On Small Business Growth
Today, I’m going to meet with my physical therapist, Chase, who is helping me with a couple injuries. I’ve referred his services to at least four other people. The referrals weren’t solicited by Chase- I just found myself in conversations where it made sense to recommend him.
In considering growth through word of mouth, Chase provides an opportunity to analyze how referrals develop.
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What marketing strategies and tactics have you used in the course of your career?
I’ve used:
A tactic absent from this list and one I’ve never generated much business through is referrals or “word of mouth.”
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Last Friday, I dropped $25,000 on a consultant.
When I woke up that morning, I wasn’t even thinking about what I hired the consultant to help with. By 9:00 AM, the money was out of my account.
What happened in between? I wrote a blog post on experience.
That blog post made me think about our pricing. Specifically, I was mulling over how most of our projects are under the average minimum project pricing that came out of the research I completed on agencies last month (for the channels we sell through.) I was wondering if we were doing comparatively smaller projects or selling ourselves short?
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Which inhibits growth more:
I heard a story about a bootstrapped software founder several years ago that stuck with me. Like many entrepreneurs, he had worked on several projects that had mediocre results. Then, he had a breakout success with a product.
His comment was, “I didn’t realize before that this is how a business is supposed to work.”
In other words, he believed that you worked hard to make not much progress and that was just how business was.
After his successful product, how will he think about the next product that doesn’t take off?
The benefit of experience is that it reveals what you’re wrong about. Unfortunately, accumulating experience takes time and losses. Fortunately, experience is transferable. It doesn’t have to be your time or your losses.
This is why it’s critical to solicit help, advice, and perspectives from others. And to read about and listen to the experience of people in your situation.
Featured image is an old illustration of the Library of Alexendria. A significant portion of the Mediterranean’s accumulated thoughts and experiences were lost with it after its destruction in the third century. By O. Von Corven – Tolzmann, Don Heinrich; Alfred Hessel and Reuben Peiss. The Memory of Mankind. New Castle. Used under public domain.
A couple of years ago, I had a beer with a friend who is a successful freelance programmer. I asked him how he got work? I expected him to say something about referrals, networking, or workshops. Marketing, in other words.
Instead, he told me, “Oh that? It’s simple. I’m just on a job board.”
I dug a little bit and he explained that it was a job board specifically for enterprise clients with software projects.
His marketing was non-existent, but it didn’t really matter. He had covered the essentials of what he needed to be successful:
He only sold a few engagements a year and lived a very comfortable life.
The essentials of larger businesses doing client work are similar:
( … and a few additional fundamentals for operations.)
If you were to advise an entrepreneur who was starting a business like yours, what would you tell them are the essential qualities that make it work well? What’s your short list?
How close does your business match those qualities?
Featured image is Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (c. 1485) Accademia, Venice used under public domain.
I’m promoting an event for our Toastmaster’s club that is a copy of a job interview workshop that another club put on. I chose it specifically because I knew that it worked wonderfully in driving membership for the other club.
I spoke with the president of that club more recently and he mentioned a detail that I wasn’t initially aware of: the original workshop was during the 2008 recession.
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Setting goals for growth is challenging. There’s a dilemma:
1) You can’t control everything. And striving after things you can’t control is a recipe for failure.
2) Setting objectives that you can control doesn’t grow you much, if at all.
The classic example of the first kind of goals are revenue goals. For example, “Grow our revenue by 10% by January 1.”
You can leap into action around this kind of goal, work everyone to the bone, and still fail. This is what happens most often because you’re not in control of how the environment will respond to your efforts.
The classic example of the second kind of goal is a process oriented goal. E.g. “Market at x tradeshows in 2022.”
Unlike the first kind, these kinds of goals are achievable. Only achieving them doesn’t always lead to growth. This is because they’re simply an extension or replication of what you can already do.
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Earlier this week, I wrote about how ignorance is its own obstacle.
We operate with half formed ideas about our business. Internally, these concern the nature of roles, team members, offers, systems, and etc. Externally, we develop theories about trends, markets, and competitors.
These half formed ideas are emerging beliefs still coalescing from experience.
The challenge is that these emerging beliefs aren’t accurate, but we operate as if they are.
For example, a couple of years ago, we launched a service that I tested by selling some initial customers through PPC. Having established that customers were in search, we built up our SEO for those terms. I projected sales based off traffic. The traffic came, but the sales did not.
I believed, erroneously, that PPC ads would be treated the same way as content that ranked for those terms- but that wasn’t true. I would have been better served to spend that time and money optimizing PPC campaigns.
We don’t know where our beliefs are off, but we still have to operate based on something.
The trick is to identify what beliefs matter. Where are the obstacles to growth?
Once you’re clear on where you’re stuck, what are your assumptions about these obstacles?
Finally and most importantly:
What data would eliminate assuming?
Featured image is one of the maps that Columbus used as a basis to seek out Asia by crossing the ocean. The missing North American continent is super-imposed over the original 1472 map created by Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli. Revised illustration by Bartholomew, J. G. – A literary and historical atlas of America. Used under Public Domain
Back when startups were reinventing business, I remember hearing many entrepreneurs evaluate everything according to scale. As in, “We stopped doing that because it doesn’t scale.”
Scale is a useful quality to consider when thinking about your business’s growth.
Some businesses don’t scale well, if at all.
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I run a digital agency, but I don’t particularly like it as a business model. I don’t take joy in our writing code, analyzing analytics, or any of the many tasks that we perform.
I don’t dislike it either though. There are downsides to agencies, but also some wonderful qualities too.
For me, it’s just a medium for practicing the deeper skills of business.
It’s the dojo where I train.
There are inherent challenges in every business model. It’s easy to think that the obstacles you face are uniquely difficult. Doing so, you give yourself an excuse for not overcoming them.
Agencies have their own version of hard problems, but these problems are also the portals to greater skill. To a more capable version of the agency operator.
The same opportunity exists in every business, including yours.
“A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
Featured image is the “Sword Saint” of Japan, Miyamoto Musashi, dueling on the shores of Ganryū Island. By Yoshifusa Utagawa (840-1860) used under public domain