If you have so called “baggage” that gets in the way of the growth of your business, Episode #479 of the Marketing Mentor Podcast is for you.
I talked with Sarah Durham, a serial entrepreneur and executive coach, about self imposed obstacles to the growth of a creative business -- and how to remove them.
In Part 1 of this conversation, we unpacked some of the obstacles we both see so many creatives and entrepreneurs putting in their own way.
We talked about different kinds of growth for different types of people and goals. And I got Sarah’s insight into what we should be doing about AI at this point.
So listen here (and below) and learn…
And if you like what you hear, we’d love it if you write a review, subscribe here and sign up for Quick Tips from Marketing Mentor.
Read the complete transcript here.
#479 – Sarah Durham on Removing Obstacles to Growth
ilise benun
Hi there. This is ilise benun, your Marketing Mentor, and this is the podcast for you if, and only if, you are ready to leave the feast or famine syndrome behind, and I mean for good.
If you have so-called “baggage” that gets in the way of the growth of your creative business, this episode is for you. In Part One of my latest conversation with Sarah Durham, we unpacked the self-imposed obstacles that we both see so many creatives and entrepreneurs putting in their own way. We talked about different kinds of growth for different types of people and goals. And I got Sarah's insight into what we should be doing about AI at this point. So listen and learn.
All right, welcome back, Sarah Durham, to the podcast.
Sarah Durham
Hi, ilise. Happy to be back.
ilise benun
Yes, absolutely. Please introduce yourself for those who haven't heard you before.
Sarah Durham
Sure thing. My name is Sarah Durham. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I started my first business, which is a creative agency called Big Duck, back in the early '90s, and I grew and ran that business for 20-something years, sold it to my employees, and it became a work-owned cooperative back in 2021. Along the way, I also bought another agency, a digital agency, and turned it around and sold that to a larger agency. Today I work as an executive coach and I work with business leaders, a lot of women in small business, a lot of agency owners, to help them find their unique leadership voice.
ilise benun
Beautiful. We have a lot to talk about today, but I want to start with a question that you and I discussed recently, which is: what gets in the way of people, creatives especially, growing their business? And often I think that has to do with sales and marketing. So what is the problem with sales and marketing? Why do people have so much baggage around this? So what's the first thing you would say about that?
Sarah Durham
Yeah, I mean, I love this topic and I'm so excited to dig into it with you because you and I both share a real passion for sales and marketing. I think there are a lot of things that get in the way of people growing their business, and sales and marketing is definitely one of them. I don't think it's all of it.
Oftentimes people who start businesses, particularly creative businesses, do so because they love to do the work. They're creative people. They want to do the creative thing. And they kind of have this idea that if they just do good work, that will lead to getting and doing more good work. And that's true for many people. Sometimes, you get referrals, somebody sees your work and they recommend you to somebody else. But that's a business model that takes power away from you and puts it in the hands of unknown people who don't know you or don't know your business. So ...
ilise benun
Explain that a little bit. Why does that take the power away from you? Because I agree with you, but I'm not sure people see it that way.
Sarah Durham
I see it that way because I think waiting for the phone to ring when somebody says, “Hey, I saw the thing you did for so-and-so," is a very passive state to be in.
So when you build what I call “a marketing machine” and use tools—like I know, ilise, you have a lot of great tools for this—when you build a marketing platform, you are actually proactively reaching out to people and trying to get on their radar and trying to familiarize them with your work and hoping that they will show up and be in touch and call you when they have a project that's a good fit. And that's very empowering. But I think when we just wait for the phone to ring, we are in a very passive state, which isn't necessarily good for you or your business.
ilise benun
Agreed. And let's just name it, because a lot of people call it “word of mouth.” And often when I ask someone new how they market their business, they say, "Oh, word of mouth." And I always cringe because that's not a marketing tool. That's something, as you say, passive that either happens to you or doesn't.
