When starting a business, you usually picture what life could be like. Retiring early. Building something your children can be proud of. Financial freedom.

To do it, you know you’ll need to work hard and stay on top of everything.

You spread the word amongst friends, family and contacts, and the business starts to get going. But there’s a build up of pressures on your time. More customer enquiries, more requests from friends and family (usually favours), more expenses to account for, more supplies to order.

After a while, it can be a real struggle to find time to experiment with new ideas that are going to take the business forward. Hell, having a guilt-free day off can be a challenge in the early days, especially if you’re not yet financially comfortable.

Reality-check: nobody really cares about how hard it is.

The brutal truth is that the world doesn’t wait around for you to be ready. If you can’t keep up with customers, their interest (and money) will drift away. And if your time has been spent working hard on a long list of “must-do-now” tasks — especially if you’ve taken any heat from your spouse about working such long hours — it’s going to be a difficult pill to swallow.

If this is you, you’re certainly not alone.

Most owners we speak to are close to full capacity with existing tasks, but have a nagging sense that they should be doing more to promote their business.

Part of the problem is that time for developing the business is not set aside beyond the initial launch phase. It’s the business equivalent of the “difficult second album” phase: musicians, and business owners, have years to write their first album or launch their business, and then have to reinvent themselves within a couple of years. An incredibly difficult task, and the point at which most fail.

Our insight is this: it’s tough to gain the time to develop your business if it’s not built into your schedule from the outset. If you don’t have that time now, you’ll have to wrestle it back.

This is the first stage of getting your business development back on track, and actually being able to make the necessary changes to grow.

So, first concentrate on setting development time in your diary every week.

“It’s tough to gain the time to develop your business if it’s not built into your schedule from the outset. If you don’t have that time now, you’ll have to wrestle it back. This is the first stage of getting your business development back on track.”

What should you do with that time you’ve carved out in your diary?

Or, in other words, how do you go about navigating your way to growth?

Now, you can seek advice on what you should be doing, but ultimately it’s going to be determined by the way you answer the big questions:

1. What changes should I make to my product or service? Am I confident enough to do it, or do I want to stay with what I know?
2. How motivated and ambitious am I? Am I prepared to go through the effort to forge ahead?
3. Which group of people should I be advertising to?
4. How can I describe my product and service better, so people feel more excited about it?
5. What price should I charge? Do I have the confidence to go high, or do I feel too polite and embarrassed to ask for more? In fact, do my customers need low prices to be happy?
6. How much will it cost to promote my business? Can I do it for free?
7. How much money do I have to spend?

Whether your answers are good or bad, the way you answer big questions like these will set the commercial direction of your business, and help determine it’s success or failure.

As Jeff Bezos from Amazon said in an interview with Lex Fridman, “If anyone listening to this is an entrepreneur or a small business, think about the things that are not going to change over 10 years, and those are the big things”.

Working on the big things and “paper cuts” at Amazon

Later in the interview, Bezos says:

“When you identify the big things, you can tell they’re worth putting energy into because they’re stable in time.” Jeff Bezos

Amazon focuses on both the big things — the things that customers truly value and that are stable across a long period of time — and what they call “paper cuts”, which are little obstacles that get in the way of an exceptional customer experience.

Both are worked on the same time — big things and paper-cuts. And while no company compares to Amazon, each business needs to make sure they don’t miss the first element: the long-term big things that customers truly value.

Those things which customers truly value can be identified — in fact, can only be identified — by a market-orientated approach.

That is, by putting aside your own perceptions and feelings, and taking an objective view from a customer’s perspective.

This is no easy task. You know your business like the back of your hand. And because of this, it’s even more difficult to look at your business with fresh eyes, as if you were the customer.

But if you do your research right, you’ll get a real sense of:

Most owners we speak to aren’t setting money aside for future marketing spend. Sometimes not even funds for a rainy day.

Without investors in the picture, the financing options are limited to using personal money and bank loans.

As with time, so too with money: it has to be set aside for the long term. If not, you’ll back your future self into a corner.

Source: @anilsaidso on X/Twitter

For instance, if you want to access the mass market and make it big, you’ll probably need mass media, such as TV, outdoor or sponsorship advertising. For that, you’ll need a bare minimum of about £5,000, to have a campaign of any size. That’s without any creative costs.

And as you grow bigger, you may need to employ someone, or use agencies, to off-load some of your work, neither of which comes cheap. But if you don’t budget for them now, you’ll reduce the options available to you in the future.

The good news is that as you grow bigger, you’ll benefit from advertising economies of scale. The bigger the budget, the lower the cost per-person to advertise to. You’ll be able to negotiate lower rates with publishers and media owners.

On top of that, your advertising will (if done right) be building on previous campaigns, resulting in more responses from customers.

Lastly, we want to warn you about a few things. Business development can be hard work. It takes time to get things going and you’re going to be tested along the way. Bear these three things in mind:

1. Marketing almost never has that “I must do this now!” immediacy to it, like, say, paying monthly expenses or collecting overdue payments. There’s a real danger of not putting aside the necessary time to develop your business. Time that’s protected from the pressures on your time to fulfil day-to-day tasks. Expect your nerve to be tested on a frequent basis.
2. “Marketing” is often only associated with promotions, advertising and social media, but these are derivatives of the more fundamental and impactful areas of marketing: developing your product and service, setting a suitable price, deciding on which audience to target, crafting a value proposition and set of selling points, and so on. Beware of defaulting back to a view of marketing that only includes social media, promotions and advertising.
3. You need a clear idea on how you are going to measure, and justify, the expenditure on business development and marketing. To do this, you must take a long-term view because you won’t get payback immediately – it will build over time.

1. Set time aside every week to develop your business (not just maintain it) and ensure this time is protected. You’ll need a plan of how this time will be truly protected.
2. Think long-term. Work on the big things that customers truly value and which will remain steady over time.
3. Take a market-orientated approach. Take an objective, market-orientated approach to solving the big questions, and avoid relying on your own opinions or intuitions alone — you need an unbiased customer view.
4. Set money aside on a regular basis. Budget as if you will be in business two years from now and will want to take the business up another level, to get closer to your dreams. It will avoid you taking more expensive financing options, and you’ll thank yourself for it.