What to Do When Faced with Something You’ve Never Been Taught
When faced with things that we aren’t proficient in, there’s really only three options.
- Attempt to do it ourselves
- Hire a professional
- Close our eyes and pretend like it’s not happening
There are variations of these, but ultimately these are the three choices.
We all have our own areas of expertise and skill. I don’t know about you, but mine isn’t marketing. Marketing is defined as “the activity and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large”. The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to market with goods for sale.
As entrepreneurs we tend to be of the mindset that we can figure “it” out whatever “it” is.
I know this is certainly my default approach to obstacles. An “I’ve got this” attitude can be an asset…it can also be a liability. It’s great to learn new things and I like knowing how things work. This learning comes at a cost.
In my forty plus years of doing construction I’ve learned a lot about building, both physical construction and how to operate a successful business. One of the things that I’ve never needed to know much about is marketing. When doing quality work and taking care of customers, word of mouth is marketing enough.
Whether it’s time or money, there’s a cost.
Now that we’re expanding our business to include business coaching, systems and training as well as customer consulting and educating, we need some marketing.
For several years I’ve been working on this. Trying to learn how while not spending any money. Then I spent a little money here and there on programs that I thought might be the trick with still no traction.
After years of very little forward progress, earlier this year I decided that I had “closed my eyes and pretended like it’s wasn’t important” for long enough.
At that point I began investing in myself and my idea. I started by joining Kingdom Builders Mastermind. It’s not cheap. In that mastermind I met Bryan Switalski who is a digital marketer using the Story Brand system which I had already been working to learn. I’ve hired him to help me with a lead generator and some sales funnel work. Through Bryan and Becky Warner another mastermind member. I found out they along with Dean Kaneshiro were getting ready to start a 90-Day Launch course. Designed to get a product to market in 90 days.
This is a substantial investment of time and money, but
What has it cost me in the time over the last 6-7 years and I haven’t sold anything yet?
I realized as I was going through this process to improve my marketing, that the same reasons that I hadn’t moved forward sooner, are the same reasons construction companies don’t do accurate and consistent proposals.
They never learned how.
They’ve either came up with a “guess-timation” way of giving customers prices or they’ve “closed their eyes and pretended it’s not important”. Either way the outcome isn’t very good.
This is precisely why I designed the Blueprint for Building a Better Proposal system. The peace of mind and lack of stress alone is worth the investment of time and money.