Category: Growth Series

The Implications of Manure

February 6, 2023 / johnhooley

“Jimmy’s son figured out that the dairies wanted their pens cleaned and the farmers wanted compost. He offered the dairies to clean the pens for free and sold the manure as fertilizer to the farmers. Now, he’s making a killing. He has a free resource and he’s turning it into dollars.”

My parents visited this weekend and my dad told me this story about a friend’s son.

I told my dad, “That’s sort of a classic story of entrepreneurship. But I would bet that, on some time horizon, the dairies are going to run out of expansion opportunities where there are no good locations to build up or down the road. They’re going to look for other ways to grow and end up telling Jimmy’s son, ‘Thanks for figuring out that for us, we’ll take this from here.'”

Chatty Kathies & Referral Strategy

February 1, 2023 / johnhooley

Last fall, Philip Morgan recommended to me, “Why Clients Buy” as part of my investigation into referral focused strategies (thanks Philip!) A thesis of that book is that for client work, you only need around 200 possible clients to know you. It’s a relatively small number of people (with the caveat that the number is based on income per client.)

From my research on agency channels, a little less than 1 in 3 referrals came from colleagues and peers, people who would probably compose much of that group of 200 people from “Why Clients Buy.”

I’m in the early phases of implementing a referral strategy and how I’m thinking about this is networks. Every person is a node in a network that connects to a certain number of other nodes. For a client serving business, you need 200 that have some sort of link to you, either directly or within one connection. As in, they know you, or when they ask for a referral, someone they’re connected to knows you.

People are not equal (sorry founding fathers, you got it wrong.) We don’t have the same abilities. As it pertains to networks, not all nodes are equally valuable.

Due to this, as strategic priorities, in building a referral network, I’m looking at building relationships with three kinds of people:

A Brand New Success

January 31, 2023 / johnhooley

I’ve been around long enough that I’ve seen many people achieve great success in the various communities I’ve participated in.

One of the patterns I’ve noticed is someone new to entrepreneurship building up to $1-5 million in revenue in three to five years (as an aside, this fits the 1,000 Day Principle- which I’ve been critical of elsewhere.)

I’ve also seen plenty of smart and diligent people wash out in three to five years with ho-hum growth in their business.

What separates the two is that the self-funded newbies who achieved exponential growth have always been in an emerging market.

We tend to treat these successes as, “Look! There was a hidden genius in our midst!” But it might be more accurate to say that someone was competent enough to ride a good wave.

Excelsior!

January 30, 2023 / johnhooley

My sister sets themes rather than New Years resolutions. For example, “Be Open to Change.” She carriers her theme through the year and uses it to guider her choices. This year, I decided to follow her example and pick a theme along with my goals. My theme is: “Excelsior!”

Part of the reason I chose “Excelsior!” was because I realized that there was an abundance of good things in my life. And that’s a problem.

You’ve probably heard these bits of advice:

“Good is the enemy of great.”
“What got you here, won’t get you there.”
“You become successful by saying, ‘Yes.’ You stay successful by saying, ‘No.'”

These oracular maxims all highlight the importance of selection.

Our time, energy, resources, and attention are finite. A key lever in creating an exponential return on these is to be selective and don’t settle for good options.

The Horns of Progress

January 29, 2023 / johnhooley

Last Tuesday, I had a standing meeting in an empty hotel event space. The hotel was an old Elks Lodge that was restored and repurposed, but the walls and ceiling still had their earlier 19th century decorative flourishes and patterns.

I spoke with a consultant and his partner who had built a business providing training to enterprise level clients. The consultant had landed a whale through his public speaking many years prior, and he wanted to figure out how to gain new clients without having to speak at a thousand events? He thought that maybe the solution was search engine optimization.

We had an interesting conversation, but one thing that stood out was a model that I shared with them that I’ve been developing and playing with over the last couple of years:

In a business, there are two vectors of growth:

Optimization
Innovation

These are like horns on a bull.

The Binocular View of Opportunity

January 25, 2023 / johnhooley

Association executives reporting increases in one-year and five-year membership levels and increases in new member acquisitions and member renewals are significantly more likely to consider their association extremely or very innovative.

This is a quote from an annual research report that Marketing General does on member based associations.

Yesterday, I wrote about having some level of risk taking and exploration as a requirement for pursuing growth opportunities. Later in the morning, I was doing research on a vertical position that we’re investing in (again), associations, and came across this tidbit.

How to Discover Opportunities

January 24, 2023 / johnhooley

How do you discover growth opportunities?

If you intended to look for a change outside of your business to capitalize on and drive growth, how would you approach it?

Innovation has a way of rapidly defusing across the market. There’s a temporal arc from a high value opportunity to a solution that is standardized, commoditized, and filled with competitors.

If you were building websites in 2000, there was a sea of opportunity filled with big fish to catch. If you’re building websites in 2023, there’s a sea of competitors that you’ll have to navigate your boat through to find an empty spot.

There are external growth opportunities beyond innovation or trends, but something that all growth opportunities share is that they require risk taking.

Their Reasons

January 23, 2023 / johnhooley

Several years ago, I was trying to gain a deeper understanding of the business model I run. In support of this, I began to network with other agency owners. One of the things that surprised me was how much other agencies charged. I came across several agency owners that billed hundreds of thousands of dollars for the same kinds of projects I had billed thousands of dollars for.

This leap in pricing fascinated me.

“How do you do bill for those kinds of amounts?” I wondered.

Enough Effort

January 19, 2023 / johnhooley

One of the questions rolling around in my head is, “what is enough effort?”

Any given task, objective, goal requires an energy expenditure to realize. That amount of energy is nearly always unknown.

For example, imagine that you want to build leads with a new channel. You saw a video on YouTube that has you all fired up about social media advertising.

How much effort should you put into that?

In Service

January 19, 2023 / johnhooley

“I could call the mayor in the middle of the night and he would answer his phone,” a Rotarian friend of mine told me. Then she amended, “…Well, it wouldn’t be me, it would be one of my pastor friends, but they would do it, and the mayor would answer!”

My friend wasn’t boasting, she was just explaining the depth of her network that she’d built over six years volunteering in service to non-violence causes in Portland.

A working theory that I’m playing with is business as service.

The theory goes something like this:

When you create products in service to a market’s needs, it’s easier to grow and especially through word of mouth.

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