Category: Strategy

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Getting the Clients I Want OR: The Law of Attraction?

The thought came to me just now that my business has continued to grow quite well, and almost all of the business that I’ve gained is for new hosting and maintenance clients, which is actually what I want.

While we still regularly have website design projects, they are becoming less and less frequent.

Now, it doesn’t feel like I’ve actively gone out of my way to avoid website design projects. My processes are all pretty much the same for website designs and I always tell people that we do it.

If I didn’t put any more thought into it, I’d simply say that it’s the Law of Attraction. You put what you want out there and it will come to you.

And I think there’s some truth to that, but if you break it down, you can see why it works. It’s not just some mystical thing that works magically.

I put a lot of thought into how to get more hosting clients. I’ve been actively tweaking my website and marketing to better reflect that we do that. I’ve been pushing hosting and maintenance services for years, while probably downplaying design.

Meanwhile, I haven’t updated my website design portfolio in quite some time, and it needs it. That just hasn’t been a priority.

I also put a lot of work into improving our hosting services and making them as good as possible. I don’t put as much thought into design.

Little by little, both the services I provide and the quality of my messaging and marketing improves. Little changes stack up over time, to where I am now getting way more of these clients.

Maybe nothing has slipped really for website design, but all of these little things add up over time in a huge way.

And this got me thinking: just imagine how all the other little things in my life can add up over time?

The power of gradual change cannot possibly be overstated.

As long as I continue progressing and putting work into the things that are important to me, they will work out.

I just need to keep going.

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The “Managed” Part of Our Hosting Really Is the Selling Point

It’s become abundantly clear to me within the last 6 months or so that what people value most about our website hosting is that it is “managed”.

Sure, they are happy to know that it’s fast and has all these features, but at the end of the day, they don’t really care about that. They just want someone to take care of it for them.

Maybe that doesn’t seem like a great insight to others, but right now it’s a big deal.

I have been a bit shocked to hear that, when offered a faster service for a bit more money, almost none of my clients have been interested at all.

They just don’t care.

What they want is for someone to handle all of this for them.

And I do! I do a good job, too, so they tend to stick around.

And while some are price-conscious, most are not. As long as it’s reasonable and we are doing a good job, they are happy to pay it.

Because they see the value.

Most have been in business a while and probably remember what it was like to work with non-managed hosting. That fear of being totally lost and having to sit on the phone with support drives them to work with us.

And I’m only just this moment realizing that I probably should try to control people’s domains, too. I’ve had some clients lately whose sites went down due to things within their hosting account that I could have easily dealt with.

So going forward, I should recommend that they transfer their domains to me.

I could even charge a premium for “managed domain registration”.

I don’t think much more needs to happen right now. I just need to always keep in mind why people work with me.

It’s not the speed. It’s not the features.

It’s our service.

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Feeling Successful and Productive Makes You More So

This last week I was working through my to-do list and I was quite productive and completed many important tasks, including some that had been delayed for quite a long time. I felt good about everything I was doing and the direction I was taking.

And then I felt excited about the future and the prospects for my business and even started to have new, profound ideas about how best to improve things going forward.

I feel like for the last couple years I’ve sort of gotten stuck in a cycle of “keeping up” with everything. I’m barely on top of things and the best I can hope for is generally just to complete the backlog of urgent tasks.

And when you do that, you don’t feel good or accomplished. You feel like you did the bare-minimum poorly.

Which is exactly how I feel quite often when I’m working. Almost all the time, actually.

Now, I’m probably doing a better job than I think and I certainly have high standards. I know I’m not burning my business to the ground and I have countless happy clients.

But I’ve felt like I’m doing the bare minimum and that’s what’s important because it affects all of my actions.

It’s also absolutely true that I haven’t done much beyond maintenance of my business. I’ve probably spent an average of maybe 10 minutes per week in the last two years “on my business”, working on new ideas and on ways to try to grow. That’s… Nothing.

As a result, I haven’t felt as excited as I should be about things and I’ve gotten stuck in somewhat of a vicious cycle where my lack of initiative and time spent on these critical functions has further hurt morale and initiative and results in me doing them even less.

But I feel that coming back.

As I’m finally starting to tackle these backlog items and projects that should help grow the business, I feel more invigorated and excited about the future. I’m exploring new ideas and genuinely putting effort into making things happen.

So I think it absolutely works both ways. Just like with most things, good behavior begets more good behavior. Or you can do a bad job and get more and more stuck over time.

Obviously this post can serve to simply encourage me to stay on top of things and focus on activities that grow the business, but I think it’s important to put a more-actionable suggestion in here as well.

Going forward, I think I need to make it a point to do something every day that feels like it will help grow the business or improve things significantly in some way. It can even be something tiny.

This is important to do even on days when I’m overwhelmed. It needs to feel like, every day, I am making important progress in my business and never that I’m simply keeping up with what I have.

That’s critical.

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I Know How to Grow, I just Haven’t Done It

As I’m reading through old posts and considering my current position, I’m realizing that I probably know exactly how to grow my business and am just not doing it.

