Business owner, market thyself

Francesca knew something was wrong from an early age.

Her skin burned.

Not like sunburn-burned. But like excruciating-and-unbearable-pain-with-no-known-cause-burned. Burned bad enough that at times she couldn't stand to be hugged by her own mother.

And the only thing that provided relief was about ten days in a dark, dark room.

Doctors kept telling her it was all in her head.

But when she turned sixteen, she quit waiting on them, found a database of rare diseases, and started going through it alphabetically.

One-by-one, one syndrome at a time.

Luckily she had the chance to sit in on a biochemistry lecture in Milan where the professor described a family of disorders that make your skin burn in the light. So she skipped ahead to “P” and realized she had a rare skin disorder called porphyria.

Then she became a scientist who specialized in researching the very disease she has.

The end.

I see this a lot with business owners too.

I fell in love with marketing while building my construction business. I’ve learned it’s easy to start a business if you work in the trades. And what I mean by that is, if you do any type of skilled physical labor, it’s easy to keep yourself busy.

But as soon as you need to keep other people busy, you have to learn marketing whether you like it or not.

Even if that just means telling every person you’ve ever met that you run a business.

Then I started teaching online and realized that marketing anything that isn’t skilled physical labor is much, much harder. And at the time, everything I wanted to know was locked inside of expensive programs that had a bad reputation for making their marketing being better than their delivery.

So that’s why I became obsessed with trust-based marketing.

To solve the very same problem I had.

Then there’s one of my favorite marketers of all time, Seth Godin.

In the mid-90s he ran an internet direct marketing company and had the foresight to see that his entire industry, built upon the idea that interrupting people was the best way to get their attention, was soon about to die.

So he came up with something better.

He wrote a book about it in 1999 and he called it “permission marketing”.

The direct marketing establishment turned on him. They kicked him out of their association. And then 14 years later they invited him back in by inducting him into their Hall of Fame. He didn’t ask anyone’s permission to invent permission marketing. He just realized he had a problem.

And he became an expert a solving the very same problem he had.

Which brings me to an idea I’ve been jostling about in my mind as of late.

Ten years ago, when I started my construction business, I started a system to keep track of everything I knew and everything I was doing. It’s grown up a lot since then. It lives in Notion, on my own machine, and inside Claude Code. And it’s the reason I can post four times a day on three social platforms, write these emails daily, publish them to my blog, keep premium clients happy, run a community, and still have time for pickleball, yoga, lifting weights, and lounging on the beach.

So I’m thinking about teaching it.

Since it’s not just something I cooked up last week, it’s been the thing running my businesses for more than ten years now, maybe it can help run yours too.

At least the underlying philosophy of it.

It will work with any of your favorite tools.

But it’s also the reason I stopped feeling the need to reorganize my entire life every two weeks while chasing my to do list around like a slippery greased up chicken.

If you'd want in on that, reply back and let me know.

Talk soon,

Kevin Hood