Without a Plan You’ll Never Make It

Those that fail to plan, plan to fail.

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This little truism has never been truer than it is now.  In this economy you have to be diligent and intentional to succeed in business. 

If you’re sitting around waiting for business to fall from the sky, it’s not going to happen.  Why is it that when we get into business, we think that business works differently than any other area of our life?  Do things just fall from the sky in your normal life?  Does a tiger just show up in your living room without being put there?  Why do you expect that clients will just come without any cause?

Maybe we believe that if we build it, they will come.  Well, I’m here to bring the bad news.  If you start a plumbing company, a real estate business, a bookkeeping service, a Mary Kay business, people aren’t just going to show up begging for your service.  Those days were gone a long time ago, and in this economy that attitude will never work.

To get customers, you’ve got to do some marketing first.  There’s a direct correlation between how long you spend marketing and how many customers you get.  If you spend 10 hours to get 1 customer, you will spend 40 hours to get 4 customers. 

I recommend that you write down how many hours you spend marketing and also how many customers you get.  Of course there’s a warning here.  Sitting on Facebook playing the farm game doesn’t count as marketing time.  You can only include the hours as marketing hours if you actually did some real marketing.  If you went to breakfast with other business people but did no marketing, that’s breakfast time.  You can’t count it as a marketing activity.  If you went to an afterhours party and drank wine and laughed, that’s drinking and having a good time; it’s not marketing time.

Now take your total marketing time and analyze it.  How many hours have you spent this week?  Two or three hours?  I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you probably can’t build a business by investing just two or three hours.  However, if you spent 40 hours marketing this week, then you’re well on your way to business success.

The next thing you need to do is figure out how many hours it takes on average to attract a single customer.  Divide the total hours spent by the customers.  This will give you the average marketing hours per customer. 

Now figure out how many customers you want, and multiply that by hours per customer.  This will give you the total hours you need to spend marketing your business.  Now you know how hard you’re going to have to work to achieve success in your business.  Don’t worry; there is a learning curve to marketing.  You’ll get better.

Here is an example.  Let say you spent 50 hours in your marketing activities and you attracted 10 customers.  That means on average it takes 5 hours of marketing for you to get a customer.

Let us say that you need 17 customers per month.  This means you need to spend 85 hours marketing per month.

Considering there are 173.33 hours per month (based upon 40 hour weeks), you have to spend half your time marketing.

I challenge you to do this for your own business.  Hold yourself accountable.  If you need help with the calculations, contact me at John@ControllersAdvice.Com.

John Wheeler