Category: Business

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The New Product Offerings

I wanted to basically collect my thoughts on paper (hard drive?) regarding the changes I plan on making in my business. I’ve gone back and forth on a lot of things and I’d like to just have some clarity here about what we’re going to offer.

Originally, I thought that we would just provide one, single service that couldn’t be customized at all to our clients. However, I no longer thing that’s the best choice. We don’t need to be that simple.

As long as I don’t personally need to be involved in the day-to-day services for our clients, I’ll still be able to scale everything properly.

I’m thinking we’ll reel people in with our core product: managed WordPress hosting. We’ll offer it at fairly reasonable prices to try to get them hooked in. Since the “managed” portion constitutes the bulk of the costs, this will be an incredibly attractive offer.

Then, we’ll offer upgrades. These would be offered when they are signing up, and would include:

  • Basic Email Hosting (up to 5 inboxes, but upgradable for more)
  • WordPress updates (Plugins and Core)
  • Theme Updates (for those with premium themes that need to be manually updated)
  • SSL Certificates (With options for all the ones my host offers)
  • Compute Boosters
  • Malware and Hacking Protection (Basically we install Wordfence and monitor it regularly (weekly?), and if a hack appears, we take care of it. Requires the updates service)

Additionally, I think we’ll provide the following hourly services as requested:

  • Breakfixes (If the site goes down, we bill hourly to fix it)
  • Hack fixes (if they didn’t already have the protection)

I’ve considered allowing for content changes and other additions, but at least for now I want to avoid that. We don’t want to compete with web developers, since some of them might actually be our clients. Additionally, the entire purpose is to avoid all of the quoting and subjective nature of that entire field. We want our services to be extremely rigid so that we can replicate and scale them.

At the moment, I think it makes most sense to target IT companies. Since that’s what’s already working with our similar, existing services, I have reason to believe it will keep working. They are the ones who have little knowledge of web services but are asked to deal with it anyway. We can relieve that headache.

I haven’t yet figured out exactly how to market to them yet, but that will come. Honestly, Facebook and Linkedin ads are looking pretty attractive, but I need to figure that out. I might reach out to a bunch directly to begin with.

I intend to speak with a couple IT company owners to get their feedback before I start. I think this will help me figure some things out ahead of time and smooth over potential issues.

I plan to build a series of online forms as the on-boarding process. They’ll be able to select their options, set up payments, and then submit relevant information to help us migrate them.

Once I’ve got that set up, I need to get a few clients to actually go there and sign up. If I’m sure it’s working, I can then go full-speed ahead on marketing.

The goal is to find some kind of marketing system that is totally automated but still has a positive ROI. Once we have clients, they are likely to stay. So getting clients will be the hard part. If I can get clients in an automated fashion and still have a first-year ROI that is positive, I absolutely need to aggressively pursue that option.

In addition to pursuing regular marketing means, I should probably also be focusing on my SEO. Consistently writing articles I think has the possibility of really benefiting me. Since I already have decent rankings and a large SEO presence with this site, it shouldn’t be too hard to start funneling traffic to the right places.

The other thing to consider is that a large chunk of my traffic might actually be hapless IT providers googling how to solve their client’s problems when they don’t really know how and don’t want to. In other words: our ideal client.

So there’s a few steps to go, but I think I need to try and organize my thoughts and the steps involved a bit more, and then power through them!

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The Future? Managed WordPress Hosting & Updates for IT Companies & Web Designers

I had an epiphany today. I asked myself the question, “what part of  my business is the most consistently profitable and also easiest to manage?”

The answer? WordPress hosting and updates.

And where does probably half of that business come from? IT companies and other web designers / marketing companies.

We can solve a problem. Particularly with IT companies, they have a ton of clients and all of them ask about website hosting or basic maintenance for their websites. Often these companies know little about it, and don’t want to deal with it at all.

That’s where we come in! We provide fully managed hosting where we deal with everything for them. We migrate sites, we deal with hosting issues, we install SSLs, everything. And we even provide updates to WordPress sites to keep them secure.

We take all of the headache out of it. And our prices aren’t crazy so they can still make money on top of that.

And you know how I know it will work? I already have a bunch of these clients! My IT partners have been hosting their sites with me for years and they seem to love it. They value there is incredibly great.

I already have some traction on my website in terms of SEO in these areas, and I could use that to start funneling people to a new landing page to test how well it will work. If I have some luck, I could even create some targeted Facebook ads try to really try and scale it and get immediate feedback on how well it will work.

This is also an area where I could really create processes that make every single step very simple and I could have a staff that knows exactly how to handle everything in a fairly automated fashion. Ideally I would only need to manage business operations down the road and wouldn’t need to interact with clients or handle issues myself, ever.

I’m really just starting to think through this now, so there are still some questions to be answered but so far this seems very promising.

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Focus Must Always be on Freeing Up Time

I’ll open up today’s thoughts with an example. I have a project that requires some custom coding. It will be a little tricky to implement, and is outside of my current skill-set. My team is already busy with other things, and I don’t want to burden them with this additional task.

