Category: Growth Series

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.

The Customer’s Reality

July 6, 2022 / johnhooley

There’s an episode of the cartoon, Bob’s Burgers, that centers around a trash can. People in the town decorate it to make it look like a pirate, lion, etc. A local realtor feels like this is lowering the value of the rental space next to the trash can and convinces the city council to vote on a resolution to make it illegal to decorate.

Linda, the mom of the family in Bob’s Burgers, decides to fight this by trying to drum up support for the creative vandalism. She stands next to the decorated trash can and she asks everyone who passes by to come to the city council meeting. She tries explaining how it’s fun and brightens people’s days, but no one will so much as stop and listen to her.

Meanwhile, her daughter Louise, notices on Next Door that there is a trend of people asking for moving boxes. No one in the family understands why everyone is so interested in boxes. But she posts on the website that there will be boxes being handed out at the city council meeting. A small crowd shows up, seemingly in support of Linda, and the councilors vote against the resolution.

There’s a lot of truth in fiction.

WW1 army officers seated and standing in rows

When to Hire

July 5, 2022 / johnhooley

This brings us to my chicken or egg dilemma:
– I want to grow my business and get more clients but I feel like I need a bigger team to do so.
– I can’t find the courage to hire more and grow the team without enough business to support them.

The above was in a business forum where someone posted the question of when to hire the next employee for their branding agency?

This chicken and egg dilemma is a common early stage business challenge.

When I hired my first developer, I was maxed out on what I could do and still felt like I didn’t have enough money to pay someone else.

When I hired my first project manager (PM), I also felt stuck in a chicken or egg scenario where we didn’t have the revenue to support a PM, but I would forever be stuck in operations if I didn’t hire someone.

Old illustration of two men in robes bowing before a king

F*ck How

July 4, 2022 / johnhooley

A friend of mine, Don, ran into one of his business heroes having a drink by himself at a bar. The hero was the CEO of a famous investment firm. Don struck up a conversation and they started talking about business. At the time, Don was still early in his entrepreneurial career and, after he finished his fan boy spiel, they got around to talking about his goals and strategies.

Don began to explain the obstacles he anticipated and the CEO interrupted him and said, “You need to use the Fukow method.”

“Phuquow?” Don asked, “Is that Vietnamese?”

Photo taken from a plane of a military base

Harnessing Imbalances

July 1, 2022 / johnhooley

The women of Camp Hansen were not attractive, but they were courted as if they were supermodels. I spent a year in Hansen as part of my service in the Marines. There were 6,000 or so Marines and maybe ten of them were female.

In the news recently: airlines are offering pilots three times their normal pay for taking on extra shifts.

When I started working in web development in 2007, businesses still asked each other for web design referrals. A couple of years later, suddenly everyone was looking for mobile developers.

a man facing a hydra with corpses on the ground

Hydra Positioning Strategy

June 30, 2022 / johnhooley

Years ago, I shared an Uber with another agency president from the airport to a business conference. It was a random interaction, just a coincidence that we were on the same flight to the same place.

A year or two after that, I ran across a sales executive from his team at an evening mixer for the local biotech industry. I was there doing research on positioning for my agency and the sales exec was there looking for clients. This was odd because I didn’t realize the agency specialized in biotech and also because most agencies don’t have salespeople out at evening mixers.

I joined the Rotary Club in Portland last month and was, again, surprised to discover the agency president as a member of their leadership board.

Yesterday, I was doing research on PPC competitors and did a quick lookup on the agency and found that they advertised heavily in the Shopify market.

This morning I looked at their website and found no mention of biotech or Shopify.

What is going on with their customer acquisition strategy?

Optimizing the Margin

June 29, 2022 / johnhooley

I was on a call with a client yesterday and asked them what impacts their revenue the most?

They have a new website that they’re feeding over 1.5 million visitors to a month and monetizing that traffic through advertising. There are a bunch of technical levers that we could pull to increase ad impressions: improve site speed, optimize the mobile ad display, work on pages per visit, and etc. But while we were going through these, they mentioned that they’re sourcing advertisers through a reseller that takes a 30% cut.

30% is a huge bite of revenue.

Japanese illustration of a demon-and-squid -ike will-o-the-wisp

False Lessons

June 28, 2022 / johnhooley

I practice speaking through a local Toastmasters club. Our club has dwindled through the pandemic. To help build it back, I volunteered to take on the role of VP of Public Relations. Last Saturday, I ran a special event to try and build membership.

It started with an idea to write an article for a local paper about our club president receiving a special service award. The benefit of this is that someone else (the paper) would be promoting our club to every house in the neighborhoods in our area.

That meant we had to give our president an award and I thought that we could amplify the impact of that by using the award as a pretext to activate past members. “Would you come and honor our president?” was the message that our VP of Membership reached out to these people about.

Echo looking at Narcissist while he gazes into a pond

Intention & Reality

June 27, 2022 / johnhooley

I’m starting this week by putting out fires.

We have a client that complained about a project. I haven’t investigated the details yet, but some of it was clearly our fault and some of it was likely their fault.

Another unpleasant task on my plate is that I have to confront a different client and maybe fire them. They are a wonderful person in charge of a wonderful organization, but they’re difficult to work with. The result of being difficult to work with has been that they’ve destroyed most of our profit margin on the work completed.

It’s annoying to have to look into these situations because it takes me off course from driving towards the objectives that will impact the entire business.

A king being stabbed in the side in front of a crowd

The Established Advantage

June 24, 2022 / johnhooley

Alexander the Great wasn’t as great as people give him credit for. His father had paved the way for his “greatness” by conquering most of Greece and building a sophisticated military. Alexander took the reins of a chariot that was already in motion.

Similarly, the Persian emperor Darius “The Great,” didn’t build his Persian empire but won it by assassinating the monarch and assuming power with the support of a few nobles. Like Alexander, he took something already established and used it to conquer even more countries.

My sister-in-law works at a family-controlled commercial construction company that will cross a billion dollars in revenue in the next two years. The wealthy CEO is the grandson of the founder and assumed control of a company that was already making hundreds of millions of dollars.

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