My dad raises grass-fed beef cattle and I help him sell it, mainly by maintaining an online presence. For a while, I kept having the most ridiculous conversations with people who I assume were marketing students. I didn't want to be rude so I'd try to let them down gently but this one guy just kept insisting that with his magical marketing skills he could grow our business.
What he could not seem to comprehend is that we could not grow our business, at least not without significant time and monetary investment. Cows take two years from pregnancy to the size that you can sell. If we buy adult cows, our margins become razor thin or even negative. Even if we somehow could acquire some cows, our barn and hay fields are already near maximum capacity. Renting another field would be relatively easy, building a bigger barn not so much.
Cows are living animals, they aren't widgets that can be produced infinitely. Besides that, many businesses inherently cannot grow, because if they do they'll become something else. The delicious bakery down the street cannot produce much more than they do, if they began mass marketing and production they'd eventually be selling the equivalent of Twinkies. We grow grass-fed, organic beef, if we expanded how long would that last? Eventually we'd become the very factor farms that we hate. Some things can only ever be made on a small scale and they are usually the best things.
But also, what are they teaching them at marketing school and how is it so disconnected from reality?
People kept trying to do this to my petcare business. âLet us build you a website! Let us buy you some ads! Let us print you flyers and cards!â I have exactly as much business as I can handle, and Iâm happy with that. âBut if you expand you could hire other people to do the work and pay them less, and raise your prices and eventually you can work from home!! Let us help you!â Iâm doing this because I like playing fetch for a living, I like being outside moving around all day every day, I like spending time with each animal separately, I like being trusted by my clients with the keys and codes of their homes, it makes me feel proud. None of what youâre offering me is what I want. I donât want a dozen miserable contractors who I pay 40% of each visit, I donât want to try and wrangle and hire and vet people to do the part of my job that I like for me. That sounds bad. Thatâs a bad idea. And they looked at me like I was speaking an alien language. âBut⌠website!! SEO! Ad buys! Targeted coverage! Constant growth!!â I donât want any of that in my life it sounds fucking awful
One of the cruelties of capitalism is that if you want to do work youâre good at and love, a lot of the time your only option is to enter into some kind of business, and as soon as you do that, all the structural incentives of the system start trying to pull you away from the parts that youâre there for (i.e. the things that make life worth living) and towards various kinds of exploitation. Anyway, this also applies to writing and selling novels.
I agree with OP down to my bonessss. The best things are done with pasison by artisans, who deseve to be compensated respectfully, but aren't into their work from a place of greed or whatever misguided capitalist-brained bros think 'efficiency' is.
I'm plenty efficient, at getting things done the way i intend to.
i described to my econ-brain-rotten brother how i run my tattooing business and got the same responses as above.
It's like he absolutely didn't hear me when i explained the nuanced reasons i even started doing this work; I started tattooing because i was tired of the isolation of my (at that point) decade-long career in the animation industry. I was sick of my best work rotting on hard drives in shut down studios, of never getting to see anyone interacting with my art.
Moved to a big queer city, where my community got me started: queer tattooers patiently shared information and resources with me. early on, friends volunteered to let me experiment on their skin. Then they started offering to pay for materials, then more. Then they brought their friends to me...
I have a beautiful community of people who know me from the drag scene, from the poetry and writing scene, from the techno scene - and all these ppl come to me because they know me, met me, trust me, because they felt comfortable in my presence.
I only have like 1200 followers on my tattooing Instagram - which rly isn't a lot for a tattooer. But i stay busier than some ppl who have more followers - and im pretty sure that it's because 90% of the ppl following me have actually met me irl. I don't give out my info to just anyone. I have to have a nice interaction with them - and they with me - and i basically invite them to get to know my work, if i think they'd be interested, if they seemed excited about it.
I built my business out of love and care, and connection. I built it because i wanted more of these things in my life. I am making what i wanna see in the world.
Im deeply proud of what I've accomplished as a tattooer, exactly because i stuck to my own beliefs and built a business that is fully customized to me, what im excited about, my abiliy and disability levels, and my philosophical values. This part of my life is all mine, crafted and chiselled just how i want it.
I don't like getting up in the morning, so my sessions never start earlier than 1300. I have a hard time focusing alone + i wanna empower ppl who aren't artists to play with art + help ppl practice and engage their decision making and request making skills - so i design the tattoos with them sitting right next to me, being part of the art process. I don't like doing math and counting so i give my clients a sliding scale based on project complexity, and they get to choose how much they pay me. This also doubles as a way to give ppl more agency in the process of getting a tattoo. Etc etc it goes on and on - every aspect of the process is considered and phislophically and emotionally calibrated. I love what I've created and i love giving the gift of a well-crafted thing......
And after hearing me explain all that, my brother said my marketing wasn't efficient and my business isn't scalable...
I dunno, i think smtng abt capitalism legit gives ppl brain damage or smtng wtf
@asmadasthehatters you can't leave that in the comments, buddy
There's this assumption, in marketing and in business for the last 40 or 50 years, that growth should be unlimited.
That exists in the real world, and it's called cancer. It will kill whatever it's growing in.