It’s also already behind schedule, yet quite important. It needs to get done soon.

I figured I would just handle it myself! So I spent probably over an hour messing around with it. To finish the whole thing, I started realizing would take many hours.

And then I realized… Why am I doing this? Am I really utilizing my time most effectively?

No. I wasn’t.

So what did I do?

I realized that I could just outsource this to my go-to contractor for code-heavy tasks. He’s usually fast and can work with anything. All I needed to do was spend 10 minutes putting together specific requirements and sending him the passwords and documentation, and I was done.

It will probably take him fewer hours than it would have taken me, plus now I am free to work on other things.

I need to always be thinking about how I can free up more time, and I need to have an aggressive mindset of avoiding work that others could be doing. It’s not that I can’t do those things or even that I don’t want to. It may even be on the contrary! It’s that the only way to grow is to focus all of my energy on running the business and making the operations as self-sufficient as I can.

Every time I’m bogged down working on actual client work, it’s completely unscalable and I’m hurting my future success.

If I can keep that in mind always, and constantly be looking at how I can improve that, I will me more profitable and will have fewer headaches in the business.

I need to be honest and fair with myself as well, however. I can’t change everything overnight. To be honest, one day I’d like to not only avoid doing sales myself, but also focus all of my time on the direction of the company and none of it interacting with clients.

But that can’t happen overnight. Hiring a salesperson is a very difficult thing to be able to do. And currently, I handle most of the client interactions, which is how it needs to stay (with the exception of having developers interact with clients during projects, which can and should be happening as much as possible.)

So I can’t beat myself up at the moment when things come up that I need to deal with. The goal is constant improvement in these areas, not overnight changes.

But overall I just want to re-state my focus so I can continue to improve.

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Feedback from Partners Regarding my Focus and Strengths

At a B2B meeting for BNI today, I asked my business partners to brainstorm and share with me what they think my unique strengths are in the marketplace and what value I bring. The goal was to fine-tune my marketing and targeting as well as messaging.

Some wonderful insight came from this meeting.

Here are a select few of the biggest things people said about my strengths:

  • We are great experts and partners, and are capable of guiding people to what works best for them rather than just giving them what they want
  • We have an intuitive sense for what client’s needs are
  • We have the ability to fully customize functionality and design to an extent that can’t be found elsewhere
  • We have an intuitive sense of beauty as well as a practical business sense that allows us to create stunning, effective websites
  • Our design sense is fresh and clean
  • We are interested in investing in long-term relationships and offering ongoing support, which most places don’t do

Much of that is really great! I feel like I’ve touched on many of those in my marketing and messaging before but never really focused too much on others. It’s nice to hear the biggest things that these partners value.

I think to summarize where to go with this, I think we should basically present ourselves as the experienced experts who offer thoughtful long-term solutions to website needs.

There’s probably a better way to phrase all of that, but that’s basically it! We need clients to know that we are experts, we can help them figure out the best course of action, we can implement it effectively and beautifully, and we’re looking to stick around for the long-term.

Maybe, using this information, I should get more feedback from others and look for better ways to phrase it all and make it cohesive.

I didn’t really identify what specific clients to work with in this meeting, but knowing what value I bring will bring me one step closer to that!

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Second Most Important Thing?

Recently I posted in this blog about the “most important thing” being these blog posts, where I have some reflection and determine all of the things I need to improve. It’s still quite possibly the most important thing I do every day.

But in the past, I had always considered the “most important thing” to be self-improvement through education and learning. Mostly it has taken the form of reading books on a variety of topics.

Is that, then, the second most important thing? For now, I’m going to say yes! Things like, focusing on improving the business are important too, but none of them are as far-reaching and critical to my long-term success as improving myself through learning.

Reading has given me a huge list of improvements, both short-term and long-term. In the short-term, I feel empowered and capable. Learning something new makes me excited to try new things and general sense that I’m improving and my situation is going to constantly improve.

And long-term, it’s basically everything. I makes me more effective. It improves my decision making. It helps me focus on what’s important and ignore the rest. It literally makes me better at everything. Knowledge is power, as they say.

These are all things that will serve me well for my entire lifetime. The more knowledge I can acquire while I’m still young, the more valuable it will be over the course of my life. Just like making an investment early. Exactly like that, actually.

I need to redouble my efforts to constantly improve myself. Whether that means reading books, taking courses (online and off), trying and improving in new things, learning a language, or even just meeting new people and hearing their thoughts. It’s absolutely critical.

Without that learning, it’s easy for things to feel stagnant. Like nothing is going to improve, and that I’m not getting better at anything. I think one of the most important things in life, in terms of feeling fulfilled, is to always be improving. And I need to do that.

Lately I’ve maybe not been as focused on it as I should have been. I’ve gotten carried off in different directions with work, and I’ve been spending more time on other, unrelated activities in my spare time. I’ve even got a handful of books I’ve only partially finished! I need to finish those up.

