Author: johnhooley

Stories

October 10, 2023 / johnhooley

Today, I’m going to draw out a history of my business as part of an accelerator program that I’m in with Entrepreneur’s Organization. I’ll sketch out a timeline of the business, with all the wonderful and terrible things that happened and when.

The first time I did an exercise like this was five years ago as part of 10,000 Small Businesses. What I noticed when I did it then was that it surfaced my, “story,” about the business.

We all tell stories about our lives. Why we are a certain way, why our circumstances are the way they are, and what it means.

When I drew out my original lifeline and surveyed my business events the first time, I noticed that I emphasized the trials and setbacks. My story wasn’t about what I achieved in the business, it was about surviving. It was about suffering losses and enduring.

Repetition

October 9, 2023 / johnhooley

I exercise on a near daily basis. The kettlebell is always challenging. If I’m feeling more energized, I offset it by working out a little harder. The weight increases every year or two, but the challenge remains constant.

Our experience tends to be uniform. Day-to-day, we overcome obstacles, apply lessons, figure things out. Eventually, we clock off and transition into evening rest.

This close to the medium, this far up the arc of development, it’s difficult to discern growth. Evolution advances in inches. Because of this, it’s important for the work to be redeeming. To feel the joy in fighting gravity to lift the weight over your head.

To see each repetition as its own opportunity.

Hard Things

October 6, 2023 / johnhooley

Today, I received a few requests to un-subscribe from an email I sent yesterday as part of the email marketing we do. They were on an email list we had painfully and manually built, with no opt-ins. Sending the first email was hard. I envisioned hundreds of spam complaints and my inbox filled with angry responses. That didn’t happen, but every subsequent email has carried with it the same anxious concerns as the first one.

Many years ago, when I first started out, I was trying to drum up work as a freelancer. The closest thing to UpWork that existed was Craigslist and there was a limited supply of possible jobs, because it was just for one city. I decided to try and cold approach businesses to talk with them about their website and its role. I hoped that with this research oriented approach, that I would run into someone who needed help and would hire me. I spent the afternoon walking around a neighborhood in Portland going from one brick and mortar retail shop to the next.

RFP’s and Losing Games

October 3, 2023 / johnhooley

My company is responding to a request for proposal (RFP) for a project that we don’t have a chance of getting. If you’re unfamiliar with the RFP process, the idea is for a client to gather a bunch of different supplier company proposals to complete a project and evaluate them methodically to choose the best one.

On the respondent side, our side, it’s a bad situation to be in, because the odds are against you. E.g. If there are ten respondents, you have a ten percent chance of winning the work.

Beyond this universal disadvantage, we’re at an experiential disadvantage. We don’t have a portfolio of work for the software integration that is a core component of the RFP. We do plenty custom programming and integration, but we haven’t worked with the specific system in the RFP. It’s likely that several competitors will have experience with it or with a close analog.

The RFP we’re responding to is being facilitated by a technology consultant. In my mind’s eye, I see them on a Zoom session sharing a spreadsheet with the client. The columns on the spreadsheet are labeled with a list of company names, ours being one of them. The rows are labeled with criteria for the project to score each company’s proposal with. Their intent is to make an apples-to-apples comparison of each company and methodically select the one best suited for the work (a great idea and also a fantasy.) In our column, they’re going to give us low scores for that key software integration.

To sum it up: it’s a failing proposition.

Network Building at Events

September 27, 2023 / johnhooley

I’ve been quiet this week because I’ve been out of town at a conference in Fort Worth, Texas. The conference was for the Texas Society of Association Executives (TSAE), who are a large pool of potential association customers for our agency. I was there to execute a component of our referral marketing plan. Today, I’ll share with you a debrief of what worked, what didn’t, and what I’d recommend to you if you’re executing a similar referral focused strategy.

My plan going into the conference was to focus on introducing myself to well connected people while gathering information on the market. I targeted three groups of people:

Certain board members and volunteer leaders
Suppliers in the exhibit hall with similar services
TSAE staff

I was there for two days and had some success with all three, but didn’t reach everyone I planned with volunteer leaders or TSAE staff.

What Worked Well

I picked up lots of incremental intelligence at the conference. I learned things that weren’t game changers, but still advanced what I knew and grew a little smarter.

Additionally, in talking with the suppliers, I learned what worked for them in landing clients, what didn’t, and what they were trying. I’m not a direct competitor but I share their challenges and, because of that, they were open about their experiences. I learned where to gather better email lists, what marketing tactics had failed, and traps in responding to certain kinds of leads. As a bonus, my company might be able to partner with one of theirs to deliver the custom web programming needed on their projects (we’ll see).

I only connected with one of the staff- the events manager. However, they shared a handful of tricks to improve the odds my speech submissions would be selected for similar events (more on that below). They also divulged some inside baseball on network building opportunities that similar companies aren’t taking advantage of.

