You have to love the business model
If you’re going to be in the Internet marketing game (hell, any game at all) then you have to fall in love with your idea. Without falling in love, you won’t have much (if any) magic, no spring in your step, no desire to get up in the morning and keep pushing that rock until you’ve achieved your objectives.
But something else is also true, and this is something that’s hardly ever talked about by those glassy-eyed followers of the Big Idea.
You also gotta love your business model. And more to the point, the business model has to make sense. Loving the idea will get you through the first quarter or maybe year of a business, but after that, it’s all about doing the dishes, setting the sprinklers out, and dusting the furniture. You gotta be able to work with it, and no outside-the-box permutation is going to save your business if the model (a) sucks or (b) you can’t stand to work within its framework.
The biggest mistakes I made during the past decade was coming up with a string of beautiful business ideas, most of which were untenable thanks to nonexistent business models. It’s a harsh thing to say about yourself, but hey, if I can be man enough to admit that about myself, and tell you that I’ve moved on to things that do make sense, then hopefully I can save you the time, energy, money, and heartache of hanging on to a business that doesn’t make sense.
So how can you tell if your business model doesn’t make sense? It truly is different for different people and businesses, but really, there are some giant clues. For instance, does it seem like you keep working with the “wrong” kind of people, all of whom have expectations you can’t meet? Is it impossible to raise your margins no matter how much you cut and cut? Are your returns on direct mail, emails, and other marketing so miniscule that you’re forced to build transactions in the tens of thousands for even the most trivial offer or call to action?
As a good man (Dan Kennedy) once said, there are some problems that marketing can’t fix. If you have complex outsourcing agreements that cause your quality to skydive, no amount of marketing will save you when your product poisons or hurts someone. If your backoffice is such a mess that you can’t respond to customers in a timely fashion (or at all), no amount of Superbowl ads are going to make you look better. If your management is running scared of social media, don’t expect your customres to give up Facebook and Twitter just because of it.
