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The hardest part about creating a marketing position that’s right for your ideal customers is that it’s necessarily wrong for your non-ideal customers.

At the age of 49, only a few years before being elevated to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln considered himself a flat failure. And on that evening in 1858, after watching the election results come in at the telegraph office, he walked home defeated.

There’s a tendency for consultants, especially new ones, to take themselves pretty seriously. I certainly did. Knowing, as Benjamin Franklin once said, that “grave men are taken ... as wise men,” I fell into the trap of trying to be overly serious in my conversations, marketing, and day-to-day work.

It’s hard to see our own business objectively. It’s hard because we’re so close to it. We can’t see much of ourselves without a mirror, and we can’t always see our own business from the inside, either.

A large part of my day-to-day work is applying marketing strategy to help people make a successful transition into consulting. And some of the most common struggles I help them work through are variations on, “My industry is so price-sensitive.”

I don’t know about you, but for me, August has always been the month that made me suddenly aware that the year is going to end at some point.

You’ve probably tried a lot of things to market your business over the years. And you may have noticed that the tough part isn’t coming up with new ideas to try out. The tough part is stopping the stuff that isn’t working.