Category: Growth Series

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.

5 Energy Sources For Growth

May 6, 2022 / johnhooley

Growth is driven by energy in the market. That market force manifests as customers buying your products. If you’re trying to grow your business, you have to figure out how to tap into more of that energy.

You might visualize your business as being powered by a water turbine in a low valley. To make the turbine run, you have to tap into lakes, rivers, and streams higher up and channel some portion of them into your pipeline to power your turbine.

To tap into these market energy sources, you could:

Raise prices on products to existing customers or sell more of the same product to them.
Sell a new product to your existing customers.
Sell a new product to your current market.
Figure out how to get more customers in your current market.
Sell your product in new markets.

A Formula for Growth

May 5, 2022 / johnhooley

If you were to reduce growth to a formula, it might look something like:

Resources + Energy + Organizing Pattern = Expanded Capabilities or Capacities

This works for trees, kids, and businesses.

For your business, resources are things like employees and tools. Energy takes the form of customers buying from you. And the organizing pattern is your way of doing business- systems, culture, values. The result is an expansion in what you do or can do.

Growth Isn’t Caused By Skill

May 3, 2022 / johnhooley

A false premise that many entrepreneurs start from when they want to grow is assuming that growth is caused by their ability. However, growth isn’t caused by skill. It’s caused by market forces. And it will only occur to the extent that our decisions align with those forces.

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.

The Money on The Table

September 23, 2021 / johnhooley

What is better: making a sale worth $5 or making one worth $5,000,000?

Got your answer?

If it’s $5 or $5,000,000 it’s wrong. The correct answer is:

It depends on how much it costs you to fulfill the sale.

If it costs you $.25 to fulfill the $5 purchase and $6,000,000 to fulfill the $5,000,000 purchase then you should snap up the small money and run from the million dollar “opportunity.”

Logically, we know this. It’s a “no duh” answer. That’s how profit works: revenue – COGS = gross margin.

However, in practice, we tend to be blind to the cost of opportunities and fixate on the upside.

Cost Versus Growth Hiring

September 9, 2021 / johnhooley

When I hired my first employee it was because I felt like I didn’t have any options to do otherwise. I didn’t have 6 months of retained earnings sitting around and I wasn’t doing highly profitable work. But I felt like it was better to risk failing than it was to keep going as I had been.

The common advice would have been to figure out a way to earn more profit, save some money, and then hire with that safety net beneath me. This is cost based hiring.

I didn’t end up going out of business with my new hire and I actually made more money. Unintentionally, I had executed a different hiring strategy: growth based hiring.

Entrepreneurs gravitate towards cost based hiring because it’s clear and safe. But it can drastically limit your potential and carries hidden risk beneath its conservative demeanor.

Archimedes and his lever with the world on its end

How to Approach Product Ideas

April 22, 2021 / johnhooley

The first product I created was a poll over email plugin for a CMS.

The idea came from a discussion I participated in as part of a tech user group about how to decide on a course of action affecting the group. I thought, “If someone could just send a poll over email, we’d be able to come to a decision immediately.”

I was looking for a product idea and leapt on this.

Over the next 9 months, I wore myself down writing the plugin in my evenings, weekends, and vacations. I traded work with a graphic designer to create a polished website design to sell it and build that too.

I launched it to crickets. After a month working on the website and marketing and was able to improve my 0 sales to 2 purchases.

It sucked hard.

Ideally, product opportunities organically present themselves to you:

You scratch your own itch.
You build something for a client that everyone needs.
Your boss tasks you with building something that’s not in the market (looking at you Bezos.)

But most of the time, for most of us, that’s not going to happen.

So how can you deliberately identify product ideas that are winners?

Finding Business Opportunities

March 19, 2021 / johnhooley

I was talking with a friend about my plan to invest in developing WordPress plugins as products recently.

“That’s a tough market,” he said, “Everything has been built. Customers don’t want to pay anything. You make $100 a year off a plugin and still have to support it.”

He’s right.

We built a WordPress plugin four or five years ago and the market was saturated then. Because of the scope of functionality, it was a pain to support and actually cost us to maintain it.

Natural opportunities that are inherently accessible and rewarding don’t seem to exist anymore.

What I’m striving to learn is how to identify hidden opportunities.

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