Your Challenge in Established Markets

September 19, 2023 / johnhooley

In new and expanding markets, it’s often enough to just show up. You don’t need a strategy because market demand exceeds supply. Customers are more concerned about access and availability than anything else.

But in more competitive environments, like established markets, it’s difficult to grow by being a run-of-the-mill entrant. Now the shoe is on the other foot. Customers have lots of options and are much more selective. If your offer is similar to competitors in this market:

You’ll likely have weak or inconsistent sales.
There’s pressure to compete on price.
Leaders become cemented in their position and difficult to un-seat.
Small differences become important as customers look for reasons to buy from you rather than competitors (distance, personality, appearance).

The problem is that most markets are established and many of the new ones don’t last.

Differentiation Isn’t Skin Deep

September 17, 2023 / johnhooley

Five years ago, I took a sales training course from Blair Enns (Win Without Pitching.) The course focused on how to sell agency services at a premium. One of his criteria for an agency that could command higher pricing was their process. He said, “Your agency must have a process that is so different that it requires weeks of training whenever you onboard a new employee.”

I thought it was an odd characteristic.

Positioning and marketing are all about perception: how the world sees you. It makes sense that you need to differentiate from similar businesses in the market’s eyes. But underneath the hood, a UX designer is a UX designer the same as a grocery clerk is a grocery clerk. If you go into Whole Foods or Trader Joes, there’s a line of people who get their food swiped through a bar code scanner at check-out. The people and process are the same.

In hindsight, what Enns was recommending, in a round-about way, was for the agency to have a distinct strategy.

Good Will Among Neighbors

September 11, 2023 / johnhooley

My family had a neighbor with ground that my dad farmed when I was a kid. The neighbor died in a tragic accident and, the following year, his son decided that he wanted to become a farmer.

My dad told him that it wasn’t likely going to work and that he’d be better off acting as landlord than trying to farm the ground himself. The neighbor’s son decided to go ahead with it anyways, convinced he could figure it out.

My dad gave him some initial pointers, but mostly he withheld guidance and sat back and waited for the neighbor’s son to fail.

Farming is resource intensive, skill intensive, high stakes gambling (and, in my opinion, boring.) It doesn’t matter if you’re smart, because by the time you figure it out, you’ll be long out of business.

Not surprisingly, the neighbor’s son quit farming after a year. What did surprise my dad was that rather than give the contract for his ground back to my father, he gave it to another neighbor who had provided advice and guidance when my dad hadn’t.

Merging to Grow

September 6, 2023 / johnhooley

I spent my Sunday driving back from my parents’ farm in Southern Idaho. As I drove, I listened to a course on business strategy. One of the lessons was on mergers and acquisitions. The main point was that most of the time businesses merge or acquire other businesses for the wrong reasons and research shows that it rarely works. The lecturer said that it’s often a misguided attempt to grow.

On Monday morning, I hopped on a call with a guy named Alan who operates a similar business to mine, in the market I’m trying to enter, but who has been working there for nearly thirty years. Alan is approaching retirement and wants to see his business continue. He told me on that call that he’s interested in merging our companies.

Here’s the initial deal Alan proposed:

His two long term employees would get equity.
He and his partner would retain ownership of the company.
I would take control of the business.
Our two teams would merge.

From his perspective, he thought I would benefit with:

Gaining his client list.
Being able to sell and build off his established relationships and brand.

That’s not attractive to me, but we’re going to keep talking to explore if there’s a way we can both achieve our goals.

What the lecturer recommended for mergers and acquisitions was to calculate the burden of merging. He said that often managers focus on the potential upside of deals- like me focusing on what I could do with Alan’s clients or portfolio. What most folks miss is that there is a challenge and cost to merging. It takes an investment to integrate teams, systems, and resources in a way that is productive. For Alan, if we merged, I’d have to take on the history of his choices: technologies we don’t use, system differences, client choices, and etc.

It’s sort of like considering whether to marry someone and only seeing the potential of that union. If you took a closer look though, you’d realize that marriage means you’ll have to live in a house with six cats, continually clean up after a slob, and keep one eye over your shoulder for that jealous ex who will be released from prison next year.

Value Capture in Farming Equipment

September 4, 2023 / johnhooley

I spent the last week working from the family farm in Southern Idaho. As a teenager, one of my jobs was to change hand lines. Hand lines are sprinkler systems for fields that have to be moved by hand, pipe section by pipe section. It’s tedious and labor intensive work.

In the past twenty years, my dad has replaced all of the hand lines with automated pivots. Pivots are computer operated pipes on wheels that pivot in circles around a connection to a source of water.

For the first half of the upgrades to pivots, my dad used a local supplier operated by a guy named Jack. For the other half, he used someone else over an hour away. Why?

At some point in the years long upgrades of all his fields, my dad noticed that Jack started to price gouge his customers. Now he only uses Jack’s business when he absolutely has to.

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