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Get mad. Get even.

No, I’m not encouraging you to go bully all the people who may be getting in your way. I’m urging you to embrace your inner anger. Until you get angry enough things aren’t likely going to improve.

This isn’t some temper tantrum, kicking and screaming fit. It’s much more quiet – well, it starts out that way. It’s more sober-minded…that just means it’s serious, not infantile. Anger with a purpose. Nothing can replace it. Few things can be as effective as a catalyst for change (i.e. improvement).

Here’s how I recently channelled my own anger. I want it to serve to help you identify yours…and figure out ways to make it work to your favor. It certainly wasn’t and isn’t my first bout with anger. Maybe it was elementary school – or even earlier – when I first experienced it. That’s likely true for you, too.

“I’ll show you,” is what you said to yourself. Maybe it was after somebody told you that you couldn’t do something. Or maybe it was after repeated failed attempts at something. Sad to say, maybe it was a parent or a coach or a teacher – a person well-intended – who said something discouraging and you bucked up by getting mad about it. Mad enough you were able to direct that energy into some positive movement. Sometimes, positive enough to result in success.

That’s the kind of anger I’m talking about.

But today, this whole niching down in our marketing begins with the stuff in our head. That’s why this is important and non-traditional marketing conversation. We usually go straight to the tactical. The action steps. The “how to” of marketing. This is much, much deeper. It’s our belief. Our belief in ourselves. We can get in trouble if we try to market – or serve a market – because of what somebody else thinks or feels.

Yes, there are some principles of marketing that are effective and others that aren’t. Before we can create an effective plan – real action steps – we have to really know and understand who we are and why we want to serve this market. Not caring isn’t effective. Apathy never fueled anybody’s effective marketing. Passion does. Sometimes that passion is born of anger.

Sometimes we don’t make progress until we get mad enough to do something about it. It’s true when we’re 5 or when we’re 75. Anger can be the positive fuel we need to get unstuck. Few things are worse than being stuck, but it’s where many of us spend the majority of our time. Stationary. In one spot. Fearful of moving in any direction. Feeling safer to just stay put.

The problem is, success won’t come chase us down. We can’t stand still and expect our situation to improve. So why do many people do that? Because it feels better than taking a chance. Because it feels more comfortable than doing something that makes us feel uncomfortable. We’ll likely choose comfort over discomfort all day long.

This isn’t about choosing discomfort though. Just because something is uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s wise or profitable.

Fear. Takes on different forms. It’s directed in multiple directions.

My most recent anger was sparked by people and a culture that I knew wasn’t congruent with who I am, or who I most want to be. It’s one of the biggest risks we can face in business — viewing an opportunity without properly considering the downside. Then there’s the fear.

For me it was fear that I might not be seeing things as clearly as I felt. It manifested itself in me pushing forward for months, even though everything in me was screaming, “This is so not right for you!” I ignored it as best I could. Day after day I fought through the misery and dread, trying to convince myself that maybe my instincts and intuition were wrong. I’m highly intuitive and rarely has my intuition failed me. But this time I was pushing hard to ignore it because I wanted this endeavor to succeed. All along, I felt like a round peg being pounded into a square hole. I kept working to convince myself that maybe I had edges that were more square than round…even though deep down I knew it wasn’t true.

Then it happened.

I finally got angry. With myself. For refusing to listen to a lifetime of experience, know-how and accurate intuition. I got mad that I had spent so much time pursuing such a poor opportunity for ME. Mad that I had spent so much time with people who weren’t even close to being the type of people I most enjoy spending time around. Other than a service that I found powerful, there was nothing else about the endeavor I believed in – nothing that was congruent with my personality, my principles or my philosophy.

By this time I had invested almost 9 months. That fueled my anger even more. And it wasn’t directed toward anybody or anything other than myself. So I made up my mind that I was going to take a moment – okay, I took more than a moment. I actually took about a week to reach some final resolutions about what I knew was right – what I wanted to do given my new found self-awareness, which was entirely sparked by getting mad enough to do something about my situation. A situation that was entirely my own doing.

It was about this time I recorded a podcast episode over at LeaningTowardWisdom.com – a passion project of mine. The episode was entitled, “Don’t Cling To A Mistake Just Because You Spent A Lot Of Time Making It.” I fell prey to this phenomenon. You have, too. We all do it…sometimes. We hang onto a failure because we’ve spent so much time investing in it. It’s hard to pull the plug, even when you know (or feel) it’s never going to work. There’s always that small twinge of doubt in our mind thinking, “What if…?” What if we’re wrong? What if it could work out favorably? It almost never does though.

