(Photo by Dan Previte)

Are you tired of being on the never-ending business cycle of: create new marketing materials, network, negotiate, get some new clients, and repeat? Does it ever feel that if you take a break from the cycle, you’ll never get any new business? When was the last time you were comfortably able to take a vacation and let your business make money in your absence?

If you’re selling widgets directly to consumers (or giving talks, or writing books, or building furniture, etc.), you only make money when you sell a widget. No sale, no income, no break. While you might enjoy selling the widgets, it’s clear what your future is: spending as much time making the widget as you do selling the widgets. While it’s rewarding to work directly with the people who are buying your widgets, you’ll be stuck selling widgets forever (unless you can increase the profitability of your widget sales).

Since selling one widget is no harder than selling 100 widgets, focus on leveraging your business energies. Instead of writing books, think of become a publisher of books (selling a collection of books to stores to sell). Instead of making movies, become a movie house (selling movies to others). Let others sell your widgets (one-at-a-time). Focus on selling a large number of your widgets for others to sell.

By diversifying into a business-to-business (B2B) sales mentality instead of a B2C (business-to-consumer) mentality, you’ll be able to smooth out your marketing cycles, and more easily make strategic decisions that will improve your bottom line.