This morning, I was cooking two eggs for breakfast. I dropped them into a pan that was not fully heated yet, which meant the eggs were taking a while to start cooking.
My instinct was to crank up the heat all the way, but that would have overheated the cast iron pan, causing the eggs to burn before the sunny-side-up yolks were sufficiently cooked.
And it got me thinking about marketing. I’m always thinking about marketing.
It reminded me that while yes, you can speed up results in the short term with tactics like advertising, the true and best way to do marketing is to take things one step at a time.
Making good eggs means letting the pan heat up to the right temperature, adding the oil when the pan is hot (not before), letting the oil heat slightly without burning it, and then finally, dropping in the eggs and waiting until they have reached the perfect level of doneness.
Doing good marketing means deeply understanding your ideal client or customer, delivering unique and distinct value in your business, doubling down on your strengths, making trade-offs with your resources, and building out the foundational systems that will support sustained results over time.
You can make fast eggs or you can make eggs the right way. To me, the fast way is to do things the slow way.
Do things in the right order, at a speed you can handle, and you’ll get magnificent, repeatable results you can enjoy over time.
Sometimes you will need to crank up the temperature to get an egg cooked quickly. But we can’t pretend that’s the right way to do it.
Slow is fast and fast is slow.