Sarah Durham
Yeah, I totally agree. And word of mouth, I mean, let's face it, it's great. It's lovely when the phone rings out of the blue and you get a client, but it's not a marketing strategy, as you said. And it's a very unstable way to grow a business, because growing a business requires reaching into new markets, doing new work, reaching people who might not hear about you through word of mouth, and building a platform that is perhaps bigger than just you doing your own thing, you know, hoping the phone's going to ring.
ilise benun
I just want to insert one thing. I'm already channeling the listeners here because you said that you started an agency, Big Duck, which a lot of people have heard about, over the years. And you are going to talk about some of the things that you did, and I can imagine people listening will say or think to themselves, "Well, I don't want an agency. I don't need a big business like that. It's just me."
So how do you think about the different tools and whether they apply to an individual—because now you are, as you said, coaching independent people as well as entrepreneurs and leaders—the difference between what you do to market yourself as a solopreneur or even a small agency versus what a bigger agency might do?
Sarah Durham
Yeah. I don't think that it necessarily matters whether you want to work independently as a solopreneur or whether you want to grow a small team or a large team. I think a lot of the practices and disciplines are the same.
And my experience going from being a one-person shop, which I was for the first couple of years, to a 5-, 6-, 7-person shop to a 10- or 12-person shop, and then I think we grew to maybe 18 or 20 people at our largest, was that actually a lot of the practices that made the business successful were the same at all of those scales. The difference was really about how many people are in the room, how do you build a team, how do you manage, how do you build buy-in on your team?
So I think a lot of the best practices are just as applicable if you're working independently. And one of the nice things about working independently is that you have much more agility. You get to make a decision in the morning and start acting on it in the afternoon. You don't have to get anybody on your team to collaborate with you, which gives you really, I think, enormous power.
ilise benun
But also requires perhaps enormous discipline, right?
Sarah Durham
Absolutely. And I definitely see that with some of the solopreneurs that I coach, that they tend to ... almost everybody, probably everybody, has some aspects of doing the work or running their business that they love. And so they tend to lean into doing those things. And things that they're uncomfortable with—and when you work independently, sometimes you tend to dodge those things. I see that. I see that with a lot of the people I coach who work independently. They just kind of just don't want to look at that thing in the corner called “sales and marketing “or that thing in the corner called “technology” or whatever the thing is that they don't love.
ilise benun
Right. So let's talk a little bit about the baggage that gets in the way, the things that get in the way of growth. What do you see?
Sarah Durham
Well, I think if you're going to grow a business where you're going to work with larger and larger clients or on bigger and bigger projects, often you do really have to build a team. And that team doesn't have to be staff. It can be a network of contractors or freelancers. But a bigger client is going to potentially be nervous about working with a solopreneur, because if something happens to you, the project can be in jeopardy. So growing the scale of the project, growing the scale of the clients you work with, often goes hand in hand with working with more people on your side, directing more people.
So learning to collaborate with the team that you're growing yourself and learning to understand and collaborate with potentially increasingly larger projects and clients is also, I think, really an important skill to grow your business.
ilise benun
And I'm wondering, because there's so many different ways to grow and for people who really don't want a team, don't want to want to manage other people, is there a way to grow to charge more, to get these bigger clients?
And when you say “bigger,” are we talking about corporations or is there some other way to think about bigger? Also, there's a question within a question there, but is there a way to grow if you just want to stay “you”?
Sarah Durham
Yeah, so I think what you're really driving at the heart of is: what does growth really mean; what should it look like for you? And what does bigger mean and what should it look like for you?
And for years, I had this theory that the notion that your business should constantly be growing was ... I think I still believe this ... it's basically an outgrowth of living in a capitalist economy and, frankly, a very male-driven capitalist economy. That the notion that your business should be constantly growing and getting bigger is sort of like the economy should be growing and getting bigger.
As an entrepreneur, you may not ever want to grow, but there is a reality that your cost of living is going to change. So let's say you're working independently and you are able on the projects you bring in to generate $200,000 a year worth of revenue and you're pretty happy generating $200,000 a year worth of revenue. That's paying the bills, you like the work you're getting, that's great.
But over time, what's going to start to happen is that $200,000 worth of revenue is going to not go as far as it used to for you personally, and that the market around you may start to change. So what used to be a big project may start to be a smaller project. Or the sort of scale of what a client is willing to budget in a downturned economy or in a growth economy, a bullish economy, may be different.
So the market's fluctuating around you. Cost of living is changing around you. Whether you want to grow exponentially or not, I do think it's important to have kind of an agile or adaptive mindset to manage that.
