… social media, educational focused, permission based, niche targeted and online.  These marketing channels are like whipped-cream and sprinkles compared to the marinara sauce that used to go so well selling meatballs all day.  You simply cannot expect to use the new marketing tools with an old product.  It has to be changed.

So what do you do?

You start small and you set goals.  Let’s say you are an attorney and you specialize in business formation and entity structure.  Setup a twitter account and start posting once or twice a day with a link to something interesting related to what you help clients with.  It could be an article you read about the pitfalls of forming your own corporation online or a lawsuit where a company was being sued for trademark infringement because they didn’t check the USPTO.gov site before launching their new product.  Then put a link to your twitter account in your signature and a call to action saying ‘Follow me on twitter and get great tips on how to protect your company and brand’.  Email everyone you know with a link to your new account and ask them to follow you and you promise to not promote Amway or Viagra on it.

If you do this one thing and do it diligently, you can grow your follower base to over 1,000 followers in a matter of months and then can start weaving in overt requests for business here and there, turning those followers into paying clients.

This is just one of a hundred different little things you can do to start leveraging New Marketing and stop wasting your hard earned money on the Old Marketing that doesn’t work any more.

If you want a free strategy session on how to apply this to your business, contact us and we’ll show you how to do it and how we can help if we think it’s a fit.