Your Choice: Business or Hobby?

Your Choice: Business or Hobby?

It's Not Easy Out There, Is It?

There are many demands on your time.

• There are days when you are expected to do the work of 5 people.
• You have an inbox that is intimidating at best.
• You have research that was due yesterday.
• You have a new client whose hand you want and need to hold.
• You have a laptop that keeps crashing.
• You have bills that need to be marked up and sent out.
• You have documents that need to be prepared before you and your client can rest.

What time does all of this leave for Marketing your practice? The answer is that some days you don't have enough time for the client work that needs to be executed, much less think about Marketing.

Here's The Reality.

You don't have any choice. You have to find a little bit of time on a regular basis, preferably every day, to help market your practice.

When you don't do something every day to advance the goals you've established in your plan, and aren't moving the needle by doing something that moves closer to generating revenue, then you need to realign your activities.

Start Here.

Start with your inbox. Before you get lost in an hour's worth of email communication every morning, do something first that advances your business. I know how hard this is, believe me. There are only a few things I like doing more than checking emails every morning to see if anyone needs me, to see if a potential client is ready to get started or to see if someone replied to me in Social Media. I fight this all the time.

This is why you hear me regularly talk about the need to prepare a sound Marketing Plan. It doesn't have to be the length of a New York Times bestseller. It doesn't even have to be 10 pages long, and probably not even 5. It just depends on the nature of your business. The most important point is that it doesn't have to be painful to put together.

A good marketing plan just needs to be based on sound strategy. I know my readers. You're professionals. You can handle this, I promise. Stop selling yourselves short.

A Hobby?

The point is that if you don't have a Plan of Action that identifies what you want to accomplish in your business, or your practice, then you are treating your work like a hobby, aren't you? You aren't strategically focusing on generating revenue, but hammering away at it like it's your favorite non-revenue producing hobby.

Don't get me wrong.

Hobbies are great. They exist to:

• Round out our lives
• To feed our souls
• To help others
• To blow off steam, and
• Sometimes to make money

'.but they are not the model for how to run your practice.

If you're not doing something every single day to market your business, then you are doing yourself a disservice.

You Decide.

What do you think?

Are you running a business or a hobby?

Thanks to Kathleen Gage for inspiring this post by sharing her unfailing wisdom about hobbies vs. businesses.

(Photo credit: BohemianCoast)