are you hunting or farming

Summary

small coaching businesses ask me how to get more clients. the honest answer is that there are two different jobs and you need to be doing both.

1. farming. blog posts, podcast, social, email list. you plant, water, wait. it compounds, but slowly. nothing you farm today pays a bill this month. it pays them in 18 months.

2. hunting. direct outreach, sales calls, paid ads, funnels with offers, talking to people one at a time. uncomfortable, immediate, and the only thing that puts money in this month.

most struggling solopreneurs farm exclusively because farming feels more like content creation and less like sales. then they wonder why they’re broke. if you don’t have clients now, hunt this week. farm on the side. flip the ratio later when the farm starts producing.

set small goals. $1K. $3K. $5K. don’t start with $50K because you’ll quit. learn to write copy, learn to sell, get the next client, repeat. try harder.

Transcript

introduction to the hunter vs. farmer approach in sales

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. Are you hunting or are you farming in your business right now? This is the Better Human Business Podcast. I’m Jerred Moon and let’s talk about hunting versus farming. So a few podcast episodes ago, episode 94, I answered part of a listener’s question from Hunter and that was when I was basically talking about going from part-time to full-time and how to do that.

And this is me answering the second part of that question, which is a little bit more in the weeds of how do you actually find clients and all this stuff. So specifically, I’m going to read what Hunter asked in the second part of his question and we can dive into it a little bit more today. So he was asking, how do I find clients, make sale, marketing are all topics of interest, especially as it relates to small coaching businesses.

deep dive into farming strategies and their long-term benefits

Social media is another topic. He said, I loathe it for the most part, but I did start an account for Instagram. He says, how important is social media for us to get business, how to gain followers, etc. This is the question. This is the golden question. The million-dollar question is if you just wanted to start a small coaching business or anything, and let’s say it’s primarily online, what do you do?

How do you go start making money? Because there’s a lot of blood in the water. It is a red ocean out there. Everyone who’s anyone is trying to start a business online right now. And what’s funny, when I first started this, I started as a blogger. I just started blogging. There was this funny commercial.

I can’t remember what it was advertising, and I couldn’t find it when I was trying to search. But Emily and I used to joke about it because it was all these clips of this guy who had all these bad ideas over and over again. And then he had some good idea, and that was the product or service that was being offered in this ad.

exploring hunting tactics and how they lead to immediate results

But all his bad ideas, he would say it would be something bad. And one of the ideas, he was like, I think I’m going to quit my job and start a blog. And then his wife looks at him, and that was one of his bad ideas. We always joke because that’s what I was trying to do. And it is really hard and really scary to just start a business, especially an online business, and try and make money from it.

And like I said, back then, it was a bad idea. People thought I was weird. I had friends and colleagues who were like, yeah, good luck with that. But now, all those people want to do something. They’re all starting some sort of side hustle, or they want to make money online. They want to do all this kind of stuff.

And so the point being is it’s way more common. And the good news is you don’t need to make millions and millions of dollars. What I always encourage everyone to do is just find out what you actually need to make from this and then reverse engineer it because it makes it feel so much more possible.

detailed discussion on tools and skills needed for effective hunting

And I always start with, like how I started, was I was never like, hey, this needs to be my full-time income when I first started because even that was too daunting for me mentally, especially doing it part-time when you still have a full-time job. And so I always set these small goals of like, okay, this is going to cover my mortgage payment or this is going to cover my cell phone bill.

I started really small. I think it was like cell phone bill. And then it was like, okay, can it cover a cell phone bill and my utilities of my house? And then like, can it cover the mortgage? I always had these small micro goals. So that’s what I recommend people do to like have the stair-stepping approach to making a business work.

But ultimately, how do you find clients and do all these things? Well, you have to really realize if you’re hunting or you’re farming. So everything that you’ve actually mentioned in the question is all farming. And I don’t think that people realize that. And so let’s start there. Like if you’re talking about social media, you don’t like Instagram but you’re doing Instagram, having a website, like all of these things, having a newsletter, just a newsletter that provides like valuable content, any of these kind of things, creating content of any kind, having a website, that’s all farming.

tips on balancing hunting and farming approaches for business growth

Now, what am I talking about? Well, what do farmers do? Farmers have to go plant seeds. They have to water the seeds. They have to wait. They’re going to lose some of the seeds. And then they have to hopefully yield a good crop at the end of the season. That’s what a farmer does. And it takes a lot of time.

And it takes a lot of strategy. And you have to be really good at it. Okay, so that is farming. And let’s just be clear about everything I said is farming. Having a website with a clear call to action, describing what you do, still farming. Not hunting. It is farming. Putting out social media content, two posts per day with the captions and interesting content, all that crap, farming.

