Category: Fundamentals

A dark laboratory with a wizard like figure on his knees in front of glass tubes

Transmuting Problems Into Opportunities

July 8, 2022 / johnhooley

I spent several years trying to identify what the core skill of entrepreneurship is. A top candidate was problem solving. In the end, it didn’t quite fit, but entrepreneurial work is very close in nature to problem solving and we often engage in this as part of our work.

One way this manifests are the limits in your business.

Your business would grow if not for the inherent limits in its design. You:

Don’t have enough demand
Don’t have the resources (people, equipment, cash, etc.)
Or don’t have a system that can fully utilize the demand and resources available

One, or a combination of these, keeps the business at it’s current capacity.

A photo of an odd cube with different width and height square ridges on the top.

Brilliance in The Basics

June 22, 2022 / johnhooley

I was on a call with four other agency owners this morning and it was interesting to see how different our businesses were. Agencies should be similar, but there were real differences in how we priced and delivered work. What roles were needed in one business and weren’t in the next. What systems worked for one agency and didn’t make any sense for the next.

Mike Michalowicz has a line in one of his books where he says all businesses are the same.

Old photo of an elderly gentleman looking up at a larger robot.

$4k More a Month in 5 Minutes

June 8, 2022 / johnhooley

“Within three months, I created an additional $10,000 a month of income.”

This was the featured testimonial for a business coach I came across yesterday. The page was full of similar quotes of happy clients who had experienced fast growth.

Any good testimonial speaks to what is possible. What was listed on this business coach’s website was a collection of best case scenarios. Which is normal and as it should be.

But it’s still worth asking the question: what is going on here?

Mastery Through Reduction

May 31, 2022 / johnhooley

What if you succeeded despite your best efforts?

Imagine a post apocalyptic setting where hundreds of years in the future someone discovered a functioning microwave. They do a dance of excitement, button smash the microwave, and accidentally start it up. Going forward, they believe they have to dance before splaying their hand in a certain pattern to start the microwave.

We all experience some form of this where an activity delivers what we want even though we’re not actually doing it very well.

As it relates to growth, what is effective is rarely improved to an excellent standard of function. We get something working well enough and then we just move on. And most of the time what we move on to doesn’t work at all.

This implies a huge opportunity to increase productivity in your business system. If you’re a coffee shop that gets customers through sidewalk traffic, rather than advertise in the local paper, you would be better served to figure out if you’re getting as many pedestrians as is possible.

Painting of a roulette table with a woman making a bet

Narrow Your Options

May 27, 2022 / johnhooley

When I started freelancing as a developer, I emailed my old boss, Joe, and asked for advice. Joe was a general contractor for more than thirty years and I wanted to tap into his business experience. I said something like, “I’m just starting out. What advice would you give someone brand new on how to be successful?”

I don’t know what I expected, maybe something about marketing or sales. Instead, Joe wrote back, “A plan is only as good as its options.”

This mystified me.

Moonlight shadow of a photographer on a dock

Subtracting Shadows to Grow

May 24, 2022 / johnhooley

When we think about growing, we think about adding. It’s intuitive because the result of growth is more capacity or capability to do something. However, the path to growth often includes subtraction.

For example:

If you remove service offerings you can increase perceived relevance to a subset of customers that you become more efficient at serving at a higher profit.
Firing a customer that is expensive to service frees up existing resources to deliver value to more customers.
If you have an employee in a role that you don’t need, letting them go can free up cash to hire someone in a role that you do need.

The Inherent Power in Basics

May 16, 2022 / johnhooley

I watched a webinar on the financial management of agencies last week. Over the course of an hour, a consultant took us through a byzantine spreadsheet that forecast profit based on how your agency was configured. It was filled with numbers, tables, highlighting and took up every millimeter of screen real estate.

Using the spreadsheet you could model changes to your business. What if you hired a new developer? What if you changed your pricing? What if you decreased time off? This impressive spreadsheet could tell you what the result would be.

At the end of the call, he asked for questions.

I asked, “What are the top changes that your clients come back to again and again?”

Japanese vendors cooking fortune cookies

The Next Level is Within

May 10, 2022 / johnhooley

I spent a month wandering Japan and following the changing colors of autumn as it made its way south in 2018. I traveled by train and as I sat by the window staring out at the shifting colors, I thought about my recent failures to achieve goals.

Prior to the trip, I had set some challenging objectives. I threw myself into achieving them and failed. It was disheartening. The reason I was unsuccessful was because many of the goals weren’t in my full control. They were dependent on external and unknown factors. But if I didn’t set goals beyond my current abilities or knowledge, I wouldn’t grow. That meant I wouldn’t expand my capabilities to take on similar larger goals. It was a catch-22 where any useful goal would likely end with disappointment.

When it comes to growing your business, much of what you want to do is in the category of uncontrollable and unknown. Because if it was controllable and known, you would have already achieved it.

In this way, our business reality is a reflection of our current capabilities.

Jedi Mind Tricks to Achieve Growth

May 9, 2022 / johnhooley

How many people are on your team? How big are you?

This is one of the most frequent questions entrepreneurs will ask each other when they meet. The other common line of inquiry is about how much the business makes.

Headcount and revenue are two indicators we use to get an idea of how successful a business is. Perhaps because of this, we intuitively focus on these two measures when we think about growth. However, they’re not great representations of success. Both can be impressive while the business is burning to the ground.

Most entrepreneurs want to grow, but it’s worth considering what and how you want to grow. Doing so often creates faster paths to growth.

Old sketch of fijin sailors on the south pacific

Choosing Business KPI’s

November 4, 2021 / johnhooley

Imagine that you’re sailing across the South Pacific on a yacht. You sip champagne as you slice silently through tropical seas and watch epic sunset after epic sunset. Congratulations, you’ve made it.

Your big challenge is that you rely on a satellite internet connection to get information about your business Every week your general manager emails you a short update with a handful of metrics.

What metrics are in that email?

This is the role of KPI’s- to provide an at a glance set of numbers that reflect performance.

Most business owners understand the idea that KPI’s are leading indicators.

In this post, we’ll build on that understanding, by examining three questions that determine what makes for an effective KPI for measuring overall business success.

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