There are no silver bullets.
I may have stated this before. Nonetheless, its a worthy reminder.
So, what is a silver bullet? For starters, as defined by Mr. Miriam himself:
“Something that acts as a magical weapon; especially one that solves a long standing problem.”
I come across owners all the time asking about silver bullets. Most of the time it has to do with getting new customers. It sort of sounds like this:
“I was contacted by this company that will get me 30 leads a month.”
“I’m going to start a (generic) PPC campaign to advertise my business”
“I’m looking for a rockstar salesperson to run this part of my business for me.”
I’ve already fallen in the trap myself a couple of times. I spent several thousand dollars on a generic PPC campaign. I created a revenue share program thinking “why wouldn’t someone want to participate in this?”
I get it. Running a business is hard. Can’t there be just one easy button I could push to make something awesome happen?
The statements listed might not be bad strategies by any means. Rather to themselves they are simply tactics, or bullets, not made of silver. There are no shortage of bullets in the world. A simple tactic where the outcome is based on hope or pure speculation. Like a machine gun, spray enough out there and eventually you’ll hit something. This is expensive and time consuming.
This all may seem obvious, but I’m willing to bet everyone reading this email is currently working on something where the outcome is based on hope. I’ve worked on my share already.
You can’t buy a silver bullet. A quick #protip, if someone is trying selling you one, buyer beware. If they actually have silver bullets, money should be coming out of their ears and their customers should be singing their praises from the mountaintops. But you could take each of the concepts above and do the following:
You can fine tune that PPC campaign to a very specific pain point someone is searching for, with a very specific offering to solve it.
You can hire an awesome employee, train them, give them accountability to a certain set of results, and increase the area of responsibility over time.
Did we in fact just create a silver bullet or two? A proven strategy that we’ve fine tuned to deliver known results.
To be clear on the takeaway. There are no silver bullets you can go out and buy or create in a day. Silver bullets are forged over time with a combination of iteration, hard work, and follow through.
How many silver bullets have you created in your business?
Sincerely,
Russel
“The Backboard”
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Helpful Content
I may have shared this before but this is a great concept to think of how a silver bullet is actually created.
