The Myth of Doing It All
Clarity comes as the result of working within your limitations and maximizing what’s available to you.
1-minute read
This is for all the small, scrappy teams and the under-resourced “teams of one”.
The myth of doing it all:
Companies think they need to be doing it all.
All the marketing strategies.
All the sales techniques.
All the brand plays.
All the content mediums.
On all the platforms.
All of it.
The symptom of this belief: I don’t know what to do so let’s do everything.
The result: half-assed everything.
A smarter approach: I don’t know what to do so let’s run a structured experiment around one thing.
The result: Focus.
You either get really good at that one thing or you prove that it doesn’t work before moving on to the next. Either way, all of your attention is focused. No shiny objects. No distractions.
Here’s a real example: (You can apply this approach to marketing, recruiting, sales, whatever…)
At Before You Apply I'm our GTM team. This means that (as of now), I’m a team of one that handles sales, marketing, brand, and content.
We philosophically don't believe in cold outbound of any kind. And I have zero clue about SEO or running paid ads so we don't do that either.
As a result, I've had to learn organic social (LinkedIn) and scrappy content creation from the ground up. All by simply doing it—a lot, over a long period of time. (3 years to be exact.)
Furthermore, all of our new hires have been on the product and editorial sides of the business. (We haven’t hired on the GTM side.) So organic growth mechanisms have continued to be where we invest our efforts. That focus and investment continue to pay off.
To be honest, we have no idea what we're missing out on because we haven’t even dipped our toes in anything else. There’s no FOMO or anxiety to be doing more.
Key learning: Clarity comes as the result of working within our limitations and maximizing what’s available to us. Because of this focus, we can purposefully build the next layer and not waste money, time, and energy on things and people that we don't need.
P.S. A useful marketing exercise is to use the prompt: “No cold outbound. Now what?” You’ll be amazed at how creative you get by removing this crutch.