My Philosophy - Fundamentals
“Being beautiful on the way to the answer is the answer.”
– Martin Prechtel
If you’re reading this then you’re likely a coach (or healer or other service provider) who is struggling to get enough clients and you can’t figure out why it’s so hard (or why marketing seems to feel so terrible). Most coaches hardly make any money at all.
So I thought I’d write this page to introduce you to My Philosophy.
I think what you’ll find here is unique.
This has all been crafted over the past decades because I couldn’t find it anywhere else. One of the best pieces of praise came after a workshop in Edinburgh where a fellow said to me, “So many of the workshops I go to are the same material but what you’re offering here seems to be your own.”
Why Ethical Marketing Feels Hard: The Diagnosis, My Take On What’s Happening
My core take on the reason so many people struggle to get enough clients is this: they don’t have the core fundamentals in place deeply enough.
You are likely good at what you do. You have the fundamentals of coaching or healing in place. But you’re not good at the business side. And those are the fundamentals you need to make the business side work.
I’ve been learning about marketing since 1994 and, after all those years, I’ve boiled things down to this: there are seven fundamentals that need to be handled in order to get clients. I call them the Seven Fundamentals of Ethical Marketing.
In brief, here’s the situation. Most clients I come across are:
- SPACE: Too overwhelmed to focus and so never get traction.
- ETHICS: Resistant to any sales and marketing tactics because we don’t want to be or be seen as manipulative and so we do nothing.
- NICHING: Fearful of excluding potential clients and so try to be everything to everyone, yet appeal to no one.
- POINT OF VIEW: Hesitant to speak their full truth openly and struggle to articulate their perspective clearly and so don’t come across as compelling or credible.
- BUSINESS MODEL: Struggling with unsustainable strategies that leave us unprofitable and burned out.
- HUB MARKETING: Missing supportive communities and partnerships and so are left with trying to sell to strangers who don’t know or trust us.
- SHARING: Feeling stuck or uncomfortable being visible or picking strategies that don’t feel right for us and so avoid marketing at all.
I go over all seven and why they matter in this ten minute video:
The Deeper Reasons We Struggle With The Seven Fundamentals?
It might be worthy and merciful to pause and consider why this is all so hard for us (beyond that we’ve simply never been taught how to market our work): We grow up in a modern society that makes it very hard to have any of these in place.
- SPACE: We’re kept busy by an insane, global, cartel capitalistic system that squeezes us harder and harder every year and a centuries old war on the yin and rest which convinces us we’re only worthy when busy and productive. We’ve got noise pollution, sound pollution, light pollution, that devilish little black mirror called a “smart” phone and jangled nervous systems. In an age of endless growth, we’re no good at the honest grief of having to say ‘no’ to beautiful opportunities and so carry grievance at our limits instead. We have so little space (physically, mentally or emotionally) in our lives anymore. I speak more about this here.
- ETHICS: Modern society is based on converting living things into dead things: mountains into pop cans, trees into paper and people into numbers. It’s a society that sees the world as full of resources not relatives and understands ‘belonging’ as possession and not kinship. The parenting, schooling and employment we were immersed in were likely steeped in coercion and manip\ulations galore (intended or not) where consent was the first casualty. We are lied to and gaslit constantly by the mainstream media and the narcissists and psychopaths in positions of power. Coercion and seduction have become entirely normalized and modern sales and marketing training is in deep cahoots with it as one of its main vectors. As a result of that, people mistrust sales people and marketers who seem hellbent on making things happen rather than making life happy (which is rough on you when you try to sell or market).
- NICHING: Many of us inherited a sort of people pleasing mechanism which has us want to be everything to everybody and makes saying ‘no’ almost impossible and choosing a niche deeply unlikely.
- POINT OF VIEW: We are punished for speaking our mind and have seen, on social media and in our local communities, the immediate consequences of being willing to tell the truth. We have so many things we don’t share for fear of being judged or cancelled.
- BUSINESS MODEL: Your business model is how money enters and stays in your business. It’s comprised of all your systems and offers. And all of that takes craftsmanship and we were raised in an era of mass produced goods where craftsmanship is all but forgotten. We’ve forgotten how and why to build things that last. And, if you’re building a business and not a hobby, then this level of skillfulness in craft is called for.
- HUB MARKETING: We have been taught from a young age to be independent or codependent but neither of those set us up to build our businesses with partnerships or community.
- SHARING: And most of us have such a deep fear of being seen, carry such self doubt (“who am I to say such things?”) and are so uneducated in the various tactics available for sharing our work, such luddites with technology and so deeply resistant to social media that we don’t even know where to begin with sharing our work with the wider world.
Where My Approach To Marketing Came From:
My name is Tad Hargrave, and since 1994, I’ve been weaving together strands of ethical marketing, Waldorf School education, a history in the performing arts, local culture work, anti-globalization activism, an interest in my ancestral, traditional cultures, community building and supporting local economies into this work of helping people create profitable businesses that are ethically grown while restoring the beauty of the marketplace.