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Time to Write Every Day

I’m thinking that I should start writing here, literally every day, for at least ten minutes.

My initial thought was, “how valuable is thinking about my own business towards its future success?” And I think the answer is, perhaps clearly, ‘extremely valuable’.

And yet, how often do I actually do it? I have lots of little thoughts here or there, but it’s almost never organized, and often no action comes from it anyway.

I think it would benefit me hugely to just organize my thoughts on a regular basis here. I’d like to outline just some of the ways that I think it will help.

1. Focus

It will help me focus on what’s important, and also to keep any pressing tasks or goals top-of-mind. By thinking about these things every single day, and in an organized manner, they will be more likely to actually stick and have an impact on my actions.

2. Time Analysis

I’ll be able to analyze what I’ve been spending time on and what has actually contributed to my success. If none of the things I did contribute much to my actual goals, I’ll have to ask myself why I’m doing them.

3. Organization and Clarity of Thoughts

By writing things out, I am clarifying my thinking and organization my plans and analysis. Once it’s on paper it will help me think about it more. Since there are a million things I could be doing at any given point, it’s nice to narrow that down.

4. Improved Writing and Communication

Simply by writing every day, I’ll get better at it. Better writing is useful virtually everywhere, so this can only help. It is likely to even improve in-person communication I think.

5. Last-Minute Blog Posts

It’s likely that there will be value in some of these musings to others beyond myself. In a pinch, I can always revise one and make it a blog post!

6. Goal and Progress Tracking

I’ll be able to go back and read previous entries and see where I was at. This could help me see where I’m stuck, and also to track how I’ve come along on priorities and goals.

7. Posterity

This could be a great collection of writings at some point. Maybe I’ll want to look back at it for myself, maybe I’ll want to make some kind of compilation. Who knows!

8. Conscious Effort Towards Business Thinking

This is a concrete step I can take to spending more time thinking about my business and how I can improve. It could start a chain reaction of improved business planning.

 

Thought of the Day – Not Spending Time on Most Important Activities

We’ve all heard the Pareto Principal, also known as the 80/20 rule. But what if you’ve identified your 20 but don’t actually focus on them anyway?

Right now, I have work extending out for months on my waiting list. I need to find additional help to handle that. It’s like we’re ready to grow, I just need more help.

In one of my recent posts, I talk about how I need to change what activities I’m involved with in the business, and pursuing that will certainly give me more time to find that help. So I would say that concentrating on delegating and removing responsibilities from myself is certainly part of the 20, and an overall process to simplify my business and establish processes is critical for scaling as well.

But not everything I’m doing right now has anything to do with that. For instance, I’m spending a fair amount of time preparing for an event I’m hosting along with Kari Switala and others.

From a business perspective, what is the purpose of this event? Almost exclusively marketing. Getting new clients.

And is that a priority right now? No. Not at all. In fact we have too many!

I obviously can’t back out now since I made the commitment. Plus it’s coming up soon, so I would never do that anyway. But I think it’s important to recognize that it isn’t furthering my goals a whole lot.

The real issue is that it’s a short term marketing effort, which is specifically what I don’t need right now. Long term efforts such as BNI and blogging/SEO for my own website are still important, because I need to keep growing well into the future.

But the short term ones, I should be saying no to until I actually need them. There are way better ways to spend my time.

How Should I Spend My Time?

I thought I would sketch out a rough outline of how I think I actually should be spending my time, because I should be putting conscious effort in to that. Note that I attempted to include emails relating to these things in their respective categories

Long Term Time Spend Goal (6 Months)

20% Working on business, developing processes
20% Working with employees, hiring initiatives, training
15% Sales, Proposals, etc
15% BNI
10% Project Management
5% Admin Work (Billing, Invoices, Deposits, Accounting, Etc)
5% Writing Blog Posts / SEO for myself
9% Other
<1% Actually doing work on client sites

Short Term Time Spend Goal (6 Months)

15% Working on business, developing processes
10% Working with employees, hiring initiatives, training
10% Sales, Proposals, etc
15% BNI
15% Project Management
5% Admin Work (Billing, Invoices, Deposits, Accounting, Etc)
5% Writing Blog Posts / SEO for myself
10% Other
15% Actually doing work on client sites

Where I Think I Am Now

1% Working on business, developing processes
1% Working with employees, hiring initiatives, training
15% Sales, Proposals, etc
18% BNI
18% Project Management
10% Admin Work (Billing, Invoices, Deposits, Accounting, Etc)
2% Writing Blog Posts / SEO for myself
15% Other (Things like this upcoming event)
20% Actually doing work on client sites

There’s a lot to think about when looking at those numbers! The two most important long-term tasks (most likely), are ones I spend a combined 2% of my time on now. That’s terrible! I definitely need to work on that.

I think it might also be time to read “The One Thing” again, as it really goes over all of this, and is fantastic.