Rob’s comments below are in italics.Derek’s comments below are in normal font.

We were talking last time about marketing and sales for sovereign entrepreneurs who want a guide to how to market and sell themselves and their services to trade on their own terms. In editing the show, I reflected that we talked about a lot of tactics, but there’s actually a foundation: the best marketing is a business that markets itself. People go through the service, they talk about it, they talk to each other about it, and they leave great reviews.

Once you’ve got that basis, that alignment really stems from you doing work that is aligned with your purpose, values-driven, and, in some regard, mission-driven. Once you’ve got that foundation in place, then all of the stuff you’re doing with ads, with writing the book, with all of the other stuff that we talked about, is really going to amplify that. Whereas if you’re trying to amplify something that’s out of alignment, you’re just going to make problems for yourself and fund the Google Christmas party when you run ads. There’s more than enough of that happening already. So I just wanted to mention that because it’s been bugging me for a week or so!

Yeah, good point.

I wondered what you thought about that?

Well, when you say it, I thought, “Why didn’t I say that?” The reason I didn’t say that is because I thought it would be obvious, but maybe the obvious needs stating more than anything.

My motivation in running my own businesses, which I’ve now been doing since I finished my last employment in 1975, was that I didn’t want to be at the dictate of somebody else telling me what my schedule had to be, what I had to do, what I wasn’t allowed to do and all the rest of it. But beyond that, it was a form of self-expression.

A lot of us end up as accidental entrepreneurs, where we end up out of work for a time and go it alone, or in my case, I was a boneheaded entrepreneur because I just thought I could do it better myself! Then I got into business doing something that I thought I wanted to do, but actually it wasn’t really what I’m here to do. I’ve had to unpick that over several years. So business is the ultimate journey of self-discovery.

Yeah.

You might have to go on that journey, but once you’ve got that alignment in place with purpose and passion in service to others, marketing and sales will become a lot easier.

Well, the whole point about what we’re doing here is to save people the pain of finding things out the hard way! But anyway, yeah, good point. I’ll just say one more thing: the whole point is self-expression. When we were talking about sales, we were talking about meeting the real needs or desires of your potential customers or clients. So it goes without saying that you’ve got to have a clear idea of what you actually want to contribute.

You’ve got to really be in their corner.

Of course, you’ve also got to operate with the world as it is.

There’s this tension, isn’t there, between doing the work that you love and finding a commercial fit in the marketplace. You’re finding problems people are trying to solve and trying to marry that up with what you love doing. It requires a degree of art to marry those two things up, and it can take time. You might not get it right the first time.

Yeah.

Don’t Get Blindsided By Environment or Market Changes

Going back to my lessons from Hard Knocks, a key one I was going to mention is that you’ve got to have an eye on the world and how it changes around you. I was completely blindsided by that.

I had more or less accidental success for several years. That came from the fact that I was in a very unusual position. I had a fair degree of competence in both digital and analogue electronic design. I’d also had a background in computer programming during my time in various corporate environments.

I was developing software at that time, a torturous process on big mainframe computers. So I knew about computer programming, and then microprocessors came along. That was a natural development on the hardware side, given the digital electronic design I’d been working on. I also had a grasp of the principles of writing computer code as software.

There were very few people who had both electronics knowledge and software capabilities because they were just entirely different fields until the arrival of the microprocessor. In most environments, people would be doing either one or the other.

So things went brilliantly because there were plenty of problems that could be solved cost-effectively with this technology. There was very little in the way of finished products. Not even very much in the way of tools to help you with the design and implementation.

As well as having that mix of skills, I also had the ability to talk to people and listen to them and engage with them and figure out whether or not I could address their problems, which was again quite unusual for people who were tech boffins.

So with all of those things, it was an automatic success. I thought I’d discovered the keys to the kingdom. I was going to be set up for life. What I didn’t realise was that the world around me was evolving all the time. I only had about 10 years of things going that swimmingly well.

First of all, there was an economic downturn that wiped out the ability of many of my potential customers to buy what I was offering, no matter how much they wanted or needed it. Secondly, these skills that I had became commoditised. The third thing is that there were a lot of already off-the-shelf solutions to the things that would have had to be custom-built before.

There were already things that made it very easy. For instance, you could go a long way by setting up a spreadsheet and putting a few macros into it without needing the next level of expertise in software design. For all these reasons, I could no longer command the same premium.

Had I been aware of that, I could have easily pivoted to my strengths. I could probably have focused more on getting the deals together and subcontracted out the day-to-day implementation. But I didn’t realise that, and so I had a very rough few years and got really demoralised.

I’m getting huge echoes of what’s going on today in a lot of places. That would be like still coding websites by hand when you can get AI to do it. A lot of people have had the rug pulled from under them.

Keep an Eye on Macro Changes

There’s also the bigger situation in the world as a whole. Looking around today at current events it’s similar, but more extreme. We’ve still got the ceasefire being ignored in Israel while a frightful human tragedy unfolds in real time that we can actually see and stream - to the extent that we’ve got the stomach for it.

Do you want to talk about the documentary you mentioned before the call?

Yeah, it’s a dramatisation of the slaughter of an entire family that happened in Gaza. It’s called The Voice of Hind Rajab.

Hind Rajab was a six-year-old child who was left alive in the car which had been gunned down by the IDF. It had 350 bullet holes in it. A rescue centre had managed to contact the child after being contacted by a relative in Germany.

So they were speaking to her. Some of the movie is an actual live recording of this child going through the attempt to rescue her. I won’t go into any more than that about it. But it was a very harrowing experience for an hour and a half. But I was glad I went through it. Because even though I get the picture, I know how bleak it is, this brought it home to me on a completely different level.

It was an hour and a half for a set of events that in real life took four hours for the people on the ground to go through. So it was fairly close to real time, except that it was actually in reality about a third of the time span that it unfolded to play out. So that, I guess, underlines the tragedy, because you’re faced with that. You think, this is appalling. How can human beings do things like this? You realise that this is exactly what has happened tens of thousands of times over.

The people who are perpetrating it are either convinced they’re doing the right thing or completely oblivious to the suffering.

It’s a broken overarching narrative.

Yeah, which we’ve got, you know, the insanity breaking out, the obviously warlike threats towards Iran. I thought it would have been obvious after the events of last September that Iran is not going to take another attack lying down. The consequences for so many people are going to be so appalling.

This comes back to the fact that whatever we do in our own lives, we depend on a functioning planet. That functioning is really quite a fragile system. One of H.G. Wells’ novels was The War in the Air. In that, he wrote it around 1905. So it was a prophetic novel.

In that, at the end of the novel, the world economy had completely unravelled. All of the cities had collapsed. People were eking out a bare existence subsistence farming wherever they could.

Obviously, that was unduly pessimistic with the next two wars, because although there was a great deal of ruination, it didn’t actually destroy the whole of human society’s functioning. But there’s no guarantee that any escalating conflict now wouldn’t have that effect and send us back at least to the Middle Ages, if not the Stone Age.

You have to look, you have to look these things in the face though, don’t you? That’s the point that we’re trying to make.

You get nowhere by being an ostrich and sticking your head in ...