Running A Business Can Be A Circus. Maybe It’s Time To Go For The Juggler

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Business ownership can be a circus. Three-ring, five-ring, hundred-ring, all vying for your attention at once. What’s the key to pleasing your clients, running your business, and still finding time to actually market it? Effective juggling. Sounds hard. Turns out, it doesn’t have to be. That’s the takeaway from a great new book I just finished, written by a colleague and friend. And I’m not recommending Think Like a Marketer: How A Shift In Mindset Can Change Everything For Your Business (paperback, Amazon.com) simply because author Kate Colbert mentioned Focus Media Services on page 101. What I love about her new book is that thinking like a marketer doesn’t require business owners to become marketing gurus or even dramatically shift what they’re likely already doing. Kate narrows down some key marketing techniques to five complementary principles worth memorizing. Without giving them all away, I’ll share my favorite: Do everything in service of maintaining a virtuous cycle of creating value for the customer while capturing value for you. In other words, having your customer’s best interests in mind is in your best interest. Customers, of course, love freebies. But give too many away, and you don’t stay in business. Never give anything away, and they may stop taking your calls. Think Like a Marketer teaches us balance, give us real-life examples in any industry, and even looks to the future. Is her advice easy to implement? Well, I just implemented it here in 264 words.