Joe Daniels thinks a lot of solo business owners are trying to solve the wrong problem.
When business slows down, the instinct is usually to blame marketing.
But if you had a "feast" before the famine, your marketing clearly worked at some point. The bigger question is why it stopped.
In this episode of Can We Not?, Joe and Sam dig into the operational side of running a solo service business, including the parts founders often ignore because they'd rather focus on the work they're actually good at.
Joe shares how his experience as the first employee at a marketing agency showed him the feast-and-famine problem firsthand, why he eventually realized he'd built a business he enjoyed talking about more than actually running, and the quarterly review that led him to change direction.
They also get into:
Why founders need both a visionary hat and an operator hat- Joe's Direction, Demand, and Delivery framework
- Why feast and famine can be an operations problem rather than a marketing problem
- How Joe used the Odyssey Plan to rethink his own business
- Why "I don't have time" is often really "I didn't make time"
- Making uncomfortable business-development work small enough to actually do
- Designing an offer around the business and life you want
- Joe's Do, Delegate, Die approach to simplifying work
- Why telling prospects they're not a good fit sometimes makes them want to hire you even more
If you're good at your actual work but occasionally wonder when exactly you became responsible for running an entire company around it, this conversation is for you.