Then there’s all that noise we hear online about not quitting too soon. And hustle. And putting in the work. All good advice, but only if they fit the context of what’s happening with us.

If I offer you some pie-in-the-sky business opportunity that is more sales pitch than reality, the sooner you realize the opportunity isn’t very real, the better. Staying with it longer isn’t going to make it more valid.

Getting angry with ourselves requires a staunch devotion to our own self-awareness. Accurate self-awareness has to be our non-negotiable. My mistake was trying too hard to negotiate it because I thought the possibility existed that I might fit into that hole shaped very differently than I am. Well, logically I knew it didn’t make sense. I knew I wasn’t shaped right for this opportunity, but I pushed hard to make it fit. I proved that any of us can endure an awful lot of dread and grief. It wasn’t grit or tenacity that I lacked. It was FITNESS. This endeavor was NOT a good fit for me.

Why are you negotiating your self-awareness? Why are you negotiating who you are? Or why you do what you do?

It’s not the road to success. You may profit financially for a time, but at what cost? What will you negotiate – sacrifice or surrender – to try to be somebody you aren’t?

Today, I’m urging you to get mad…mad enough to stop it. Mad enough to get on track to be true to who you are. Mad enough to go all in on your strengths and stop trying to leverage your weaknesses, which we all know is a ridiculous strategy. We can’t operate our businesses by shoving all our chips into the middle of the table on a weak hand. Then stop doing it with your enterprise or career. Or your life.

The key is accuracy. We have to really know ourselves. Getting angry at ourselves with a false sense of who we are…that won’t serve us. We’ll just beat ourselves up for failing to be somebody we’re not. Too many people live that life. Don’t join them.

Self-awareness isn’t bound up in limiting ourselves. Sometimes I sit with a CEO or business owner who believes the performance of his company tops out at a certain level. Maybe they’ll talk about a revenue amount. They just can’t see the organization performing at a higher level. Maybe it’s a profit level that they just can’t see improving…at least not dramatically. Others find it impossible to see themselves at the helm of a company much larger. All these things can restrict growth and keep companies (and careers) stuck. It’s not intentional. Maybe it’s not even conscious. But it’s effective none the less.

A business owner knowingly or not thinks his company is mostly topped out at $12M annually. He can’t see it growing beyond that. His self-awareness is solid and mostly accurate, but he’s got these limiting beliefs that are based mostly on his fears. Fear and self-doubt will work against our accurate self-awareness. In our next episode we’ll close out this series with some things we can learn to hold our ground with ourselves, while simultaneously reaching some new heights we may have thought impossible. And it doesn’t involve being something or somebody other than the best version of ourself.

Be angry. Angry enough to think about the market you’re serving and how well you’re doing it. Angry enough to think about how fragmented you may be – and how it’s likely that fragmentation stems from you trying to be something you’re not. Or trying to make your company be something it’s not. Plenty of successful companies have lost their way because they didn’t really know their strengths and they thought it was smarter to broaden their marketing. Meanwhile, some of the best and brightest fully embrace who they are and why they do what they do – and nothing else.

What business are you in? Why?

What business do you want to be in? Why?

What are you doing to protect yourself and your self-awareness? Anything? Or are you sacrificing it because you’re listening to all the wrong sounds. Experts, friends, competitors, partners — or anybody else who is trying to convince you to be a button-downed, custom suit wearing executive when you know you’re just a blue jean, Nike wearing guy who prefers flannel shirts in the winter. Today is the day you need to buck up with enough anger to say, “NO, I’m gonna be who I most am. I’m just gonna be the best version of that possible.”

As a leader of your company, your effective niche marketing hinges on what you think. What you believe. Start surrendering that and you’ll quickly lose your way by joining the ranks of the ineffective marketers who don’t know who or what they are. How can the market figure it out? Now you’re seeing the problem. Confusion. Delusion.

