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The surprisingly simple math behind starting a business
I spent most of my 20s as a carpenter.
I was fairly good at it.
Which is why, when I finally decided to go out on my own, I thought the hard part was already behind me.
Turns out, not so much.
Listening to Alex Hormozi a while back, he broke down what most service business models actually look like. Plumbers, small gyms, marketers, consultants, etc… and I had a bit of an epiphany moment. He said if you want to be successful in business, first you need to realize what kind of business your in.
And he said for most services, you’re in the business of marketing and sales.
But if you mainly sell supplements, then you’re in the branding and distribution business.
And I thought huh, that’s really interesting.
Most people think if you’re a plumber then the business is wrenching pipes. But that’s only true if you’re self-employed. If you’re a business owner, where things happen even when you’re not around, then it’s another story. And not only are you marketing to attract customers, you’re marketing to attract the best damn pipe wrenching talent you can find in your industry.
Internal marketing, and external marketing.
Two different things.
Anywhoo… all to say, that’s something I gravitated towards intrinsically whilst running my construction business. Spending all my time on marketing and sales. Hiring out the work to guys could just do what they did best. I often felt bad for not strapping on a tool belt and teaching more back in those days.
But it turns out, that was probably the right thing to do even if it felt wrong.
So I laid out the math on Threads the other day and I got some push back on it:
Starting a business is:
- 70% marketing
- 20% sales
- 10% delivery
But most of the people that pushed back, if you dug down deep enough, they were either self-employed, or in reality working for someone else as a sort of freelancer / solopreneur hybrid. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that. But the bottom line is, if you’re starting a business, then marketing’s not just a part of your business…
It’s the whole damn thing.
Either that or you’re usually just wrenching pipes for someone else who’s better at marketing and sales.
Like when I first became a self-employed carpenter, I’d find a gig, build it out, collect a check, pay my bills, and then look up and wonder where all the money went, and started scrambling around to find next person with the next check who’s ready now.
I had no time to plan things out.
It was always a scramble.
Until I started focusing on the marketing, and the sales, and hiring other people to do the work.
And the ratio shifts as you scale, by the way. Once you've got clients and systems and proof, delivery naturally takes up more of your time. But in the beginning?
It’s all about the marketing.
All to say… if you're at the point in your business where it feels like not enough people know you exist, it's probably not your skill set that's the problem.
It's your ratio of marketing to delivery.
And the framework that’s moved the needle for most of my clients lately is one I teach inside the Nature of Marketing community called Client Affinity Content.
I was just on a mastermind call, and one of my business partners, Justin David Carl, was talking about his growth over the last three months, and he said that after we talked about some changes to his content strategy, he went from 20,000 followers (where he was stuck for four months) to now almost 80,000.
Which is one big parabolic curve if you ask me.
And a lot of that came from what I teach inside Client Affinity Content.
It's free in the community right now.
Here's the link:
Talk soon,
Kevin Hood