That’s farming. Having a newsletter that people can sign up for and get valuable content and want to subscribe and farming. That’s all farming. All you’re doing is planting seeds. Same with like SEO stuff that I talk about doing all the time. Shooting after specific keywords, creating a lot of blog content.

closing thoughts on mastering sales and taking actionable steps forward

Again, all farming. That’s all farming. All you’re doing is planting seeds. And what I see people doing incorrectly is thinking that all this farming is going to lead to immediate income. And it will not, especially if you don’t learn to become a hunter. Okay, so now let’s talk about hunting a little bit.

Hunting is having a very directed action of what you want to do. So think about the hunter. Hunter can go out today and they can have a meal. Sometimes they don’t, right? Like it’s hard. It’s not that it’s easy, but they don’t have to wait months for the crop to grow and water every single day, like creating all your social media content.

They can go out into the forest today with a gun and come back with an animal, right? And so those are the skills that everyone is neglecting are those hunting skills. What is hunting? Well, really, I’d break it down to two different ways to do this. One specific to online business. And then another just in general for anybody who wants to make money now faster.

So the first one is going to be a funnel, right? Everyone talks about a funnel, but a funnel is different than a website because it is, it’s more in line with hunting. So if you had an ad that people click on, and then in they click to this, they get to a funnel. And the only option they can take in the funnel is to take the action you want them to take, or they don’t take the action that you want them to take.

And it’s very hard because you are actually hunting. You have to, if you’re doing this online, you have to set the right ads. You have to get good at ad copy. You have to get your, the right message in front of the right people. Then they need to take action. And then you have to have a compelling enough offer for them to buy.

So that’s online business. So what is something I’m going to recommend you do other than all the farming that you need to be doing? You need to have a really solid funnel. That’s very clear. That gets people to take action. There’s no ambiguity about what you do. You are trying to make money. People need to know that.

And then you just need to get your message in front of the right people. That’s the first way to go hunt. It’s specific to online business. Another way to hunt is to get good at selling. You can do this basically anywhere. A good book is to sell as human. If you want to start just somewhere with sales, but you need to be reading books on how to sell.

You need to be reading books on how to communicate, how to have uncomfortable conversations, how to negotiate all of these things. You need to learn how to sell. And it is not an easy thing to do. And it is uncomfortable. And the reason people don’t want to do this part of business, the hunting part, is because it’s very hard and very uncomfortable.

Like farming seems like a lot more fun. It’s like, I just sit here. I plant my seeds. I water. Like, yeah, it’s difficult, but hopefully somebody will want to come. And like, hopefully this seed sprouts into something, but maybe it won’t. If that’s all you do, you’re not going to make a lot of money online.

You have to learn how to hunt. And so these are the more uncomfortable skills. You have to get good at selling. You have to get good at asking for money. You have to get good at delivering your offer. So what skills do you need to get good at? Well, specifically, if you want to online business and everything else, you need to get good at writing copy.

So go learn everything you can about writing good copy. This is for sales pages. This is for advertising. You need to learn how to create good creative. So creative are like the pictures, ads, videos that go into like advertising. You need to get good at those things. You need to get good at sales in general, like actually selling to other people, whether that’s over the phone.

To be honest, I think that’s a lot easier than trying to sell something on a web page. I think having a face-to-face conversation or at least a phone conversation or a Zoom conversation, it’s so much easier to sell something to somebody because if you’re decent at having conversations, you can read the other person.

You can learn to sell to them and you can make the direct offer. So that’s another thing you need to learn how to sell and you need to learn how to develop these skills. So that is my big takeaway. One, know the difference between hunting and farming. And if you’re listening to this, not just you, Hunter, but anyone out there and you realize, holy crap, all I’ve been doing is farming.

Yeah, it’s time for you to do some hunting because what you can also do in the farming is if you’re developing these relationships, you’re developing goodwill. At some point, you have to just straight up ask people, hey, will you go buy my thing? Whether that’s a direct one-on-one conversation, a phone conversation, whether that’s an email blast or an Instagram post or whatever, or an Instagram DM strategy, something like that, because an Instagram post saying, hey, go buy my stuff, like we’ll have about a less than 1% chance of working.

So anyway, you have to go out there and you have to do the hunting. And so getting good at all those skills, you could do this on YouTube for free. You could read books on it, but just know that these are the areas you need to go study and get better at if you want to make money online. And this is where it gets really frustrating because, again, so many people just want to farm because they want to, they see what the big influencers are doing.

And I’ve talked about this, like if you’re someone like Jocko Willink and you have millions of followers on Instagram, sure, you can just post that you have a clothing company now and you have a thousand customers overnight, no sweat. But we aren’t those people. Anyone listening to this, you’re not that person.

So you have to go do the things that Jocko’s never really had to do, which is having sales conversations, which is being a little bit more uncomfortable on the business side because you don’t have the giant following that just does whatever the hell you wanted them to. And so until you get to that point, you have to become a really good hunter.

Keep farming, but also go out there and learn to be a really good hunter. If you don’t want to, well, you’re just going to have to try harder.