Today’s podcast is my response to a great question that came in on the blog from Matt Ham:
- Revenue: It’s all about revenue in the beginning phases. Where there is no margin, there is no business. If you’re not actually making revenue, guess what, you don’t have a business! Utilize guerilla marketing and social media to build your platform as inexpensively as possible. Once you’re making a profit and the business is humming, move to the next step.
- Hires: Who do you hire first? Based on the first step, I’m always going to start with a sales person. Why? I need to bring revenue in and a sales person cost justifies. If they don’t sell, they don’t get paid. Now, if you are the one selling and doing an incredible job, you’d be best served to hire an admin person to take tasks off your plate that keep you from selling. Admin people are a fixed expense. If you don’t have the revenue, be careful on the budget balance.
- Marketing: Think tactically not expensively. What can you do with your website? Is it functional and aesthetic? What can you do with SEO like keywords, adwords, content creation, etc. How can you continue to bolster your platform by spending a little bit of money? Sneak peak – we’re going to be launching marketing coaching soon.
- Strategic: Up until this point, you should be focused on the here and now. Once you get to this step, you should start thinking 6 months to a year out. What can you do as far as future initiatives? Are you launching new products or services? What about marketing strategies? What is the most important thing to grow the company in the next 6 months. Don’t just drop ideas into place and hope they work out. You need a system that outlines the most important thing to do going forward. After our Strategic Planning events, businesses usually leave with 4 to 6 initiatives and they leave knowing nothing is more important that those items. If you focus on those things, you grow.
Those are the steps I’d go through if I was a small business starting out or growing. On the next episode, we’re going to be answering any question you have about the process of strategic planning or our event. Comment on this post and be sure to listen for the answer on The Chris LoCurto Show next week!
Great advice Chris! Keeping it simple and focused on what’s going to get you where you need to go!
Thanks for using the question brother – so glad to hear you go through it. Time to get started on #1!!
The one piece of advice we got when we paid for a Strategic plan three years ago was, “don’t let this data sit on the shelf and collect dust!”
to the question, how often do you revisit the plan? And when do you revamp the plan?
How far ahead do you plan and why do you recommend that time frame?
How do you plan ahead with any form of accuracy when there are so many unknown variables?
Thanks for more great info! As an established business (started in 1978) looking to grow, do your suggestions change? We’ve all taken the DISC profiles and I think communication internally has gotten much stronger. That was one of the goals prior to looking at further expansion. I think my fear is that with expansion and bringing new people into the team there will be some back tracking on the high levels of communication as new hires are brought up to speed on our culture.
Pak Chris – I live in Singapore now and had to chuckle at your “Pak” unsurety. I too had to figure it out when I moved here. In short, it’s the Indonesian version of “Mr.” But the pronunciation is tricky; it’s for the most part (and you won’t go wrong with) pronounced like “pack” but there’s a funny throaty cut off with the k when you do it right.
Practice up! Then head to Java (the main Island over here, where Jakarta is) for more coffee!
Oh – and good reminder about keeping it quick and dirty in the beginning.