Category: Growth Series

Intelligence & Risk

July 18, 2023 / johnhooley

I’m reading a comic book on business strategy. I love it as a format- it’s a lot of fun and a great way to build in marketing. The book is, “StrategyMan vs The AntiStrategy Squad.”

One of the book’s hypothesis is that strategy is based on insight.

It’s an interesting idea and there’s some validity to it, but more accurately, the risk in a strategy is modified by market intelligence. As in: how much accurate information you have about the market.

The more information you have, the more reliable your strategy is. Conversely, the less information you have, the less reliable your strategy becomes.

Imagine you’re playing poker with your friends. You’re sitting around a card table in a garage dense with cigar smoke. As you look around the table, you can actually see through some of the cards in their hands. You gaze at the deck and you can see a card that is coming in a few draws. How does this effect how you play?

Beyond Brute Force

July 16, 2023 / johnhooley

In seventh grade, I won a popularity contest (I’m still celebrating.) My junior high had students complete a short survey concerning who they trusted and felt comfortable talking too. The result was that I was one of two students selected to go through a program called, “Natural Helpers.” The idea of the program was to train students to recognize serious problems and report them to adults whenever they occurred. We were trained to be half counselor, half snitch.

I lead with this just to illustrate that it’s always been easy for me to make friends.

However, even with this friendly orientation, when I think about business development and trying to fill a CRM with 500 contacts to keep in touch with… well it seems like a little slice of hell. I abhor the rote work of continually reaching out to contacts and I dread inauthentic interactions or small talk.

This is the problem that I’ve been trying to solve as I work on building out our referral focused marketing strategy:

How can we get people to know, like, and trust our brand without me having to build five hundred relationships?

The answer that I’ve come to is to seek tactics to elevate our visibility within the networks of communities.

Two strategies that I’m exploring are leadership and reputation.

Keys to Victory

July 11, 2023 / johnhooley

On Saturday, I watched a headline fight on the UFC between Dricus Du Plessis and Robert Whittaker. As the fighters walked into the octagon, the commentators discussed each fighter’s strategy in a segment called, “Keys to Victory.” It made me laugh because each of the fighters had keys like, “out strike the other fighter,” and “win the grappling.” Apparently, the keys to victory were to win the fight.

In the same vein, benchmarking your business can show you a version of “keys to victory.” If you compare yourself to similar businesses, you might discover that you don’t get as many customers as they do or that your COGS are higher than the average.

Huh… If only we had more customers we’d make more money. Brilliant!

Positioning Misses

July 5, 2023 / johnhooley

Later today, I’ll talk with a potential client that was referred to us. In my fifteen years in business, I’ve received few referrals. This is despite having great relationships with clients and working with them for years.

The reason that we received few referrals was because we were positioned based on specialized technical expertise. Our positioning was so narrow that few people understood what we did. Only once someone needed someone with that technical experience would they become aware that our role existed. The result was that we built up our inbound leads through SEO and directory listings.

SEO worked great for several years and then our market tanked. I decided to reposition again. When I repositioned our agency, I tried to apply the advice of the business experts in our field. In brief, that advice was to focus more on selling strategy and less on the actual execution. The result was that our website and marketing framed us as digital strategists.

In retrospect, this was a big mistake.

Disciplined Execution

July 3, 2023 / johnhooley

I’ve noticed that people often use discipline and willpower interchangeably. They say something like, “She’s incredibly disciplined,” but what they mean is, “She’s strong willed enough to keep on track with her goals.”

This false equivalent is an issue because willpower is an expensive resource that quickly erodes as time passes.

Discipline, on the other hand, concerns consistently meeting your commitments. You could do it through willpower, but that’s only one option and not one you can rely on.

Discipline matters in a business because it affects the quality of your execution. You can have a brilliant strategy and a great culture, but if there isn’t discipline in execution, the business doesn’t progress.

Just like in your personal life, you could attempt to maintain discipline in execution through force of will, but the chaos of your environment will naturally break it apart.

