Small Business Articles on Processes

Moving from an Individual Contributor to a Leader in Your Own Business You’ve taken the big first step to exponential growth. You’ve decided to get out of your own way. You’re going to stop struggling to do everything yourself or be involved with everything yourself. But you haven’t quite got there yet.  Though you have reduced your workload, you haven’t yet got to the magical pivot point where you work on the business, not in the business. You’re still involved in the day-to-day operations.  Why is this? How do you work on business, not in it? Changing to Working on Your Business Not in Your Business Though you are doing less yourself, you … [Read more...]

Four Keys for Growth Creative agencies require the management of sometimes unpredictable people and services. But this doesn’t mean you have to suffer unpredictable sales growth. Despite the uncertainty and variability that you have accepted as part of your business, there are growth strategies for creative service firms like yours that will produce a steady upward trajectory for revenues and success. I’ve condensed these into the following four strategies for growing professional firms: Know what business you are in and what drives your success. Deliver consistent high-quality services that provide terrific value for your clients.  Have a consistent and … [Read more...]

The Stand-Out Strategy to Deliver Yourself from Burnout As the owner of a small business, you’re used to doing it all yourself. Now you’re ready to grow, but you’re getting in your own way: Have you found that you’ve built yourself a successful creative agency, but that you’re stuck because you’re doing too much yourself?   Have you tried to bring on help, but found that no one is able to do the work as well as you?   At the same time, are you frustrated because your business is stuck and can’t grow without you spending significantly more time on it? Are you considering hiring a manager to run your business … [Read more...]

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...]