Are you an asset builder or a service provider?
(This was first published in my newsletter, in October 2019. Sign up now to get this content when it’s fresh.)
Here's a common situation: an organisation has a team of smart, hard-working people. They're great at what they do, but they can't do their best work because they're locked in a delivery cycle that constantly has to prioritise the urgent over the important.
You'll find these teams frantically working on stuff like campaigns or reactive one-off projects. Often both. They're constantly rushing to meet deadlines that feel impossible. They're always bogged down in approval processes.
But somehow, they meet their deadlines and get their work out the door. They catch their breath, and immediately move on to the next thing. And they do it all over again, like hamsters in wheels.
And when they do, all that work they sweated over just kind of disappears, never to be seen or heard from again.
I've usually seen this in marketing teams, but that's just because I work in marketing. It can happen to basically any team; nobody's immune.
Assets vs services
I thought of this when I was reading Dan Kennedy's 1990 book The Ultimate Sales Letter. This is a hugely influential book in the copywriting space, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to do a better job of writing persuasively.
Kennedy reportedly charges into the six figures, and sometimes seven, for a single sales letter. Here's how he explains these astronomical fees:
I and astute clients don't think of my work as work, as a service rendered, but as the development of a very valuable asset, akin to a building in which a factory or store operates, equipment that produces revenue, or — a good analogy — a salesman out on the hustings drumming up business, in which a salary, bonuses, health care, company car, and expense account totalling more than my fee each year must be invested.
When I read that quote, I thought of the teams I mentioned above. When you get locked in a delivery cycle, you're constantly rendering services. Services disappear the minute the provider puts down his or her tools. Assets keep working for you, long after you've finished developing them.
How do you get there from here?
This is a matter of changing your thinking around how you deliver projects. Rather than think about how you'll meet a specific deadline for a specific project, think about how you can meet that deadline while also creating something that adds value to your organisation this week, next week and every subsequent week.
Often, this doesn't actually take much additional work! It's just a matter of getting in a room, and thinking about how you can re-use and repurpose the content you're already creating.
(By the way, I wrote about repurposing on my blog early last year. Check it out.)
And even if it does take more work, you'll still probably come out ahead. If you use twice as much time and energy turning a service into an asset, you only need to use it 3 times to end up better off. That's really not that much.
A few examples
Rather than write a quick promo email in an afternoon for a panicking sales manager, you could write a whole series of emails that educate your leads and push them towards buying your product. Then, you set this series up to automatically go out to new leads as they come in, forever.
Rather than just publish a bunch of disconnected blogposts, you could deliberately write a bunch of related blogposts. Then, you could stitch those posts together into a longer eBook of 10-12 pages. Then, you could use that eBook as a tool to get more leads, and run social media ads driving traffic to it forever. Now, the content from those blogs is working for you every day, rather than just going on your website once, then rotting.
Rather than just bang out a landing page, you could undertake some deep customer research, with interviews, surveys and data analysis. This gives you a much better landing page for your campaign - along with a repository of insights you can use for future campaigns.
So which one are you doing? Are you stuck on the hamster wheel, creating one-off bits of content that get used once, then disappear? Or are you creating ongoing assets? Or somewhere in between? Drop me a line and let me know.
Photo by Blake Wisz on Unsplash