But does bigger mean better? No, I definitely don't think it is. I mean, I have met and I currently coach some very small firms. Right now, I'm coaching an agency that's a two-person agency where they occasionally use freelancers and they are generating millions in revenue. And I've seen several agencies like that. So I don't think there's a corollary between the size of your team and your ability to be very successful from a revenue point of view.
ilise benun
And actually, because there's been so much media attention recently to AI, or as some people call it AIs, in the plural, and what it's going to do to creative services, writers, designers, et cetera, I'm curious if you think that approaching clients and offering strategy, or things that have to do with how you think, as opposed to what you do, is a positive or growth-oriented direction? Or is there some other way you're thinking about how to deal with AI?
Sarah Durham
You know, it's interesting, your connection of AI to what I would call “upstream strategy work.“ Certainly it has been the case in the creative services field for a long time that strategic work is usefully differentiating. You know, that it is more likely that your clients can hire other designers, other copywriters, other creative people to do more tactical work.
And when you get to know a particular market, a vertical, for instance in Big Duck's case we worked with nonprofits, the more you know the people you work with and their sector and you understand their needs, the more likely you are to be strategic and to be able to either sell strategy-only services—which might make you more competitive—or to link that strategic perspective into the creative work you're doing.
I'm not sure that I believe that moving upstream into strategic work increasingly, that you won't still be competing with AI. I think AI is going to be a real game changer, and we're obviously just at the very beginning of understanding what that's going to look like.
What I am encouraging my clients to do with AI is get in there, start using it, play around with it, really think about how your services might be affected, really think about how you can get out in front of it. What are the opportunities for you to leverage it proactively as opposed to kind of hiding in the corner and hoping it goes away?
ilise benun
Right. All right, so let's come back to growth then, because I think you were on a track and I have turned you in a slightly different direction, but I want to come back to the idea of unpacking the baggage that gets in the way of growth.
Sarah Durham
Yeah. So the piece we began with, that I think is also important to come back to, is the sales and marketing piece.
So we were talking just a minute ago about the idea of collaboration with your clients, collaboration with your team. A lot of what that involves is letting go and trusting. And what I see—this is certainly true in my own journey and what I see with a lot of the small businesses that I coach—is that as you start to hire some people or get a little bigger, oftentimes the person who founded the business really starts to spend more and more of their time just doing sales and marketing and less and less time doing whatever the product or service is that they originally created.
So I think that can be something that also gets in the way of growing. I think sometimes people don't want to stop doing “the thing” and they often have other associations to sales and marketing that are negative. They think that selling is icky; that it's sort of yucky or sleazy in some way. And I think they picture sales as something off-putting.
Some people, I think, have a real fear of putting themselves out there, of finding a way to use social media or write or speak that they can do in an authentic way, in a way that feels true to who they are.
Some people, I think, really resist the time investment that it takes to grow a business, and particularly the time it takes to build some sort of marketing machine.
And many people, I think, also really struggle with just this question of, "Is the work I'm doing unique enough, special enough? Should I really be tooting my own horn or am I somehow overstepping the mark if I put myself out there and share with vulnerability?"
ilise benun
And I'm curious what your own experience was. Did you feel marketing was yucky and slimy and salesy when it was just you? And if not, how did you see it?
Sarah Durham
I have always enjoyed marketing and sales. And I think I have enjoyed it for a couple of reasons. One reason is that I've always thought it's a really interesting challenge or question to say, "What is it that I am observing or thinking about? What are the patterns I'm noticing that could be useful to talk about or share?"
And so, when I started doing marketing work, I think it began with blogging for me, I would write blogs with this sort of idea of, "Hmm, I think this is ‘a thing.’ I'm going to put it out there and see what other people think."
And as I started to do that, I started to get really positive feedback, and people would tell me that the blog was helpful or tell me that they were using it. So putting something out there, getting feedback on it, really understanding if you've hit the mark or not, can be very validating.
