A room full of people who already know what to do

Read time: 4 mins

Morning — here's this week:

— What a conference full of business owners taught me about doing nothing

— Why your quiet months are decided three months earlier

— One thing worth doing before Friday

Becci and I went to the Entrepreneurs Circle conference recently.

If you haven't come across it, the EC is a membership organisation for owner-run businesses — Nigel Botterill started it in 2010, and the annual conference pulls in a thousand-odd business owners from across the country.

This is my second year, and I always find it very inspiring. This was Becci's first year, and she came away full of ideas on how to drive ours and our customers' businesses forward.

But here's the thing I keep coming back to.

That room was full of people who already know what to do.

They're not short of ideas. They've read the books. They've been to the sessions. Every one of them could tell you, fairly precisely, what they should be doing to grow.

And most of them won't do it. Not because they're lazy — they're the opposite; they've paid good money and given up 2 working days to be in that room. They'll go home, get back into the business on Monday, and it'll be six months before they think about it again.

There's a line that gets used a lot at the EC and I've never been able to shake it:

Learning is acquiring new information that leads to a change in behaviour. No change in behaviour means no learning has occurred.

Which is uncomfortable, if you've ever been to anything.

There's another line they use at the EC that's more uncomfortable still: everything is your fault.

That one takes a bit of getting used to. It sounds harsh — and then you realise it isn't saying you're bad at this. It's saying nobody else is coming to fix it. The quiet month in February is yours. The thing you've been meaning to sort out for two years is yours.

Which is bleak for about ten seconds, and then quite freeing, because it also means it's within your control.

And it's the reason marketing doesn't happen in most businesses. Not ignorance. Not budget. Something a lot more ordinary, and a lot more fixable.

Almost everyone I sit down with says a version of this.

"We know we should be doing more. We just never get to it."

And it's true. You're running jobs, quoting, chasing suppliers, sorting staff, doing the invoicing at nine at night. Marketing sits on the list somewhere below everything with a deadline attached.

So it gets done when there's a gap.

Which is the whole problem, and it's worth being precise about why.

You do marketing when you're quiet. Naturally — that's when there's time, and that's when you're worried.

It works. Enquiries come in. You get busy.

Now you're flat out. No time for marketing. It stops.

But marketing doesn't pay out this week. It pays out in roughly ninety days. So the work you generated while you were quiet arrives, you stop generating, and ninety days later the pipeline is empty again.

Then you're quiet. So you start marketing. And round it goes.

Most businesses think they have a demand problem.

What they've actually got is a scheduling problem.

The feast-and-famine cycle almost every service business complains about isn't the market being unpredictable. It's the completely predictable result of only marketing when you have time to.

And it's self-inflicting, which is the annoying part. The busier you get, the more certain the quiet spell becomes.

The businesses that don't have this problem aren't doing more marketing than you. Quite often they're doing less. They're just doing it when they're busy, which is the only version that breaks the cycle.

That's not a motivation thing. Nobody keeps doing something at the end of a fourteen-hour day because they feel strongly about it. It's a system thing — either it's small enough and booked in firmly enough that it survives a bad week, or it isn't.

Ten minutes. Do it before Friday.

Pull up last year's monthly figures. Find your two quietest months.

Now count back ninety days from each one, and think about what you were doing then.

If you were flat out — and you almost certainly were — you've just watched the mechanism work. The quiet months weren't bad luck. They were booked in three months earlier, by you being too busy to do anything about them.

Then look at where you are right now, and count forward ninety days.

That's the month you're deciding this week.

This week's prompt: build a marketing routine small enough that it survives your busiest week.

P.S. Whenever it's useful, three ways I can help:

— Can visitors actually reach you? Two minutes, no email needed, and nothing gets sent or changed. Put your website in and read what comes back. → mot.bamsh.co.uk

— Watch: what AI search means for your business. 12 minutes on where your next enquiries are actually going to come from. https://youtu.be/QXCk1NYG-Kc

— Stuck with your marketing? Book a 15-minute call, and we'll diagnose the problem and the opportunities. https://bamsh.co.uk/15-min