When you have to tighten your belt at home, one line in the budget that always seems to have a little bit of give to it is your grocery bill. After all, you can eat a little less and save some cash, right? Even if you are starving, you can go even a few days without food (or like, 100 years, like that guy in India, allegedly). But eventually, it catches up to you, and your body begins to break down. I’m currently watching a series on Netflix called Out of The Wild: The Alaska Experiment, where 9 people have to hike through Alaska alone to hunt and find their own food. One guy in the group, a police officer, is a bigger guy (muscle-wise) and needs more calories to burn throughout the trip. On 10 days, he’s only eaten a couple thousand calories, instead of the 3-4,000 calories a DAY he was eating before.

In the episode I watched last night, he wound up fainting while everybody was resting in a cabin. He fell on top of one of the female members of the group and everybody had to pick him up. He had no idea what happened. His body was trying to tell him that he needed to eat more.

When business is slow, there are a lot of easy scapegoats. Right now, that scapegoat is the economy. Everyone wants to use the economy as the reason why their business is down. But marketing your business is like feeding your body: you can go a little while without doing it, but eventually it’s going to catch up with you. Your business will start to break down. The companies that succeed are the ones that start cutting costs elsewhere and pushing all that money into marketing.

Let me simplify this for you: when business is down, what do you need most? More sales. How do you get more sales? Marketing. The end.

Why is the marketing budget the first thing to cut? It should be your number one priority. This isn’t a sales pitch to get you to hire me and my team for your next project (although if you’re interested, contact me!). This is a plea to the business owners of the world to stop blaming everything around them when they aren’t marketing nearly as much as they could, or should, be. Feeding your body is one of the top priorities in your daily life. So should feeding your business.