This approach to marketing was formed over the past three decades of my life of working with thousands of entrepreneurs one on one, at workshops and in my membership to grow their businesses, noticing what worked and what didn’t. That’s the primary source of most of my material.
But I also weave together threads from people like:
- Derrick Jensen who helped me see the insanity of modern civilization.
- Jay Abraham from whom I learned marketing basics.
- Robert Middleston was one of the original people I learned from in this field.
- Seth Godin who helped me understand the importance of permission and being unique.
- Ari Galper who helped me see the importance of removing pressure from sales interactions by focusing on the truth of whether or not it’s a fit vs. having a hidden agenda to get the sale.
- Byron Katie helped me find some semblance of sanity and clear seeing in the manias that destroy us as entrepreneurs and humans out here hustling to provide for ourselves and our families.
- Stephen Jenkinson and Martin Prechtel from whom I learned about the importance of cultivating a more deeply cultured, courteous and beautiful manner of approach to life. Increasingly, I look at marketing through a cultural lens and find my most important teachers to be elders from the indigenous world, folk tales from my ancestral homelands and the beauty of the natural world.
And others you can find here.
What’s Likely: The Prognosis – Two Paths: Struggle or Flow
The Worst Case: Struggle
Sadly, these things rarely improve over time without conscious effort.
It usually gets worse.
Over the past decades, I’ve seen what happens when people don’t handle the fundamentals. They don’t last long or, worse, they do and their business grinds them down. They say they’ve had twenty years in business but they’ve actually just had the first year twenty times over. They don’t make progress. They’re just increasingly tired and bitter every year with the same amount of work but less give a shit.
So much time gets wasted working on the tactics because the core strategy is off without solid foundations in place. They jump from one shiny object to another, get scammed by marketing coaches promising outrageous results and it feels like they’re flushing their time and money down the toilet.
The coaches suggest tactics that feel gross, awful or unethical, slimy and, when they resist doing them they’re told, overtly or covertly, that this must be a ‘limiting belief’ and require some deep ‘inner work’ (for which they, conveniently, have a $10,000 coaching package which contains enough Novocain for your soul to last a lifetime).
But, as soon as Facebook realized you have your own business, it started targeting ads to you, didn’t it? And they disagreed with each other.
You need a blog! No! You need Substack! What? Forget that! Build a membership! Says who? Memberships are for chumps. You need your own app! An app? If you’re an idiot. You need a high ticket program you can sell. A high end program? Forget that, start with writing a book. Bah! Books? Who even reads anymore?! Get yourself booked on podcasts. Etc.
It’s dizzying.
I’ve known so many entrepreneurs who have tried all of those generic templates and strategies but they always feel like they’re wearing an ill-fitted borrowed suit vs. a tailored suit.
It’s not that those tactics don’t work. I think they all can.
It’s that, without having these seven fundamentals in place, they don’t have a chance to work. It’s like building a house on shaky foundations with rotten wood.
Without these core elements in place, so many entrepreneurs feel like they are flailing and throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what will stick but, because they don’t have the fundamentals right, almost nothing does. It’s incredibly discouraging. It’s like living in a shack that’s leaking and just when you fix one leak another one appears.
Note: We live in an unethical age of shallow flatness, ugliness and mass-produced everything. This is all likely to get much worse with the increasing reliance on AI which is a child of the times. Relying on AI for the wrong things will flatten your uniqueness, and make your creativity muscles flaccid. The mania of efficiency is the enemy of depth while a devotion to ethics, effectiveness and beauty is both its midwife and worthy adversary which deepens the capacity of depth to be itself.
The Best Case: Flow
When people start to handle these seven things, when the fundamentals fall into place, magic happens.
When you dig deep enough into your business you hit the springs, and the fresh water of the never-before-seen beauty that you are, has a chance to bubble up and refresh the parched and impoverished place you live.
When your roots dig deep enough your business has a chance to burst into the original and devastating beauty that catches the eyes of all those meant to find it who didn’t know they were looking for it until they saw it.
When you deepen into the craft of cooking the aroma of the meal you make wafts into the marketplace and reminds the starving people of their hunger for real food.
Marketing starts to feel good. Actually, genuinely, surprisingly, delightfully good.
You realize that it wasn’t so much that you had limiting beliefs about marketing but that you had a conscience and that all of your resistances to the aggressive and unethical tactics came from the best part of you not the worst.
Marketing gets easy. Shockingly easy. Simple.
Clients show up ready to spend money and without needing to convince them to buy.
It gets easy to introduce yourself at events and describe what you do and people say, “Oh my god! That’s me! I need that!”
And when they ask you how you do your work, you have ways to express it where they say, “Wow. That makes so much sense.”
You have offers that are so well crafted that they get a “Shut up and take my money!” response. Your business model is simple, satisfying, sustainable and safe for people to check out from a distance.
People trust you more and more because you’re endorsed by people you trust and you’ve found the tactics to share your work that feel deeply good to you.
