Sunday, March 20, 2011

How Often and How Much Do You Water Your Lawn?

When you're a little fish in the pond of big businesses, you have to concentrate your marketing efforts. A large company will have larger funds and therefore will have the privilege of marketing far and wide because their brands are already widely known and powerful.

A smaller company will have a smaller advertising budget and will have to be careful not to spread their marketing efforts too thinly. For a small company, thin marketing efforts are shallow efforts and shallow efforts will fade long before any impact is made.

Analogy
Watering your lawn is a necessary chore if you want beautiful green grass. If you water a couple of times a week for a couple of hours each time, the water will have the opportunity to penetrate down to the roots and promote a healthy lawn.

If you water your lawn daily for 10-15 minutes, the sun will evaporate the water that sits on the blades of grass, long before the water has even had the chance to make it down to the roots, rendering your efforts useless.

Don't advertise in everything that comes your way. Be selective and plan to do it for a while.

Keep Swimming Little Fish!


Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Are You Focusing On The Wrong Thing?

As a little fish in the pond of big businesses it's easy to get caught up in one detail and neglect the bigger picture of your business. When you focus too narrowly on one thing, especially something that is negative, you miss the opportunity to see all of those positive aspects of your company that far out weigh the acute challenges you may be facing.

Analogy
You have a telephoto lens on your camera and are focused in on an old-dilapidated building and decide that it's far too ugly to take a photo of. Then you change to a wide-angle lens and see that this old house is perched on a hillside overlooking a spectacular valley with wild flowers in full bloom. The rotting house is now no longer your focus, but is a small element within the composition of your masterpiece instead.

Keep Swimming Little Fish!