Don't Be Cheap

One of the biggest problems I see business make is they are cheap. They don't want to spend any money. Some have unrealistic expectations.

I recently had a client tell me about someone he saw on Youtube talking about how he made so much money. He was convinced he could do the same. I asked how did the guy make his money. The client told me it was through the Youtube channel. I said how do you think he grew that channel? I told the client there are tons of people on Youtube with no views or subscribers. You are competing for viewers against people who know what they are doing and will spend money.

I even told the client if you know what you are doing you do not need to spend a ton of money to get results, but you have to spend some money. I had another person waste my time about my services. They wanted me to work for free but get a share of the profit. They wanted to hire a bunch of different people only offering them equity. I told them they were going to be the one who most believed in their product and if they couldn't believe in it enough to spend the money for what they needed how could they expect others to believe in it enough to work for free. I didn't take the offer. If it was Uber I might have. Had he offered to pay me I would not have accepted. I realized he had nothing of value, and I was not going to promote something like he was offering on anyone. So yes, equity can be a legitimate offer, but you have to have something of value which this guy did not.

I understand where you are coming from. I also used to be very cheap. I still am pretty cheap. But I learned that you need to spend money. It is an investment. I made money being cheap but once I allowed myself to spend money on things like marketing I did so much better.

Marketing is as much of an investment as the products you buy. If you are looking into starting a business and you thought of things like inventory, building, etc but you did not factor in marketing you need to add that in. With the most amazing product in the world without the ability to market it no one will know.

Many entrepreneurs now use the Internet, so you don't even need inventory or a physical location. It should be easier to set aside money to market your goods or services. Many people like the two clients I talked about are lulled in by get rich quick schemes. Or they see some guy on Youtube or somewhere online that claims to have made a ton of money. First, they may have no proof. Even if they do, they are probably not telling you everything they did to make it work. They might even be selling you that information. People then buy that information. But people rarely follow through with all the steps. They think I can do it this other way which is cheaper.

I am not going to say there are no short cuts. There are. I tell clients you can take your time and spend less, or you can spend more and get where you want faster. For instance, you can learn to make your own website and then build one or you can just hire a web builder. You can use free marketing methods to build a site over time of you can use money to help build it.

Most of what I have mentioned in terms of money is marketing. As a professional marketer of course, I will push that, but I don't want you to think that is the only thing I mean you have to spend money on. As I mentioned last paragraph you might want to spend money on a web developer. Even if you can learn to do things someone with expert experience can do it better, faster, and often cheaper.  Spending more could be making a product that cost a little more but is higher quality and will give you a greater return on your investment when you offer it for more money because it is better quality.

I used to try to find the cheapest way to do things. But the cheapest ways are not the best ways. When I started spending money on things that would help my business, I found my business could grow so much faster. I have seen those that spent money and those that didn't and the ones that spent money tended to be far more successful than the ones that wouldn't put in the effort needed to make their business work.

What do you think? Do you have experience where you spent money and it really helped? Did you have an experience where you were cheap, and it worked or didn't? Let us know by commenting below.