Sit down and think seriously about what you’re negotiating – the things you really don’t want to negotiate, but for some reason, you are. You’re giving up yourself…probably with a lot of delusions about it working out to your favor. I want you to consider that this may be the very reason you’re struggling. You’re trying to leverage your weaknesses instead of your strengths. Does that sound like a good plan? You know it doesn’t. Let’s talk more about that next time.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:38 — 28.5MB)

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One of the most common challenges I encounter with businesses is their inability to accurately identify their ideal prospect. And I’m not talking about start ups. Companies ranging in age from a few years to a few decades seem to suffer this malady. Mostly, I think they just haven’t taken the time to think seriously enough about it. It doesn’t seem important so they stay busy with other activities.

Our business vocabulary is dominated by words like expand, grow (I’m guilty), enlarge and other terms that depict making something bigger, not smaller. Why should we give any time to thinking about making some aspect of our business smaller? It’s counter intuitive. But it’s the wise course when we’re thinking about our marketing and our overall business model.

Lessons Learned (And I’m Still Learning)

The temptation is to go BIG or go home. It’s one of the many things that sounds good, but it’s often pretty foolish. Logically it makes sense to want to sell or market to as many people as possible. We all need and want more customers. To restrict the people in our sales funnel just makes no sense if we want the output at the bottom of the funnel to grow.

But that’s exactly what many of us get wrong.

You’d think that simple math would apply, but you’d be wrong. The greater the number of people you’re attempting to get into the top of your funnel should result in a higher number popping out of the bottom. What you may not be considering are the actual number of people you can actually corral into the top of your funnel. You’re likely focused on all the living, breathing people you could attempt to get into your funnel, but they’re never going to enter. You dream about them entering though. In fact, you’ve got those spreadsheets with some terrific – seemingly realistic numbers – of prospective customers. You think if you just get a little bitty conversion rate the bottom number of customers will be HUGE.

It’s unreasonable, but it feels so logical. That’s why you hang onto it. What if you could make those numbers happen?

When I was still a teenager selling hi-fi gear I’d sometimes get called to meet with a competitor who wanted me to consider jumping ship. I’m not sure if it was my intuition or what, but I remember one time sitting down with a shop owner who was attempting to lure me with visions of bigger commissions. “You could earn X,” he said. I don’t remember what X was, but I do remember it being more money than I’d ever made. Without thinking about it, I blurted out the question, “Do you have anybody making that right now?” No, he didn’t. And without hesitation I asked, “Has anybody ever made that kind of money working here?” Again, no! He instantly followed up, “But it’s possible.”

And that’s how we approach our marketing numbers. We keep on thinking it’s possible, even though we’ve never done it before. And we don’t know anybody who has. But we’re going to be the ones who are able to tempt mass volumes of prospects into our funnel where others may have failed.

This is where our romantic notions blind us to the realities of the market. We fall in love with notions that may not be realistic. Like a high school boy who dreams of dating the most popular girl in school…it’s nice to fantasize about, but it’s not going to happen. Eventually, we think that boy is delusional. That’s what we become in our businesses, too. Delusional.

While I sat in the C-suite I never had trouble niching down. I knew exactly who our prospects were and it made for effective marketing. It influenced and directed our messaging, the words we used and how we sought to gain the attention of the right people – our ideal prospects. But about 8 years ago when I stepped away from running bigger businesses and set about to start my own one-man-band coaching and consulting company I lost my mind. Well, not literally, but I did lose my learning. It’s as though I forgot what I’d learned and practiced all my life.

I just wanted a customer. Initially, any customer. You know the feeling. Every business owner and leader knows the feeling. There are many times when we just need to make a sale. We need somebody to buy something. Sometimes we feel desperate for it. Sometimes we are desperate for it.

I felt like that. Some days I still feels like that. And I know I’m not alone. You sometimes feel like that, too.

The Internet is so vast that it creates these false impressions, often intentionally. We like others to think we’ve got our act together – and that every step we make is the right step. While I enjoy what Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys, calls “positivity,” the reality is I’m sometimes annoyed by people who always act like they’re setting the woods on fire. You ask them, “How’s business?” and they’re likely as not to answer, “Man, it could NOT be better.” During my lifetime of experience I have frequently found these are the people often suffering the most. They just feel compelled to put that mask on, hoping to fool the rest of us who are mere mortals struggling sometimes to get by.

I admit it. I have sometimes struggled. I’ve not always had it right. If that blows your opinion of me…well, I never told you I was a guru or somebody impervious to the pains of being in business. Business is hard. It’s very hard. I don’t care what industry you’re in. And I don’t care what competitive edge you think you have, or what edge you legitimately enjoy. The market is tough. It chews up the best of us at times. And because it’s organic and ever changing…we have to stay on top of our game to give ourselves a chance for success. Failure is easy. Success is hard.

