When You Realise What’s Most Important

Good day, it’s Craig Marty here and I trust that you and your family are having a good week and that business life and home life are not too chaotic, which I know they can often be. 

That’s exactly what I’m working on building to help fellow business owners with. I’m talking about having a business life that is stable, growing and 20-40 hours per week (depending on how many hours you really want to work), whilst at the same time having the business continue to grow, we don’t want to work less and earn less do we? 

“Less Business, More Family” is a motto of mine. If there was a subheadline to that motto it would be Less Business, More Family, whilst still growing your business (or something like that, I haven’t worked through that wording yet). 

Back to what I was saying. In the last article I wrote here on my website I mentioned that I was moving away from what I call ‘client work’. This is my company providing a single stand alone service for other businesses. It can be great, rewarding and fun work, it can also be terrible. 

If you’re already in business, running your own business or just providing services for clients as part of your job then you probably know what I’m talking about. Right? 

My Marketing Method 

In earlier posts on this website I have shared the map I use for attracting and winning clients for my business and for other businesses too. It’s called the “Customer Mountain Map”. I will talk about that and how it works more and more in future posts on this website but I won’t dive deep into that right now. 

You can get a free copy of that map right now if you want to see the map. Just click here for your free copy. 

Customer Mountain is simply a summary of the first 14 or 15 years of my business and marketing journey. I got started back in late 2004 and read hundreds if not thousands of websites, watched even more videos, went through courses and training and listened to thousands of podcasts all about marketing. 

Getting it all to work didn’t come easily. After many years of being an idiot and trying to get customers, sales, sign ups and so on the pieces did eventually start to fall in place. This is the short version of the story.

More years passed and I began to see the patterns and organise the steps that I needed to take to get a customer. I created the Customer Mountain Map to help explain the process that I DID NOT develop, because these marketing practices have been around for centuries (there are only so many). I simply organised the marketing steps in a way that makes sense for me. 

This is now the marketing map that I use when working with clients and inside my own company too.  

I will still work with some clients one on one. I still have clients now that I’ve worked with for a long time and that will always be part of what I do. What I’m working on now is better packaging up the Customer Mountain Map and the steps and processes I take and walking other business owners through that so they can understand it, see how it applied to their specific business, still get my help to roll it out and then continue to fuel it for years after. 

That’s the program I will be offering to new clients. You could call it a course or a program, I’ll probably be calling it a “program” because there will be more hand holding and direct support through live calls, and me providing some of the tools perhaps too, so that the results can be more guaranteed. 

Why Offer a Program

Providing a service like Social Media Marketing or Email Marketing to clients is limiting. If you’re in business you probably already know what I mean. 

If I’m running social media ads for a business that’s all I’m doing. So it limits my company’s earning potential for those hours I’m working on that 1 thing. Does that make sense?

If I sit down for 4 hours in the morning, write, create and upload fresh Ads I can’t possibly do anything else in those 4 hours. I can charge more of course which I do but it’s still 4 hours of work. My companies earning potential is capped for those 4 hours. 

Remember my motto? Less Business, More Family. To live and achieve that more and more I need to get more out of every hour worked. 

Instead of working 4 hours on one client’s services I can work 4 hours with 14 clients helping them through the steps of their own Customer Mountain. 

This is not about diluting the attention I give to clients. I won’t be offering anything less, I’ll actually be in a position to give more long term rewarding work to them. A marketing strategy they can learn and use for years to come. They will ALSO be able to duplicate it themselves for another service THEY might start to offer. 

I’m simply choosing what outcome I want to deliver. Does that make sense?

I could get a new client who I will manage all their social media ads for them. Or I could work on filling up another group for my program. 

Some business owners do want to learn it and do it themselves and that’s ok. But there are a lot that don’t. I’m touching on client selection now but that’s a WHOLE other topic that I won’t get into right now. 

So I’m not trying to figure out a way to deliver less to more people in the same 4 hours, I’ll be working on attracting a different type of client who wants to know HOW to run a marketing program for themselves. I am thinking through this live as I’m sharing this with you now and I hope that’s ok. Things like this do take time, they do take planning. 

All this is WHY I’m moving towards offering a program rather than spending the majority of my time offering single services for clients. 

The second BIG reason why is because sometimes, just sometimes, completing a single stand alone job is not a great experience. Sometimes it’s not very rewarding. Have you ever worked for a client or a customer who:

1. Didn’t really know what they wanted and kept changing their mind?
2. Who thought they knew a lot more than what you do even though it’s your profession, not theirs AND they came to you for help?
3. No matter how many times you explained something there were still questions and confusion and ended up with that one job not ending great?

Yes? Does any of this sound familiar? If you’re in business I’m sure it does. If you’re not running your own business yet this is something to prepare for yourself because it happens across all industries. 

Over time I’vd developed materials and steps in my own processes to limit these as much as possible but nothing is perfect and 100% of clients aren’t either. Most are fine, I must add that. Most clients are good to work with. Many are great to work with. A small number are not fine. 

So when it comes to ‘Less Business More Family’ I need to make sure that my company and my time is:

1. Providing a main thing that I can develop and streamline forever.  
2. Provide a main thing that I can deliver to multiple people at the same time. 

The Marketing Revolution

This is not revolutionary. 

Evolving a company like this is not special. It’s not new. In fact I am years overdue in doing it. I’m slow to this milestone. 

I have made all the mistakes possible (I should share more of these in future posts and I probably will). What’s important is that the change is made. 

I don’t work 60+ hours a week now. I used to, but I’ve streamlined my work since then. I’m below 40 hours in a working week now. But… ‘Less Business, More Family’. I want to be able to spend less time in my business but still have it grow, while I spend more time with my family. 

If that sounds like something that interests you also, then keep following along. Keep reading these blog posts because I’ll be leaving intentional tracks in the sand for you to follow. 

When I post a new blog I send out an email about it. If you want to be on that list of business owners who get that email just go to craigmarty.com, enter your email address for a free copy of the Customer Mountain Map. Access to that map will be emailed to you, and then I will be able to email you each week or so when I put a new post like this online. 

Ok until then, have a great week ahead and we’ll talk soon.