Booked for Two Years.

"I'm booked for two years in advance; why do I need to spend money on branding?".

What happens if you don't spend money on your marketing and scaling your brand?

This is a question that comes up in conversation more often than not, and it's a valid one. If you have a successful business. People want your services. Ask for you specifically. Why would you invest in branding and systems?

The answer is Growth, to use another word, scale.

Now, it's important to point out that everyone has different ideas of success, and everyone has different aspirations in life. For some, having a stable set of clients to work for and a healthy income is all they need to be happy, and that's good. There's no problem with that.

But for some people, Growth is their game and the primary motivator to get out of bed in the morning. For that person - expansion is everything. So, how does strategy help with that?

Well, you can only get so far doing all the work yourself. Burning through the hours of the day and night. Without sitting down and working out the plan for scaling. The brand identity. The processes. The product roadmap. Things will bottleneck:

• Your business won't scale beyond just you.

• You won't achieve brand consistency.

• You'll spend your time fixing other people's mistakes.

That's where investing in your brand and marketing infrastructure is worthwhile.

There are three things to do in the process of addressing these issues and growing.

1. Work on the fundamentals of your brand:

Conduct an audit of your Story, Positioning, Spend, Channels, Audience, Design, etc. See where you're at with these and where you want to take them.

2. Build a roadmap:

Plot a course of where you want to get to and what needs to be done along the way. For example, expanding operations across two states might mean finding more suppliers or setting up a warehouse. Those are steps along the way to developing your operations.

3. Look at your content systems:

Your content system comprises your pool of ideas (inputs), outputs (the posts you publish), and the process of creating those outputs. Covering who is on your team using Canva, Grammarly, or ChatGPT.

Mapping this out means you'll have a critical infrastructure that will support the scaling of your brand.

Obviously, a short post isn't going to cover all of the details of what one needs to do to scale their brand. But perhaps this serves as a prompt for you and those helping - a start to the conversation.

To learn more about your brand strategy, I wrote this post and made a video on the topic.

To answer my own prompt: why invest in a brand when you're booked two years ahead? Because with that kind of momentum, you're a way of doing things is working - it's helping people - so why not share your service with even more people.