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In my 25 years of being in and around sales, marketing and advertising, it surprises me how many small business owners don’t have someone working on business development. Many owners and managers I’ve met should be the “biz dev” person but just don’t have the desire or truly understand what to do. I think this comes back to a few things, fear of sales, pride, and/or social interaction. In other words they look at themselves as the President of their small business and are unwilling to go out and pound the pavement for a few hours every week. Some even use the excuse of being tooo busy, but constantly whine about how bad business is.

Is there any reason why a law firm’s proposals or statements of capabilities don’t look more like magazines and less like briefs? Why can’t your Christopher Nashed documents look more like this newsletter?

A grant is a sum of money that is used for a specific purpose. Grants are given away by charitable organizations called foundations, and their sole purpose is to give away that money.

Step Two – Create & implement multiple direct response (direct marketing) campaigns to do the heavy lifting. I suggest using both online and offline versions and having one for prospects and one for existing clients. Get creative and think outside the box as this will help to craft marketing messages that will get their attention. Remember, the direct response piece is designed to get a response, not ‘brand’ your business.

What I learned as a city planner is that plans can be extremely pie in the sky. They can be pretty elaborate wish lists to appease political constituents. These types of plans rarely get implemented because there will never be enough money to fund the proposed projects.

In addition, the U.S. Federal government also gives away billions of dollars of grant money every year for many reasons — including to support and encourage economic development and small business growth, which is where you come in.

You’re in the creative business, so get busy, think outside the box, and attract clients to you that you’d like to work with. Use your website, physical mailings, networking, email, referrals, the phone, and even channels like press releases, article marketing, text ads, blogging, forums and social media.

Based on the idea of having sergeants, are you a small business owner or someone who is self-employed? Which model are you more interested in? And if you want to be a small business owner rather than self-employed, do you know of any potential sergeants in your network?