When famed investor Keith Rabois meets with a new CEO, he asks to see:

1) Their priorities

2) Their calendar

They rarely ever match.

He tells them that their goal is to get them to match.

If you often find yourself being the generalist in the room, some basic mental models can help you add to the conversation without having the deep expertise that others in the room possess.

Storytelling is one of those “small hinges swing big doors” points of leverage for solopreneurs and small businesses

What is an audience?

In the music sense, it’s the people *not* on the stage, who are showering their favourite artists with love and appreciation, singing their songs.

In the business sense, a useful way to think about your audience is “a group of people who share a common interest or goal whom I want to empower”.

How does marketing make change happen?

Here are 2 ways to think about it:

Insight Driven: When you have an insight and deliver such innovation that people willingly choose to make a new decision, adopt a new habit etc.

Pattern-Match Driven: When you provide an option that matches a decision they’ve already made. This isn’t a new decision, merely new information.

Contributing to The Carbon Alamanac was an unbelievable experience. Hearing Seth Godin talking about it on the Tim Ferriss podcast recently reminded me of something Seth said about promotion while creating The Almanac.

All successful cultural promotion (be it books, public health issues etc), operate in a loop:

1) Awareness

2) Tension

We have all heard about SMART goals. And some of us might know about SMARTER goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound, Evaluate, and Reward.).

But a simple rewrite to the 'ER' part that I heard recently on Dr. Richard MacKinnon's fantastic WorkLifePsych podcast changed my goalsetting the most...

When the goal is to build a business, where does the founder begin?

This question popped up in a text message conversation with a friend. He was busy working on a hobby project, and considering taking it live, launching and getting real users.

His question is the question that hits anyone starting a business - where do I start?

I subscribe to Seth Godin's idea that marketing is about change. This involves changing people's actions, perceptions, or the conversation. That change has to be specific to be valuable. Instead of wasting our resources shouting into the void hoping to snare anyone, we get to choose the right (smaller than you think) audience for whom we can provide the most value and hopefully, delight.

So many things in life are best explained with an iceberg analogy, and this is no different. If building and selling are above the water, what’s underneath?

When you go behind the scenes of building and selling, I believe there are some shared core skills at play.

Here is a position I'll take to make this post more interesting: Many entrepreneurs and business owners make the mistake of focusing too much on building, without first selling a product or service that truly solves a problem for their customers. In this post, I’ll explore the power of selling before building, and how it can set you up for success over the long term.

Here is a position I'll take to make this post more interesting: Many entrepreneurs and business owners make the mistake of focusing too much on selling, without first building a product or service that truly solves a problem for their customers. In this post, I’ll explore the power of building before selling, and how it can set you up for success over the long term.

Balancing the need to build with the need to sell is tricky. These two components of building a successful business are critical, and our pattern-seeking brains can trick us into believing that we need to do one first and then the other when in reality, it’s a little from Column A and a little from Column B.

I realised recently that almost every conversation I have with founders, bootstrappers, and freelancers, centres around the 2 issues of building and selling. (Often it’s a question of which to do first, but more on that later.) They seem to be timeless skills worth building in business and in life.

Do you feel successful right now? Would you text a friend right now and say “I'm feeling pretty successful today.”

My guess is a no to both of those questions (and maybe even a queasy sensation to go with the second question).

Success is one of those words that has a different look and feel in different cultures.

Mental models are about leveraging timeless principles to improve our thinking and decision-making. As Archimedes once said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” Ultimately, it’s our mind that is that lever and it’s up to us to figure out to best use it.

Almost every day, I read about, or think of, a book that makes me think “Oh, I must read that again”.

I don't know about you, but I find myself firing books into my Kindle and filling up an Amazon shopping basket of books in the ill-founded hopes that future me will surely have the time to read. He will, won’t he?

Like anyone who works from themselves, I have a litany of things I learned the hard way.

All of them have taught me things that now are a part of my subconscious judgement when making decisions.

They help me be less wrong in the future.

In speaking with founders on The First 10 Podcast about how they found their first 10 customers, I have discovered that some of these mistakes and failures are universal.

The exhaust of finding your First 10 Customers is stories of things learned. Making a career of building businesses is a marathon, not a sprint, and my hope with this post is that some things in here will resonate with others on their entrepreneurial journey.

You've got the skill, you just need the customers. Consistently marketing your services is one of the most valuable things you can do as a freelancer. It helps you understand better those you seek to serve, as well as increasing your opportunity footprint. More marketing creates higher demand for your services, and the more you can charge.