Page 282 - Duct Tape Marketing

Commit to Your Marketing with a Plan, Budget, and Calendar

The idea behind this calculation is to demonstrate that if you wish
to achieve a revenue goal of $250,000 per year, and you are the sole rev-
enue generator for the firm, then you must be responsible for generating
approximately $120/hour in revenue every single day, eight hours a day.

Let’s say you set your salary goal at $100,000. Then you must
generate around $50/hour over and above all expenses related to your
product, service, or running the business. The point of this exercise
is to give you a sobering frame of reference to draw from when pri-
oritizing how you use your time each day. (Did you do any $5/hour
work today?) I would suggest that you take one day and track how
you spend every minute. Then go back and assign a dollar amount to
the value of how you spent your time. You might be very surprised at
how much time you spend doing things that detract from your goals.

What’s the most profitable way for you to spend your time? How
much time did you spend on marketing today? The biggest benefit
of establishing marketing goals that are tied to specific marketing
tactics is that it forces you to develop systems and strategies that help
you meet the little pieces of the puzzle. If you meet the little pieces
(the parts that most businesses don’t even think about—like number
of referrals), then the big pieces will fall into place almost magically.

Make It a Game—Have Rules and a Way to Win
In an earlier chapter, I introduced the idea of getting your entire

team involved in the marketing. This is particularly needful with
respect to your marketing goals. One of the best ways to get your
team involved in marketing is to set and communicate marketing
goals that allow everyone to play. A sale or a referral usually comes
about because several people worked together to make it happen.

Once you create your goals, you will find that they take on even
more power if you can enlist some of the proven principles of open-book
management. Open-book management is an entire management and
accounting philosophy, but one of the principles is to identify a series

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