Why You Can't Find Time to Follow Up (It Isn't Time)

I just finished editing a networking video series with a business coach.

One of the topics was follow-up and somewhere in the edit, the coach and I landed in the same spot. When her clients can't find time to do something as vital as follow-up, the answer isn't to push harder, it's to simplify.

That stuck with me as I am finding myself more and more with this same exact problem, so I want to explore it this week. So I'll be honest, I'm not standing outside this one, I'm guilty of the same thing, so I'll be evaluating my own systems right alongside you.

Here's where I've landed, when a contractor tells me he can't find time to follow up, I used to believe him. But the more I think on it, something like follow-up isn't hard, it doesn't take long, and it is pretty much vital to build a business. If it's not happening, something else is in the way.

Let's face it, we (more specifically, I do) love too many good ideas. Think about your list, a referral program, a follow-up sequence, a neighbor postcard campaign, a plan to check in with every past client twice a year. Good ideas. Real ones. And how many of them are actually running right now or run consistently enough to actually work?

You said yes to five things, so only a few of them get your full attention.

You know this feeling. You start the referral program strong for two weeks, then a big job lands, and it slips. You mean to call your past clients, but the postcard idea is also sitting there half-done, and the neighbor campaign never got past the notebook. So you do a little of everything, and all of it dies slowly.

That is not a discipline problem; that is not a time problem, that is what happens when we refuse to choose. The contractor with ten ideas running poorly will always lose to the contractor with one idea running like it matters.

The hard part isn't finding another idea, you already have too many. The hard part is admitting most of them have to go.

How many marketing ideas do you have going right now that you'd honestly call "sort of" running?