If You Only Do One Thing – Part 10

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Welcome to the latest installment of our new weekly blog series, If You Only Do One Thing. Every Monday, we will discuss one thing that you can start doing today to improve your marketing performance.

With so much advice floating around from so many different sources, it can be tough for marketers and small business owners to know where to focus. This series aims to help you out. Last week’s thing was Free Shipping.

Today’s Thing = Hire the Right Person

When all else fails and you don’t want to have to worry about marketing anymore, the best thing that you can do is hire the right person to worry about it for you.

For most small business owners and managers, marketing can seem like a bit of a chore. It’s something you know you need to do, but it’s not a first concern. And so you give it the old college try, but it never takes priority.

If you only do one thing in marketing, my advice would be to make that one thing hiring someone to handle it for you. This could mean bringing on a part time or full time employee, or it could mean retaining the services of a local agency or freelancer. Whichever you choose, bringing on the right person to handle your marketing will help you grow, even while you’re concerning yourself with other things.

Ideally, you should be looking for someone with experience doing the kind of marketing that you want to do. They should be familiar with your industry, and be able to show you some proof of past success. That will allow you to hand over control of the marketing strategy to them. You won’t need to micromanage everything that they do, so you can focus on the things that matter most to you and your business.

If you only do one thing, hire a marketer who will help you do more.

Share “If You Only Do One Thing” with all your marketing friends, and suggest future topics in the comments below or on Twitter @zheller. 

The Case for Paying Your Employees Less Money

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It’s no secret that for the bottom 90% of Americans, wages have stayed basically flat for the past thirty or so years. And there is a lot of buzz these days about whether or not to raise the minimum wage. That certainly won’t solve the problem, but it’s a good start.

When you are running a company, you have to decide how you will set compensation across your organization. There are a couple of competing ideologies at play. Some say pay employees more, some say pay them less.

Here is the case for paying them less:

  1. Salaries are expensive. In any company, employee pay is going to be one of the biggest costs of doing business. And it’s easy to look at the total salary number as a percentage of revenue and think about how you can lower it.\
  2. Tie salaries to production. Keeping base salaries low and paying performance-based bonuses is not necessarily keeping wages low, but it is a way companies can attract talent without broadly raising wages.
  3. Salary waste. For each position with your company, you can look at what you’re paying vs what you’d be paying a new hire with the same qualifications. If you are paying someone more than you would pay for something new in that position, it’s easy to view the difference as waste.
  4. Profits and investor returns. The lower you can keep salaries, the higher your earnings.
  5. Job growth. If salaries are lower, you can generally afford to hire more workers. If all salaries go up, many companies worry about the need to cut staff.

Yesterday we made the case for paying them more. Check it out here.