The Balancing Act

There is a balancing act that we have to perform daily if we are to have success in any service business. We must achieve a balance between the daily operations of our business, dealing with clients, and marketing. Whether you are an accountant, realtor, attorney, insurance agent or any other service professional, you must incorporate balance into your business and into your marketing game plan.

Many service professionals are out of balance due to the feast or famine syndrome. We have all been there. This is where you are working for months with more clients than you can handle, everything is going well, and marketing your business is the last thing on your mind. You are almost to the point of being overwhelmed with all the work you have to do. Then you wake up one morning with maybe a couple of things to do for the day and you start wondering how you are going to market your services because you just don’t have all the clients you need to sustain your business at the moment. The clients you were servicing for the past few months are gone. You have delivered what they needed and now there are no clients to replace them. A good example of this is when realtors are in a housing market that is great and they have to do very little in the way of marketing because clients are calling them. They have all the listings they can handle and eager buyers to buy the homes they have listed. Then one day circumstances beyond their control start impacting their business. There is a change in the economy and they have no clients. Either the interest rates have gone up or the local economy is suffering or some other event out of their control has caused a downturn in the housing market. Now after months of not marketing their services, all of a sudden they are struggling to get clients. Does this sound familiar?

It takes months for most marketing strategies to produce any significant results. If you are in the situation of the realtor that was not marketing their services when the housing market was great, you are probably going to struggle with having decreased income and trying to figure out what to do next. Your stress level increases, self doubt about your abilities creeps in, or you start considering another career. It does not have to be this way. Wouldn’t it be great if you could reduce the chances of being in this situation? Nothing is guaranteed but if you have balanced your marketing efforts along with the daily tasks of running your business and dealing with clients, the chances of you being in this situation a greatly reduced.
No matter how busy we are, there is always time to market our services. You can make 1 cold call every day, go to 2 networking events each month, develop a newsletter to keep your name in front of your clients on a monthly basis, ask for referrals from every satisfied client and start building a database of these potential clients.

There is a long list of things you can do on a daily basis that require very little time. The key to marketing success for service professionals is finding a few simple things you can do that you feel comfortable doing, and do them consistently. Don't make this harder than it has to be. Literally a few minutes spent on some aspect of marketing your business on a daily basis will pay off significantly in the coming months. The key is to do something every day related to marketing no matter how busy you are. Take 2 minutes to make a phone call to a potential new client or take one hour out of your week to attend a networking event and you will develop habits that make it very easy to balance your marketing with your day-to-day operations. You can master the necessary balancing act that is so essential to being successful in your business.