People begin to email you and say, “I read your website and I knew you were the one.”
And, if enough of us do this we begin to restore the beauty of the marketplace in our small, humble little corners of the world so that the small particularities of our shared lives can feed the grand magnificence we are a part of.
What’s Needed: The Prescription – Seven Practical Elements for Ethical Success
Depth.
Depth is the antidote to desperation.
If you want the tree of your business to grow tall and wide enough it needs deep roots. The home of your business needs strong and deep foundations. Most people don’t go deep enough.
But to get nuts and bolts about it: Whether or not you ever work with us here at Marketing for Hippies, here’s what we most recommend:
Below are what we see as the key elements you want to get in place early on in this year to make progress.
ELEMENT #1: Make it a priority. If you want to make more money and grow your business, you have to make it a higher priority than it is. You need to be willing to start saying ‘no’ to some things in order to say ‘yes’ to your business. You need to decide if this is going to be a hobby for you or a sustainable business. As Monica Paredes puts it: devotion. This is what any kind of craft and beauty making asks of us: a period of devotion.
ELEMENT #2: Get some education on these fundamentals. In your professional education (as a coach, healer, crafter or farmer) you learned the tools of your trade. You didn’t learn about marketing. You didn’t learn about any of the seven fundamentals above as they relate to your business. There’s so much available in books, podcasts and free content online but I suggest finding something that is organized, structured and coherent. You don’t need more content but you do need context. You don’t need more free ideas but you likely could use some frameworks.
ELEMENT #3: Get professional support, structure, guidance and feedback: Do not try to do this alone. Most of us wait too long to get the kind of help we need. What most of us need is a qualified eye on our work to tell us if it’s good enough to continue or if we need to keep working at it. We need someone who can ask us the right questions and who can create a structured approach for us so we’re not wandering aimlessly without direction.
ELEMENT #4: Get yourself a marketing journal: This one sounds too simple. Have a notebook or a note taking app where you can keep track of your business and marketing ideas. So many of us have brilliant ideas that we forget and never implement.
ELEMENT #5: Develop a regular marketing practice: You might have a regular yoga or meditation practice. It’s the slow and steady work over time that develops you. So consider setting aside one hour a week to learn about marketing and work on your business not just in it. What’s the easiest way to avoid meditation? Read books about meditation. Same with marketing.
ELEMENT #6: Find others: Build yourself a wee posse or pod of fellow entrepreneurs who are drawn to the same kind of ethical marketing approaches you are. You are too close to your own business to see it clearly. It’s incredibly helpful (and good for our morale) to share this journey with others.
ELEMENT #7: Give yourself a year. These things take time. If it’s a big priority for you, in a single day, you can begin to see the most obvious gaps in your current approach. You’ll see which fundamentals are missing. That’s the easy part. In the first three months, you might feel discouraged and overwhelmed with how much there is to do and, worse, redo. In nine months, you’ll start to ‘get it’. Things start to click. The pieces begin to come together in ways that surprise you. In one year, you have the basics in place. Marketing will feel good and you’ll see a genuinely workable path ahead of you. If you give it three years? Your business is transformed.
If you do those things above, you may be absolutely amazed at what happens for you over the next year.
If you do those things, you can begin to live out this poem, Cargo, by Greg Kimura:
You enter life a ship laden with meaning, purpose and gifts
sent to be delivered to a hungry world.
And as much as the world needs your cargo,
you need to give it away.
Everything depends on this.
But the world forgets its needs,
and you forget your mission,
and the ancestral maps used to guide you
have become faded scrawls on the parchment of dead Pharaohs.
The cargo weighs you heavy the longer it is held
and spoilage becomes a risk.
The ship sputters from port to port and at each you ask:
“Is this the way?”
But the way cannot be found without knowing the cargo,
and the cargo cannot be known without recognizing there is a way,
and it is simply this:
You have gifts.
The world needs your gifts.
You must deliver them.
The world may not know it is starving,
but the hungry know,
and they will find you
when you discover your cargo
and start to give it away.
If this all makes sense to you, you feel like you’re a fit and you resonate with our values, vision and mission and approach here, we recommend you check out our Ethical Marketing Starter Kit.
In it, you’ll learn a bit more about me and my story, a deeper explanation of the Seven Fundamentals of Ethical Marketing (via pre-recorded webinar, a workbook and a carefully crafted series of emails each with a five-minute exercise to help you take some baby steps), and a one-time 50% off code you can use on most of the products we sell.
In it, you’ll learn how your marketing can be ethical, effective and beautiful.
Ready to Market Ethically and Successfully?
Sign up to receive your Ethical Marketing Starter Kit—practical exercises, deep insights, and a one time 50% discount for the products of your choice.
The antidote to desperation is not to get another diploma, to get discouraged or distracted or to sell out and become deceptive.
It’s to go deeper.
Stay human,
Tad
PS If you’re not even sure what you want to create or what you’re doing with your life yet, you’re not quite ready for this work. For more help in sorting out what you want, I recommend checking out the following colleagues: