The Squirrel and Marketing

I have been acquainted with the squirrel for a long time. In the 1960s I am fairly sure it once ate my homework.

Some of my friends who have been diagnosed with ADHD, ADD or are “on the spectrum” have told me they also deal with the squirrel regularly, I am not convinced that it is the same squirrel.

My squirrel convinced me to start my first business in 1996. It told me to leave the company I was working for in 2011, go to Central America for a month, then start another one.

It told me to start this blog, to write my first book, to record my CD in 2011, and last year it convinced me to build a storage facility for a bunch of used equipment and build an online store.

What the squirrel says makes sense at the time, but in hindsight sometimes makes me question my sanity. I have definitely chased it up quite a few trees and found myself with no easy way back down.

A few times the squirrel has encouraged me to try marketing. This blog was one of those projects, it eventually turned into my first book in 2013. It convinced me to start a podcast last August, to try various marketing companies and coaches, and to take on an intern late last year. The squirrel sometimes costs a lot of money to feed.

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes what it tells me to do leads to good things that I don’t regret. But the end result is usually that I have too many things going on, and projects linger and have consequences even when they are “done”.

As a one-person company, I can’t afford most of the marketing services offered in the US or EU. Yes, I have tried them out, but they never came close to paying for themselves. Traffic is not sales.

My daughter owns Huckleberry Branding here in Nashville. They do marketing for various larger companies and help maintain my websites. She has been a valuable resource for marketing advice, but she would be the first to tell me that her services aren’t economical for a company my size.

I also follow some marketing sages like Seth Godin and other business experts. Books are the least expensive way to learn marketing and business theory. But the squirrel reads them too, and often tries to send me down some path to investigate a noise.

I am involved in too many things for an old guy. Sometimes I think I need different Boss…