Eyes to See

June 27, 2023 / johnhooley

“Man, it’s weird,” one of my friends told me, “It was there, but I just couldn’t see it.” We were sailing on the Columbia river at sunset, talking about his problems with his ex-girlfriend. After breaking up, he began to see patterns in his behavior that resulted in him being single again. Post breakup, post hurt, post introspection he could clearly see problems that he was blind to when they were a couple.

There are a finite number of objectives in your business that will take you where you want to go. There might be fifteen or fifty things that you need to accomplish to grow to your ideal end state.

These objectives might be things like:

Set focus or market limits.
Develop a good CVP.
Figure out where opportunities are in the market.
Etc. etc.

The challenge is that we’re blind to most of these objectives. We have ideas about what’s needed, but we don’t actually know.

Working In The Future

June 26, 2023 / johnhooley

I have a long list of backlogs in my to-do list tracker. These are full of things that I didn’t get around to doing:

4/12 Micro Distributing SOP
4/29 Tefi’s Admin questions
5/10 Schedule backup and shut down of Pantheon
And many more…

In your business, these tasks will focus your attention on the here and now. Many of them have to be done or there will be consequences. Of the items above, two of them are important and when I found them in my backlogs, I thought, Crap! How did I lose track of that!?

There’s always lots to do.

The gut reaction to this pressure is to focus your attention on the here and now. This introduces a problem though: what got you here won’t get you there.

The Final Ingredient

June 21, 2023 / johnhooley

I spoke with Melissa, an owner-operator out of Chicago today. She runs a management and events planning company for associations. She’s a 10,000 Small Business (10KSB) Alumni like me.

If you’re unfamiliar with 10KSB, it’s a small business accelerator funded by Goldman Sachs and operated by Babson University. It’s a three-to-six month program that provides education and access to capital and is organized around the participant creating a comprehensive growth plan.

She told me, “I went through 10KSB in 2013 and expected that my business would just take off after I created my growth plan. But actually, nothing much happened until 2019.”

“Why?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said, “I had to sort of settle into all the ideas. Then in 2019 things seemed to catalyze and the business did take off. I’ve been busy ever since.”

Painting of a sculpture of a man sitting and thinking

A Rational Story

June 20, 2023 / johnhooley

“They’re chock-full of technology,” Peggy told me, “It’s incredibly competitive.” Peggy is a consultant working in the market we’re targeting and I had reached out to her for advice.

She was one of two research interviews I completed yesterday. The other was with a direct competitor. A couple of weeks ago, I talked with a potential customer in the market.

I have a hypothesis about the market: that there is an addressable customer need for website design, development, and support for organizations between $3m and $50m. These are organizations that have some staff responsible for communications, but not enough to have an in-house team.

Old photo of a one story Japanese building with large letters on the eaves.

Why Plan for Change

June 19, 2023 / johnhooley

Nintendo started as a playing card company in 1889. In the 114 years since, they’ve sold: table-top games, electronic games, virtual shooting systems, virtual reality games, handheld games, platform games, home entertainment systems, the Wii, and theme parks.

In their time in business, there has been an incredible amount of change; change that they survived while hundreds of thousands of other businesses shuttered their doors.

Every business is affected by change. Some ride positive lift from market trends and technological innovation. Others descend on the backside of change, struggling to survive and eventually failing.

That change is a constant is why you should plan for it.

Plans force you to anticipate. To cast your eyes ahead and see the branches in the river, so that you end up on a route that will take you where you want to go.

When you don’t plan, you’re rolling the dice to see what fortune has determined for you instead.

You’ll still see change, but you’ll be reacting to it as it occurs. You’ll be rowing up-river fighting to get back to that fork you missed while drinking a beer and celebrating your success.

Featured image is Original Nintendo headquarters (1889–1930) and workshop in Shimogyō-ku, Kyoto, c. 1889. Used under public domain.

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