On Small Business Growth
“I think he’s better than I am,” Octavia said.
Octavia is one of our junior developers. Like me, she has a desire to help people out of poverty. I had asked her to join me in interviewing people for our new WordPress Developer apprenticeship position. We were both surprised by the candidates that made the final cut. Octavia thought the final person we spoke with knew more about coding than she did.
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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.
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In The Histories, Herodotus explains how Cyrus became the first Persian emperor. Cyrus was the adopted son of a wealthy leader in Persia. At that time, the Medes, not the Persians were the dominant people of the region. Cyrus forged a letter saying that the King of the Medes had appointed him military general for the Persian tribes. He used this as a pretext to force the Persian military to assemble near his parents’ property with scythes.
Nearby was a large thicket of thorny shrubs and he told the Persian soldiers to clear it. All day, the Persian men toiled under the heavy sun of the Levant. When they finished their task in the evening, Cyrus told them to assemble again the next morning.
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One of my key objectives in our six week execution cycle is to relaunch another iteration of a PPC campaign. We’ve been adding people to the team and capacity has exceeded demand. Because of this, capturing more of the market has been critical.
In the background though, one of our clients was acquired and transitioned into a chief marketing role in the purchasing organization. She recently told me that she’s replacing that organization’s agency of record with us. This will more than double the considerable work we were doing for her before.
Now, the focus has shifted to maximizing our team’s productivity.
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I’m the smartest person in my business. It’s a problem.
You’re probably the smartest person on your team too. You’re most invested in your success and most familiar with the way your business provides value.
There’s a quote that goes, “the reward of work done well is more work.” And that’s the trap of being competent.
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Several years ago, the 4 Hour Work Week created a flood of new entrepreneurs that were cash strapped and feeling pressure to grow. The promise of cheap help had many of them creating apprenticeships.
That trend has long passed as we prepare to hire our first apprentice under the Steward brand (job posting here: Hiring a WordPress Developer Apprentice . )
Why an apprentice? And why now?
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I’ve long felt like there’s a link between entrepreneurship and leadership.
It’s easy to think of famous entrepreneurs who are highly effective leaders like Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, or Steve Jobs. However, you’ve probably encountered many entrepreneurs who aren’t leaders at all or are terrible at that role.
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“That guy is making more money than he ever has,” my dad said.
I was home, on the family farm, visiting my folks and getting caught up the local events. A farmer from a nearby town came up in conversation and I asked how he was doing.
“Oh yeah?” I asked, “What’s different?”
My dad told me that this farmer used to run an operation with twenty to thirty “hired hands” working a large swath of acres. Now, on the verge of retirement, the farmer had collapsed the operation down into just a handful of fields, a select few crops, and one hired man.
He shrunk his team and grew his profit.
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I enjoy hiking with other business geeks. On one of these hikes, my friend John shared a marketing test he had run on social media. He wanted to see what people responded to. So he posted a bunch of ads for his agency sharing a variety of information:
The last one was just for fun, but that was the one that had the highest engagement.
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“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?
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