Wouldn’t it be nice if our greatest lessons came from our wins? But we both know that’s now where our most valuable lessons have come. No, they’ve come from the times we got our brains beat out of our head. All those times we tried something that failed. Sometimes colossal failures taught us the most valuable lessons.

I’m experienced enough to realize there are at least a couple of fundamental truths about business building…

One, there is such a thing as luck, serendipity, timing or whatever else you’d like to label it. Good ideas require a degree of effective execution, but they also require correct timing. Plenty of people have had an idea whose time just wasn’t right. There are many fragile moments in the course of our careers and businesses where things need to work out just right, or we’ll fail.

Two, winners have stayed with the fight through the failures until they’ve found success. Some winners have failed a lot. Others, because of that first truth, have fought though a limited number of failures and found success fairly quickly. It’s different for each of us. Which is why there are NO secrets. There’s just our own persistence to press past the failure for as long as we must until we find our own success.

What’s that got to do with niching down? Quite a lot really. Niching down can speed up our learning curve and help us achieve success more quickly. And that’s worthy of our consideration all by itself. But that’s not where I want to focus. Not today anyway.

Niching down helps us serve better!

For me, after a lifetime spent building businesses, it wasn’t about confidence or experience. Or even know-how. I don’t mean that I’ve learned all there is to learn. Quite the contrary, the more I learn the more I realize I have to learn. But as I embarked on doing hardcore business coaching nearly 8 years ago, I didn’t lack the skills or confidence to do it. I knew then, as I know now, that I had quite a lot to offer. Enough to offer to make myself valuable to somebody.

My early error was my failure to concentrate on WHO. Who am I going to serve? “Anybody” or “everybody” is never the right answer to that question. Logically, I knew that. Yet, that was really my answer. WRONG.

My mind would race with people in all sorts of spaces who could benefit from my help. I knew this because I had served people in all sorts of spaces and my work had benefited everybody I served. It didn’t matter if they were a retailer, a manufacturers, a service professional or anything else. Business building and leadership aren’t so different from industry to industry. The verbiage may differ, but the principles don’t. That just added to my marketing confusion.

So for a few years I was pretty much all over the place. Working with businesses with nothing in common so far as industries were concerned. I was being a marketing generalist and it resulted in very sporadic, unpredictable marketing. Sometimes feast. Other times famine. Up. Down. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Sure it does. Many of  us operate much larger businesses than my little one-man-band enterprise in the exact same way. We put one foot in front of the other day after day, week after week, month after month.

I kept doing this in spite of knowing better. Proving another point: it’s one thing to know, it’s something else to DO. I was guilty of not closing that knowing-doing gap. I was doing one thing in the face of knowing something else. Until I regained my senses.

It all happened over the past year or so, but it only recently culminated in a renewed focus and hard-headedness. The kind of hard-headedness required for success. You might prefer the words grit, tenacity, determination or resilience. I’m calling it hard-headedness because for me, that better describes it because for me it involved a sense of anger. Anger at myself for being so foolish for so long. Anger at others for trying to distract me, no matter how well-intended. Anger at failing to do the very things I knew were necessary for my own success.

Don’t underestimate the value of getting mad, as long as you direct it where it belongs. Anger can bring about the clarity you need to really focus on WHO you can most serve – that ideal target market that desperately needs what you have to offer.

That’ll be our focus in part 2. In the meanwhile, think about all these things and spend some time coming to terms with your own need to scale down who you’ll serve. I know you want to think you’ll change the world and maybe you will, but not before narrowing down a specific – very narrow – group of people who can benefit the most from what you do. Your service may have universal value and appeal, but there’s somebody – some group – that values it more than anybody else. And you’ve got to be congruent with who you are, and who you most want to be.

So as you can see, there are many moving parts to niching down. But for today, we at least got our toes in the water. Keep soaking on these things and let’s work this out a bit more so we can work toward growing great – both in our personal and professional lives…and in our organizations. I want your business to grow great, but I know that’ll best happen if you can grow great as a business builder. So let’s make sure we’re doing the work.

Subscribe to the podcast

To subscribe, please use the links below:

• Click Here to Subscribe via iTunes
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If you have a chance, please leave me an honest rating and review on iTunes by clicking Review on iTunes. It’ll help the show rank better in iTunes.

Thank you!