I have to say that at some point in my business, probably I think I might have been about 15 years or 12 years, something like that, into Big Duck, I hired somebody, a very senior-level person who's really a marketing and sales genius, a woman named Farah Trump Peter. And once I had somebody else in the room who also liked to do sales and marketing, but had a very different style, very different voice, very different way of doing it, I started to see how fun and creative it could be, that you don't have to do it the way everybody else does it. You have to find your way to do it. And having a colleague to bounce ideas off of, to be inspired by, to watch and to learn from, was great.
ilise benun
And I would imagine that's part of the role you play with your clients now as you coach them as well.
Sarah Durham
Yes. I think that's the benefit of working with an executive coach like me or somebody like you who's really a specialist, is that you have somebody else in the room who you can share your fears and concerns with and bounce ideas off of, and that can definitely be helpful too.
ilise benun
Was there a best marketing tool or your favorite marketing tool that you ended up using?
Sarah Durham
Well, for me, hands down the ... well, I shouldn't say “hands down.” My two favorite tools, marketing tools, have always been public speaking, speaking at conferences. And actually, I really loved podcasting. I hosted the Big Duck podcast, which is called the Smart Communications Podcast, for many years. I had a lot of fun doing that. I also really like blogging.
The advice that I give to the folks I work with is really to start with the channels and tools that feel most logical and intuitive to you. Some people love to write, are great at writing really thoughtfully, feel really comfortable with that process. Some people hate it. Some people love to speak at conferences, get on stage, make videos. Some people hate it. I never want to see somebody using a channel or a tactic that they are uncomfortable with because it actually comes across when somebody doesn't love it.
ilise benun
And it doesn't work either, I find.
Sarah Durham
It doesn't work, yeah. It doesn't work. So you have to be you. And again, one of the advantages of building a team is that you can build a team where different people do different things based on what comes most comfortably to them.
ilise benun
Yeah. And your description about your first blogs and how people responded, I call that “listening to the market.” I love the idea. It's kind of a mind shift because you have to just put something out there, whether you're afraid to do that or not, and then wait to see if there's a response. What's the response? What do they ask? What do they say? Or, even as you said, the topics come out of you listening to the market and observing things and then articulating them and putting that out there, right?
Sarah Durham
Absolutely. Absolutely. And actually, I love the phrase. You know, the fact that you call it “listening to the market,” it suggests something else that we haven't talked about that I think is really important if you want your business to thrive, which is actually to pick a market; to pick a market in the first place.
I think that's another thing that gets in the way of growth, or maybe we could just say “progress,” for a lot of entrepreneurs, is that they haven't picked a market. And when you rely on word-of-mouth marketing, you do a project for this person, you hope the phone rings and it's somebody else, and you end up not able to be highly specialized and highly strategic because you're kind of just taking what comes along the road.
ilise benun
Right. And how did you pick the market? I mean, I think of it as the nonprofit market. Is that how you think about it, too, for Big Duck?
Sarah Durham
I definitely picked the nonprofit sector as a vertical to focus on. I made that decision in 1999 or 2000. I did so at a point where I had about five employees and we had been kind of a generalist firm doing a lot of work for a lot of different kinds of clients.
We had worked very deeply with trade magazines; we had a lot of trade magazine clients. We did some book publishing design, we did some identity design. And we had several nonprofit clients. And actually, my decision to specialize in the nonprofit sector came in part from a piece of advice that a consultant gave me. This was a man who is fairly widely known in the agency world who said to me, "Well, you could specialize in the nonprofit sector, but there's no money to be made there and you'll never really probably grow a very big business."
ilise benun
And that's what a lot of people believe.
Sarah Durham
Yeah. And I thought, "Well, first of all, I'm going to prove you wrong."
ilise benun
I love that.
Sarah Durham
I don't like ...
ilise benun
Really?!
Sarah Durham
Yeah. That felt shortsighted to me, I guess, is a better way to say it. And secondly, I didn't have aspirations to build a big business. I had aspirations to build a business that I loved and felt proud of. And doing work with the nonprofit sector felt to me like a really good reason to get up early in the morning, or stay at work late at night, or work on a Saturday night if I had, to because I was doing work that I believed in.
So it was kind of a no-brainer decision for me. I think I also benefited though because, at that time around 2000, there really were so few creatives focusing on working with nonprofits. The nonprofit sector is relatively young. It only really emerged in the 1950s or '60s. So to some extent, it was still the Wild West.
