Businesses require expertise in a variety of disciplines to operate successfully, but typically one dominates the others.

Some businesses are run primarily from a financial perspective (by the numbers), some from a technical perspective (anyone see themselves?), some from an administrative perspective (systems and procedures) and some from a marketing perspective.

All of these disciplines are critically important for any growing business, but there is only one that can make the business extraordinarily successful. That’s marketing.

Why? Because if you can consistently and predictably get the kind of business you want, at the profits you need, you can deal with all the other issues. That’s what good marketing does that no other part of the business can.

In no way do I want to make it sound like getting your numbers in order, making sure you are meeting the highest technical standards or building the necessary processes and procedures are unimportant — they are important. Every restoration business has to operate well in these areas of management. If they don’t, they won’t survive.

But no matter how important these disciplines are to your company, no matter how well you do them, they are pretty much the same from restorer to restorer. They do nothing to help differentiate you from your competition. More to the point, the people you want to refer and hire you don’t much care about them.

What do they care about? That’s the first question that marketing answers and that’s why marketing has to be the primary focus of your business. It’s the marketing discipline that can uncover and create the kind of differences that deeply matter to the people you are trying to get to refer, hire and work with you.

When you operate a company from a marketing perspective you are fully immersed in your customer’s world, seeking to find and understand their pains, challenges, objectives, issues — anything that could motivate them to change the way they do things now. And the major change you are seeking to effect is using your company instead of their current suppliers!

When you focus on marketing, you focus on how to create and communicate difference, how to provide value added and value in advance, how to improve your sales process, how to discover metrics to evaluate your marketing efforts, how to better understand just what the heck marketing is.

With a relentless focus on the marketing aspect of your business you will be able to find the way to predictably drive the growth of your company and create opportunities instead of hoping that external forces go your way.

Tim Miller is the president of Business Development Associates, Inc., a marketing consulting firm that works exclusively in the cleaning and restoration industry. He can be reached at tim@gobda.com or (773)777-9956.