I hired an account manager, a PPC agency, and a junior developer this year. All three were part of an effort to scale up and serve more customers. At the end of the year, all three are gone and the work to scale had a negligible impact.

In retrospect, I don’t think these were dumb decisions. I had completed a lot of work to figure out whether these were viable investments and how to find good people. At the same time though, I failed in several respects. While not dumb, I didn’t do a good enough job managing the risk and I didn’t stay focused enough on ensuring they’d be successful.

In terms of managing the risk, I hired the PPC agency first. Their only job was to scale up an ad campaign that I had already proven out. They wanted to rebuild it and I green lit it with the belief that their focused expertise should lead to better outcomes. In the end, they were able to generate more leads of worse quality. The net result was almost no customers at a 5x ad spend.

I started the hiring process in advance of the PPC agency actually generating the right kinds of leads. I recognized there was some risk in doing this, but I wanted to be more aggressive, and I didn’t see it as likely that they would fail to deliver on something that I had already put legs underneath.

Ultimately, much of what we do is a calculated gamble and I still look back and think, “Yeah, I’d probably make that choice again.” But how I would do it would be more careful.

Because there were problems:

  • I gave the PPC agency several swings at bat and didn’t closely monitor their work. This caused them to focus on poor fit keywords and make offers that attracted the wrong people.
  • I gave them a lot of latitude in generating results with no firm constraints on cost or time. We did lots of starting and stopping and didn’t have measurements in place to identify if we were on track or not.
  • Our failure to get a return from them made it harder to get a return from my follow on investment with the new developer. Failure became more risky.

The next time:

  • I’ll put a pre-determined cap on how long they have and at what cost.
  • I’ll oversee how they implement at the front of the engagement.
  • I’ll prove the result of that work before making another investment based on it.

Similarly, with my account manager and junior developer, I gave them a lot of latitude in executing on the goals I set for them. They were provided with some structure and support, but both of them still floundered.

The foundational problem is poor integration. I expect investments to go from crawling to running without much management. I’m impatient and tend to leap ahead to the next initiative once the fire has started, but it goes out while I’m tackling the next obstacles.

I don’t know exactly how I’ll alter the next investments, they’re still amorphous, but I do know I’ll be putting safeguards into place to keep my aggression focused on generating a return before shifting focus to what’s next.

Nosce Te Ipsum.

Featured image is The Fire of Rome by Hubert Robert (1785). Used under public domain.