If you’ve ever read The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, you know the frazzled state many small business owners, entrepreneurs and start up companies find themselves in. When accounting, development, product creation, selling and management are all on your singular plate it is difficult to even start thinking about anything but the absolute basics.

Perhaps you try to create a logo with some clip art, stealing images illegally off a website or a search engines’ image search. One company I met had stolen an image that literally still had the watermark of the stock photo company it belonged to.

In case you’re wondering, that’s a bad idea. Stealing images, even images that don’t expressly say they’re copyrighted, is illegal and if you’re sued it can cost you up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That’s a scary thought when you’re just in the infant stage of your company and you’re trying to come up with the basics of a simple marketing plan.

There is an alternative. It will take about a week of concentrated effort but that week will get you a long way towards where you want your company to be. Simply hobbling along with little to no marketing materials is not a good way to build your business.

The first and most important thing to do is sit down with someone who knows nothing about your company, possibly several people. Have some way of recording their questions about the company. Listen to what they would like to see as well as what they think is important. Take all this information you just spoke and write it all up.

The next step will be to organize that large mass of information into something that makes sense. Product details should all be in one place, company policies in another and so on. With all that information you can easily copy and paste into brochures, a website and emailers. You can visit the text later for mailer ideas and reword and update things as products change.

Knowing what you do, you can spend the rest of the week creating a logo that matches your company’s mission, taking photos to make a marketing library and building a mailer or e-mailer to send to prospective clients.

Demystifying small business marketing and simplifying the design process isn't impossible. Any one can do it and even if you decide to outsource such things to other skilled professionals, you should be empowered with some of the basic principles so you can understand what they're doing!