Small Business Articles on Processes

Relieve the Entrepreneurial Burnout You Are Causing Yourself Business owner burnout is one of the biggest risks to you and your creative agency. If you get burned out your business performance will suffer and growth will falter!  What happens to your business when you are burnt out? Does it continue to operate? A Xero survey published in Small Business Trends in 2017 found that more than three quarters of owners feel the effects of burnout.  What Is Business Owner Burnout? Entrepreneurial business owners who are burned out often feel alone. Like you are fighting a battle with no support.  Are you burned out, or getting there? Here are a few questions to help you identify … [Read more...]

How to Regain Your Mojo and Grow Your Business Many creative agencies and small business owners come to me with the same problem. They don’t have time to drive business growth. They wake early and get straight to work, checking emails before they have got out of bed. As soon as they arrive at work, they start fighting fires. They become wrapped up in other people’s tasks - micromanaging them to make sure they get done right. They forget meetings, get home late, and spend the last hour of the day ‘wrapping up’.  Does this sound familiar to you? The problem isn’t your team or your people. The problem is you. Your business is a mirror of … [Read more...]

Give Your Marketing Strategy a Solid Foundation How do you create strong brand positioning in your market? By developing a market positioning strategy. Marketing strategy can be intimidating. You understand sales, of course. But marketing? Why do you do it, and what’s it really for? And how do you write a positioning statement? Why you need marketing Marketing is one of the most powerful tools your business has. In the long term, it determines your success. It creates awareness, boosts reputation, and helps to develop and maintain demand.  Marketing informs your customers about what you do, for who, how, and why. Without this, there will be no sales to make. When you have a … [Read more...]

How to Unlock the Advantages of Specialization in a Service Firm In the start-up world, there’s an obsession with finding your product-market fit -- that point where you find the right mix of features, benefits, pricing, and marketing messages that capture the needs and desires of your target market in a way that makes them come toward you, that makes closing deals easy.  It sounds like a miracle, but I’ve seen it happen for creative agencies and service firms too. When they start out, they build some momentum, but then growth stalls. Some agency owners keep grinding on trying to push their way through it. Others pivot and innovate a new way to offer their services -- … [Read more...]

Like an Orange, Your Market Is Full of Juicy Segments When you see a marketing message that feels like it’s written directly to you, you are experiencing the value of Market Segmentation.  When you segment your market, you can create messages and offers that are more targeted. As a result, people will respond more, your lead attrition will be lower, and the amount of work and effort you and your team have to do to land the sale will shrink. In short, segmentation is key to achieving your full potential of growth and profitability. In this article, we look at a few of the many benefits of employing marketing segmentation strategies and a simple process to start segmenting your … [Read more...]

Are you searching for the pivot point that will transform your sales, but not sure what that looks like, never mind how it will happen?  There’s a lot of talk about “product-market fit” in the start-up world -- that point where your product offering matches closely with the needs and aspirations of your ideal target market. When that happens, things change; your ideal clients buy more quickly, they share your solution with others, clients start coming to you instead of you always going to them.  That same thing can happen with your creative agency or service business. Are you finding it hard to land clients?  If folks aren’t lighting up when they hear about what you do, it might not be … [Read more...]

The Pros and Cons of Implementing a Competition-Based Pricing Strategy One of the easiest forms of pricing is competitive-based pricing. Using this pricing strategy should ensure that you price in the ballpark of the price for similar services. If you do it well, a competition-based pricing strategy can help you raise prices without losing customers. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the best strategy for you. In this article, I explain the pros and cons of competition-based pricing. I share a few examples, discuss how to implement a competition-based pricing strategy, and you learn how to decide whether it is the right pricing model for your business. Let’s get … [Read more...]

The Pros and Cons of Implementing a Value-Based Pricing Strategy Wouldn’t it be great if you could price your services by shaping how your clients perceive the value you provide? Welcome to value-based pricing, a pricing strategy that has the potential to explode your profits. What is value-based pricing? When you employ value-based pricing, you set your prices on your service’s value to your clients. This should let you maximize revenues and profits: Your competitor’s prices are not a restriction, as they are when using a competition-based pricing strategy You free yourself from the mindset of a set profit margin, which is the foundation of pricing models like … [Read more...]

Putting ‘Good, Better, Best’ Pricing into Action How much more profitable could your business be if you could sell your services at higher prices? The answer is way more profitable, right?  Tiered pricing could be the answer to this conundrum. The strategy is successful for many reasons. It’s a great way to raise prices without losing customers. You may have even been ‘tiered priced’ without even knowing it. In this article, you’ll learn how tiered pricing could help you sell your services at higher prices to your customers – and a few tactics to help you achieve this. What is tiered pricing? There are several definitions of tiered pricing, and it’s often confused with volume … [Read more...]

The sales funnel is a useful concept for helping us visualize the journey that a prospect makes toward becoming a customer. But the idea of the “funnel” makes the process seem more predictable than most of us find in practice! Just because someone is in your funnel doesn’t mean that they will buy, or even that some percentage of them are going to buy this month! What can we control about our funnel, and what can’t we control? YOU CAN’T CONTROL WHO’S GOING TO BUY Obviously, not everyone buys. In fact, some folks you think are a slam dunk will never buy, and some long-shots will come through easily. YOU CAN’T CONTROL THEIR TIMING When a prospect tells you, “I want to get … [Read more...]