When you first start up your business, money is usually pretty tight. But what you do have on your side is time.

If you invest that time in marketing activity: calling your old contacts and grabbing a coffee with them, networking, maybe doing some presentations, then you'll start to get clients.

Do more of it and you'll get more clients.

But the rub is, working with clients takes time. Eventually you reach a point where you can't invest any more time in getting new clients because you're busy working with the ones you've got.

You end up stuck on a hamster wheel running faster and faster just to stay in the same place. 

Very many businesses hit this barrier. They can't grow because their only way of getting new clients is through their own activity and the time they spend doing marketing.

To break through that barrier you need to switch from solely using activity to win clients to using “assets”. Just like the way in the industrial revolution businesses switched from using human activity to make things to using machinery.

What's an asset in the marketing sense?

It's anything you can create and then use that will win you clients without needing to keep spending your time on.

Your reputation or brand for example. For most of us that means our status as an authority in our field. 

It could be automation. The email marketing I do needs me to set up the system in the first place and write each email. But they can be used again and again for thousands of subscribers without any extra activity from me.

One of the most powerful but frequently avoided assets is advertising.

We don't often think of advertising as an asset, but if you have a profitable advertising campaign you can run it again and again without it needing your own activity. And since it's profitable, it pays for itself and you can reinvest the profits in more advertising to grow fast.

These days, with advertising options on Google, Facebook and Linkedin we can zero in on our ideal clients far more reliably than ever before, making advertising online much less risky.

Yet many smaller businesses are still shy of advertising, preferring to spend time on “free” approaches to marketing rather than spending money. But in the end, it's lack of time that will kill your business growth. 

Tomorrow I'll talk about how you can overcome that fear of spending money on advertising.