How To Give Away $735,000...
...And Keep Your Soul
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? - Mark 8:36
Over the last 18 months, I have referred away or passed up on (mostly referred away) about $735,000 in potential revenue for my consulting business.
Even writing that hurts. I run a small business—a boutique consulting firm. Passing up on that amount of money looks insane.
Except I knew those clients and I would not have succeeded together.
Except that taking that money would have forced me into a paradigm that wouldn’t allow for me to do my best work with the clients I exist to serve.
Two years ago, I realized something that has completely transformed my business. The people who don’t choose to work with me are right.
They’re right because they don’t actually want what I have on offer. They’re right because they’re looking for an agency to “do their marketing” not for a strategic partner to build them a new market category.
They’re right because they don’t believe what I believe. They’re right because they believe that the best product automatically wins - that the market is a Monopoly board and their job is to get a majority of the real estate.
They’re right because they believe that they need to appeal to everyone - that the greatest risk to their business is offending or alienating some segment of the population.
They’re right because they are looking for a hype man or a hypnotist. Someone to take their perfectly average product made for the average customer and turn it into something people would crawl over glass to get. Some trick or PR stunt that turns their commodity into a hit.
I do everything I can in my business to be a husbandmen marketer. Someone who cultivates and strengthens the bond between companies solving true problems and customers looking to have those specific problems solved. Someone who shepherds legendary products through every step of their adoption lifecycle.
Marketing is not what you do when you have an average product. It is the generous act of helping people understand why a great product will help them become who they want to be.
I believe that the most successful companies create new demand for what they do.
I believe that the greatest risk to your business is the resounding thud of apathy.
I believe that success begins by making things that specific customers can’t live without.
I believe that good marketers do not use customers to solve their problems. I believe that good marketers use marketing to solve the problems of their customers.
I don’t pass up business because I don’t like making money. I pass up or refer away business because I have a long-term strategy for delivering the greatest possible impact for the customers I exist to serve. I have developed the empathy to tell potential clients, “This isn’t for you, here’s the contact information for my competitor.”
If you haven’t passed up business lately, then you probably don’t have a strategy, you’re just a beggar on a street corner waiting to be picked.
And in a world of noise, you’re getting harder to hear.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.