Stepping back to step forward

Growth Chart 2

How often have you heard someone given you a really good piece of advice about marketing and thought 'That sounds great but I'll never get around to doing it.’

If you have, you are not alone.

Speaking to business owners it is becoming clear that what stops us from growing our businesses through marketing is mostly not a lack of marketing ideas, or having access to the right systems, or even marketing skills. What stops us most of the time, is that we are too busy to do any more marketing, and sometimes too busy to do any marketing at all.

And mostly the thing we are busy with that takes them away from marketing is delivering our product or service.

It is easy to get stuck in this place for a long time, too busy to invest in marketing, too busy to bring someone on free your time up, like a climber on a rock-face unable to go up, unwilling to go down. In our opinion the only way to get out of this situation is to take a step back in order to take a step forward.

Clearly in this situation we need to increase capacity in the production department, but even before you can do this we need to create new systems and maybe bring new people in to the production department. Of course all of this takes time, so ultimately the first step is a period away from doing projects or delivering your service or whatever our business does in order to be able to invest in building the business.

One of the results is that in the short term our profitability will fall. As with all investment we accept this in the hope that in the longer term it rises to new heights.

In fact the profitability in business rarely increases in a straight line for businesses. Rather it goes up in a series of steps with regression in periods of investment. (see diagram below). At Co- we see this interaction between Production and Marketing as a dance at the heart of every business, as each department only able to swing forward as the other swings forward.