GarthBox

The only guarantee about a plan is that it won’t work perfectly as planned.

No matter how much time you put into adding all the steps and organizing them in the right order, things will certainly go awry. However, that is no excuse for not planning.

Rather, the smart move is to plan for a plan.

It’s to do all the right research before crafting a plan.

It’s to create your minimum viable product before you work on waterfall engineering your business.

It’s knowing that the industry you’re hoping to get in will shift and you’ll have to pivot to meet the demand.

It’s about bringing your passion into exploring why you want to create, why the market wants it, why they will care to buy from you.

When you plan to plan, you consider in what ways the industry can shift, you’re prepared, you’re smart, but most importantly, you’re flexible.

 

Stay Positive & There Is No Map, But Following Your Heart Is A Great Place To Start

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Some of the most productive days are filled with quick work.

It’s the thrashing before a deadline.

Other times, it’s pure motivation that drives us to get a lot of shit done.

While the result may be good enough, deadline met, to-do list complete (list-check-off-ers, you know who you are), quality and delight become oversights.

You don’t sign off an email wishing the recipient of your message a fantastic day. Your blog uses fewer words that resonate and show your astuteness. You washed the dishes, but some of the bowls still have grease on them.

Consider tomorrow’s schedule. Will it be filled with remarkability, creation and progress or will you be left washing the same dishes a second time?

 

Stay Positive & Quality Is Expected, Telling Yourself Otherwise Is Putting You Behind

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When you wait to make a point about your business, you’re often left thrashing for proof.

Much of the time, the data is not there to support it or you have enough to act as a lead, but not sufficient enough to convince someone you know what your target caves.

With any business, you need to create a few hypothesis to begin so you’re not scrambling once presentation time hits.

If you expect to make the case that people care about toppings on a pizza, what can you do to start probing for the truth (or lack of truth)?

If you expect to make the case that people care about beer that tastes close to wine, what can you do to start probing for the truth (or lack of truth)?

Your quarterly review is not the time to search through your social posts and sales sheets to see if anything random stands out; it’s the time to look back to see if the assumptions you made and tested for hold true.

 

Stay Positive & It’s Called Trial And Error, Not Error And Trial

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“Because I feel like it…”

A smart marketer will dig deeper into this.

A smart marketer knows that feeling a customer has is why they come back.

Tactics then become less about getting attention or making a customer do something.

They become about them feeling that again and again.

A signature of a farmer on a milk carton doesn’t get one’s attention, but it does make someone who is already going to buy organic milk feel more… And when we feel more, we’re likely to come back and feel it again.

Don’t let someone stop at “I’m buying this because I feel like it.” You’ll miss one of the strongest insights beside hate that you can use to connect in your marketing.

 

Stay Positive & Ask The Customer, What Do You Feel?

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Having a signature from a farmer on your milk jug matters. It’s perceived that farmer’s cows produced that milk.

Having a logo for a business pitch isn’t necessary, but investors do perceive you as a person to take more seriously with one.

As marketers and entrepreneurs, we’re faced with the realities of making something better each day. Often times, we feel some tasks are more urgent than others, we become firefighters instead of artists, and, in so doing, we miss opportunities to be perceived the right way.

You can have all the right words in a speech, but you’ll be perceived as an amateur if it’s also filled with “um” and “like.”

Yes, the work you do speaks realities, but how you do the work often speaks more toward perceptions, and boy do perceptions matter.

 

Stay Positive & Dance Between Reality And Perception

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In most cases, hate doesn’t do us much good.

Hate doesn’t make us more creative.

Hate doesn’t build relationships.

Hate doesn’t force us toward smart decisions.

However, hate does help us craft the right message toward a target.

If you can dig into your target enough to know the feeling they hate, the situation they hate, the perception they hate to have… then you’ve struck a golden insight.

Every successful business can be summed with what the target hates.

I hate… giving up. (Nike)

I hate… bland beer. (Dogfish Head)

I hate… broken out skin. (Proactive)

Have you asked yourself: What does your target hate?

 

Stay Positive & Are You Doing The Opposite?

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1. Address what the audience will want to know first.
2. Shut the devil’s advocate up by stating what he would say before he says it (and why he’s wrong).
3. Say only the words you can back up with your passion; that your bound to improvise around because your emotions start doing the talking.
4. Keep it short and end before the allotted time. You’ll never cover everything they want to know, and, if anything, the longer you go, the more questions you’ll create and the less time they’ll have to ask and you’ll have to answer them. This leads to frustration and an uninformed vote. If there’s Q&A time, make sure you add to it or you’ll wish you had.

 

Stay Positive & 5. Pitch At Every Opportunity You Can, Learn From It

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