I’m a few months into conquering my Achilles’ heel: marketing (see more here). I never understood the big concepts in marketing. More importantly, I never tried to understand them. And I paid the price for it. Not understanding marketing and not hiring someone to fill that gap prevented me from growing my company past our $10 million peak. I’m confident that the company could have gone to over $100 million in annual revenue if I’d filled that gap.

I’ve been reading a lot about marketing over the last few months. Right now, I’m focusing on messaging and telling your company’s story. This means how you position what you’re selling to your customers. From lots of reading, it’s clear that the foundation of messaging (and all marketing, really) is the problem. You must be clear about what problem you’re solving.

This seems pretty straightforward, but it’s not. I went years in my last company without having a clear idea of the root problem we were solving for our customers. Lacking that, I also didn’t have a target customer profile (i.e., what people were experiencing this problem). Therefore, I didn’t know how big our market was (how many people exist that have the problem). Because I didn’t know the market size, I didn’t realize how big the opportunity was. Because I didn’t know how big the opportunity was, I hired based on where we were, not where we could go. There were more downstream implications (that weren’t good), but you get the idea.

Not having a clear idea of what problem I was solving was a major mistake. I was so focused on revenue that I missed the bigger picture. I couldn’t see the forest for the trees and missed out on building my company to over $100 million in revenue.

After learning more about the big marketing concepts, I now realize that not having a clear idea of the problem made it harder for me to understand marketing. It’s difficult to create an effective message when you don’t know how you’re creating value for customers and who those customers are.

Businesses exist to sell solutions to problems. If you’re not clear on the problem, selling (and marketing) your solution is many times more difficult.