Category: Fundamentals

A few friends and I debated which is harder: developing effective marketing strategies or hiring sales people.

I fell on the side of developing effective marketing strategies.

Every business has to be able to generate leads to survive, but there is a limit of escalating difficulty that we all hit. Often, that limit becomes the single biggest constraint on our growth.

For example, if you’re a restaurant, you might naturally capture a certain amount of foot traffic, but expanding beyond that is challenging.

In that frontier of growth opportunity, most marketing tactics don’t work.

It’s a harder problem to solve than hiring sales because you operate with limited information. It’s an innovation for the business- the creation of something new.

Innovation is like mapping the sea floor with a depth gauge.

For years, I worked at building and selling software products through our agency with little success.  This is how I used to characterize it to my friends:

It’s like driving through the desert to Las Vegas.  You know you’re heading in the right direction, but you don’t know how far away it is.  And the agency is like an anchor that you’re dragging behind you.

I remember telling this to another agency owner that was also building software and he said, “Oh my god, that’s exactly it.”

Today, I’m looking at building another small software product.

It’s been more than five years since I told my anchor in the desert analogy to someone.

What permeated my experience back then was a sense of ignorance: being in the desert and not knowing the distance.

“I sincerely apologize for the issues you’ve experienced and the amount of time it’s taken to reach a resolution. Your site’s performance and uptime is something that we take very seriously, and we want to do whatever we can to ensure that you’re in a good place…I understand that none of this is ideal, and your concerns are not being taken lightly as we truly value your partnership with WP Engine.”

This was part of a message that a client of ours received from a customer service manager after intermittent downtime and no fixes from their website’s hosting company, WP Engine.

From a support standpoint, it was a great message. But I didn’t put much stock in it.

The site had been experiencing issues for a week and a half and my client and my team had been on support chat with around thirty different WP Engine support techs. The proposed issues and fixes weren’t consistent one support person to the next. No one took accountability in solving the problems. Their site was treated like a hot potato.

This told me that WP Engine didn’t take performance or uptime very seriously, that our clients’ problems were being taken lightly, and that WP Engine didn’t see itself as a partner. Pretty much the opposite of what the customer service manager was saying.

One of the maxims that I operate with is, “truth in behavior.”

It’s a simple idea, but it has wide application.

In marketing, how someone acts is more important than what they say.

In hiring, knowing how a candidate has responded to an actual situation tells me volumes more than an answer about what they would do.

The inverse holds true too for what you’re communicating to others.

In leadership, how you invest your time, energy, and attention will tell your team what you value and what they should value.

Make what people do the primary content in what they communicate and you’ll put your feet on firm ground to decide how to respond.

Featured image is of a US Navy P-2H Neptune of VP-18 flying over a Soviet cargo ship with crated Il-28s on deck during the Cuban Crisis. The Cold War was communication almost entirely through behavior. Used under public domain.

Imagine that you were rich.  You want to build your rich person “house on a hill” and so you find an unoccupied hill and buy the land.  You hire an architect and contractor to build your dream home.  It’s going to take six months to complete construction.  You hire a landscaper to design your private utopia.  But here you run into a problem.

The problem is that trees take time to grow.  You don’t want a bare property with just shrubs and grass, but rich as you are, you can’t buy the years it takes for a seed to reach maturity.  

What do you do?  You buy saplings rather than seedlings.

Like I wrote about yesterday, businesses take time to grow.  That doesn’t mean that fast growth isn’t possible.  Setting aside technological market disruption, there are ways to cheat time and grow quickly.  Most of them revolve around some form of acquisition.  You acquire a resource that has already gone through the length of time needed for it to be useful.

One of the core skills of entrepreneurship is solving challenges at the right level.

Imagine a ruler, standing on end and driven through the conceptual blob of your business. At the top of the ruler, near the 12″ mark, you have a band of strategic challenges. In the middle, at 6″, you have a band of tactical challenges. At the bottom, at 1″ you have technical challenges.

As an entrepreneur, you need to know where on that ruler is best to deploy solutions.

On Tuesday, I was reviewing PPC results from July for a campaign we’re running. I thought that we needed about 5x as many leads as we were getting for one of our offers.

How many leads do you get a month?

This was a question I asked a couple of friends on a backpacking trip this weekend. We hiked up a Southwest Washington river lined with waterfalls and camped on a sandbar at a curve in the river. We talked a lot about life and a lot about business.

They both run agencies, one small one like mine and the other a mid-sized agency with around 40 employees.

Their answers surprised me:

• The agency similar in size to mine wasn’t sure and hadn’t checked in a while.
• The larger agency said he was getting ~20 leads when he bought the business a few years ago. Back when he acquired it, it was also smaller in terms of team size, but still good sized in the 25 – 30 person range. Since then, both leads and head count increased.
• For myself, we received 8 – 9 leads last month (I think we have 1 – 2 un-tracked leads.)

This tells you a lot about the agency business model we operate in.

“There are a million things that people think we should do and it would be great If we could do them. But we have limited resources,” James told me.

James is a friend that owns a coffee shop. We were discussing the challenges of growing a small business.

The biggest obstacle to growth for him is capital. Cash for a refrigerator, new products, branding, a better barista bar, and a new location. In terms of surmounting that obstacle, there are lots of tactics that could make a difference. But there’s little clarity of what will make a difference.

“Let me show you something,” he told me, and brought out a dry erase board showing various initiatives mapped according to their impact on profit and revenue.

When Trump was president, commentators observed that he made promises that were always three weeks away. Covid was going away in three weeks. Proof that the election was stolen would be revealed in three weeks. If re-elected, Trump would finish the Mexican border wall in three weeks.

What happened in three weeks? We forgot the promise.

When I was setting quarterly goal targets, a pattern developed where not only would they be irrelevant in three months, but often I forgot whey I had engaged with them in the first place.