Now there are a lot more people working it than there were. But I feel really fortunate to have been in that first wave of people focusing on nonprofit communications. And that really gave me the ability to be kind of an innovator and a thought leader in an emerging sector.
ilise benun
Was it true that there was no money in nonprofit?
Sarah Durham
No. I'm sure that if I had wanted to be taking home millions of dollars a year, that wouldn't have been realistic, but I was able to pay myself a normalized salary over many years. The business was consistently profitable. I think running a business efficiently and effectively can be done really with any market. How big you get might be the question—whether the market will sustain huge growth, I don't know.
We made a point pretty early on to be pretty discerning about who we worked with and to really only work with nonprofits whose values aligned with mine and those of the folks I worked with at the time. We found there was a lot of work to be had, a lot of ability to charge what our clients felt were fair rates, and to run a business where we paid ourselves reasonable salaries and made a profit.
ilise benun
Beautiful. All right. I think we should put the bookmark here. I want to ask you two questions. One is, is there anything else you want to say on this topic of baggage and how to unpack it that you haven't said? And then I'm going to ask you for a baby step in case people want to move in the direction of anything we've said so far.
Sarah Durham
Yes. Okay. So there is one thing I want to say that we haven't talked about that I see coming up a lot with my clients who struggle with sales and marketing. And that is the idea that for every hour that you actually do the thing that your business does, so let's say you're a copywriter, for every hour you write, there are probably multiple hours that you are going to spend doing sales and marketing. I don't know exactly what that ratio looks like for you and in your business, but I found that for every hour or two we spent at my agency actually doing the work that people hired us to do, we spent multiple hours doing the marketing stuff, doing the sales stuff. And so I think it's important to note that and to encourage your listeners to really think about that ratio and ask the question: are they investing enough time in planting the seeds and watering those plants so that it can grow into the kind of beautiful sales and marketing tree that you aspire to have?
ilise benun
Love that metaphor. And maybe your baby step, I can direct you a little bit with it because I feel like one of the things that gets in the way of that ratio, which is very realistic, is some expectation, unrealistic expectation, of how long things take—whether it's a prospect to convert into a client, or to do the content marketing that has you putting out really good quality content. Is there a baby step we can take to shift the mindset in a more realistic direction?
Sarah Durham
Yeah, I think you're right that people often underestimate what that time commitment is going to look like.
The baby step that I recommend is to set aside a deliberate amount of time every week, ideally at the same time every week, to devote to sales and marketing.
So for instance, maybe if you're a morning person, you pick one morning a week, and from 8:00 a.m. or 9:00 a.m. until noon or 1:00 you do not do anything other than work on your marketing content or building your marketing machine. That would be a baby step—is just be very deliberate to carve out that time, protect that time, and make sure you invest it not only in doing the reactionary work like “listening to the market” as you call it or responding to a phone call or an inquiry you might get, but that you do proactive work—that you develop your own thought leadership, your own ideas, you put out your own content.
ilise benun
Beautiful. All right. I have a feeling there's going to be a Part Two to this podcast, Sarah, because I also want to talk with you about what happens when you've grown successfully and maybe you wanna to sell the business, God forbid.
Sarah Durham
Yes. I want to talk about that, too. And I also think it's important to link the two because actually the best time to think about selling the business is long before you actually want to sell the business. So as you're building your sales and marketing machine, as you're starting to grow your business into something that exists beyond you, that's actually a really valuable time to start to dream the dream of your future exit.
ilise benun
Awesome. All right. Tell people where they can find you online, Sarah.
Sarah Durham
Sure. I coach through a business called comptondurham.com, so that's C-O-M-P-T-O-N, like Compton, California. D-U-R-H-A-M, like Durham, North Carolina, .com.
ilise benun
Beautiful. All right. Thank you for sharing, and we will talk with you again very soon.
Sarah Durham
Thanks, ilise.
ilise benun
Ready to remove those obstacles? Great. Because if you want to build a thriving business on your own terms, the first step is to sign up for my Quick Tips at marketing-mentortips.com. Once you're on the site, you'll find lots more resources including my Simplest Marketing Plan. Enjoy, and I'll see you next time.