One of the saddest mistakes I see professionals and businesses owners make is the reverse of the phrase, “all hat and no cattle.” I’ve been told this is an insult in Texas and refers to someone who has a big mouth with little or no follow-through. The reverse of that is to build a GREAT enterprise, with too few customers.

Every week, I work with professionals and entrepreneurs who provide a great product or service, people who have invested and taken risks to create a great business, only to watch it struggle for lack of customers. Why?

A common pattern is that they (1) are not good at marketing and (2) they compound the problem by refusing to invest in marketing!

Yes, they may throw a little money at advertising. They may have attended a workshop or even paid a consultant at some point, but they fail to understand the dynamics of effective marketing and they refuse to get better at it!

Remember the definition of insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over, while expecting a different result!”

Consider this scenario, which is all too frequent: a passionate professional invests many years and thousands of dollars in education. They love their work and they are very good at it. So they do a little marketing, then they wait, hoping their expertise and passion will attract customers. Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen.

Or I see business owners who put their life savings into a new business because they know it provides a great service at a fair price. But since everything’s invested in the business, there’s no money or energy or time for marketing and within a year, the business closes its doors. What a waste! The community loses a valuable service, and the owner loses the business and their life savings.

Invest in marketing! And perhaps more important in learning how to market effectively! There are lots of great training, books and manuals to help you! If you don’t have enough customers, it’s not the economy and it’s not bad luck. It is a skill problem. Get better at it!