Don't confuse entrepreneurship with marketing

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The initial marketing a business does when it starts isn’t marketing and sales. It’s entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is whatever you do at the beginning of a business to see if you have something viable on which to build a business. It is a subject on its own and has its own course material covering things like bootstrapping, speed, spending more time out of the office than in the office, begging for money, begging for payments, listening to customers, and growing at all costs.

Marketing is when you know something will sell, and you then make an outsized, on-face-value-irrationally large-sized investment in telling the world about it so you can sell more of it. It’s a case of spending money today to make more money tomorrow.

Of course, marketing has a heart called the brand - the thing that sets you apart and legs, namely your sales activities. But I digress - none of this should ever be confused with entrepreneurship.

Most SMEs are not businesses; they’re experiments trying to become businesses. You’re only a business when you make serious, regular, predictable money. Very, very, very few are in this position.

The surprising thing is how many people make a living by merely running commercially subcritical, experimental, bootstrapped, up-an-down….how will I get through the next month, businesses?

Marketing should only start after entrepreneurship. Before you plough into marketing, you should first test your idea, refine it, find an initial market for it, get more feedback, gain some experience, and figure out how to make money from it. You should first sell, then market to sell much more.

The marketing you do in your entrepreneurial phase isn’t marketing - it’s testing, experimentation and part of a bigger effort to jumpstart a business. It’s marketing activities, like Google Ads and social media, but it’s not the kind of genuine marketing you should eventually do that is expensive, long-term focused and aimed at driving exponential growth instead of securing the next sale.

When you engage in proper marketing, you aim to earn something much more than the next buck. It’s about building something much bigger - a brand. Because a brand is the actual distinguishing factor between an entrepreneurial startup or SME and an established, growing, sustainable business. A brand delivers an unfair advantage because people stop comparing and start acting. They buy. And come back to buy again. And tell others to buy. And spend more than they should on buying. That’s a brand - and that’s what marketing is about.

Don’t think for a moment that you’re doing marketing when you market your new idea. You’re not. You’re busy with entrepreneurship, which is something completely different.

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