Case in point: working with one of my partner companies, they have a variety of websites they’d like us to host. Once they are over to us, we can begin billing for that hosting.

It’s up to me to make sure those sites get migrated. And I just haven’t been doing it.

This is the proverbial “low hanging fruit” and I just haven’t been pursuing it at all, despite the fact that I absolutely have.

Yes: it’s more exciting to talk to a new client and make a new sale. In this case, the sale is already done, and all that remains is the boring logistics of actually migrating the websites and setting up billing.

What this might be reflective of is the fact that I love the conceptual, the novel, and the big-picture. I don’t love details and implementation. But in this case, they are absolutely critical.

Reading through my posts, I also have countless ideas of how to expand my hosting operations. But I’ve barely implemented any of them.

Networking with owners of other website hosting companies would be a great start! So I think it’s time to finally get to that and other ideas.

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Time to Reach out to IT Providers

I was talking with a business associate of mine the other day and that conversation led to some great insights.

I’ve long had the idea that IT companies would be likely to want to work with me and outsource their website hosting business to me. Generally, they hate providing the service and only do it to appease their clients.

I think what’s held me back from wanting to just go out and talk to a bunch of them is that I always felt like it wouldn’t be a two-way relationship. So often (especially in the BNI world), you go into a meeting thinking, “how can we refer business to each other?”

And in my case, I only have so many potential leads for IT companies, and all of those are going to go to the IT company I already have a strong relationship with.

But there are ways to help others besides just providing them referrals.

In this case, we can engage in a mutually-beneficial arrangement. If they don’t like hosting and are providing a bad service doing it, we can solve those problems. We can take all of those headaches away.

Obviously it’s good for us since it’s new business, but it’s also good for them because it solves a problem they’ve been having.

So I want to have at least a short-term plan for reaching out to these IT companies.

The obvious first-step is to ask if anybody knows the owners of IT companies, which I did this morning in BNI. And it worked! I got a referral and now have a meeting lined up for Friday with an IT company.

But what if I got more specific? I could start looking into all of the companies in the Twin Cities, and start asking people if they are connected with specific ones.

I could even target ones that have a mutual connection on Linkedin and then ask those people specifically for a connection!

I could also potentially start cold-calling down the road, but understandably, I’m not thrilled about that idea.

But I should have connections to plenty of these businesses, so for the time being, I should really explore those.

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I Need to Always Be Improving One Thing

So I just read a rather depressing but very honest and introspective post from myself from February this year. In it, I explained how I felt like I hadn’t really been trying all that hard. But I felt like I had rounded a corner, and that 2020 was going to be nothing but good things!

Putting the soul-crushing irony of that belief aside, while the post did bring up some great points and present a good overall picture of where I was (am) at, it didn’t really provide any real strategies for improvement.

As much as I wish it were, “start trying harder” is simply not an effective strategy, no matter what anybody tells you. And neither is anything dealing with “motivation”.

So what do I do?

I’ve talked a lot about the “One thing”, the thing I need to focus on most in my business (or life!) to improve at any one moment. While I’m not strictly saying that I should just, “do that”, but focusing on one area is, in fact, what I’m saying.

I need to always be focusing on improving in one area. I’ve written at length about habits, and how I want to be building one new habit at all times, etc.

As strange as it is to say, the one habit that I need to be building, more than any other is… Building new habits constantly.

So… I guess to start, I’ll need to be building two habits at a time!

But that seriously needs to be it. Even if I’m doing a bad job building whatever habit it is I’m working on, I just need to be doing it. I need to focus every single day on it, and aggressively enforce what I’m doing.

And the reason for this goes beyond “habits are good”.

If I want to get to where I feel like I’m “trying hard”, it’s going to take a lot of work building up the habits and resilience that it takes. It’s going to be improving things, one step at a time.

I’ve written about sleep habits extensively, and so far have just been plagued by failures with those. Maybe that’s a good place to start and just double down on fixing that.

I’m taking a month-long break from alcohol and so this seems like a good time for it. I’ve tried to do just one piece at a time, but maybe I need all of the following to be in sync for this to work:

  • Going to bed early
  • Waking up at the same early time every morning
  • Not using the snooze button
  • Not napping

I have so many years of bad habits with all of these lined up, I may just have to do it all. I might be exhausted initially, but that exhaustion will help me sleep earlier and get better sleep, which will then help with not needing to snooze or take naps, and over time I should even start waking up at the same time.

So… I just need to focus on this, and then the next thing, and then just keep improving.

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I’ve Gotten Comfortable Just Running the Business

Don’t let the title fool you: this is a post about something bad.

I just got done reading some of my posts from January and February, when I was excited to grow my business and really work through a ton of marketing things. And then, as you know, the world changed in March.

So for a long time I told myself that it was okay to just worry about keeping things going and not too much on working ON the business instead of IN it.

But it’s been 7 months now, and I’m still just working IN the business. I haven’t gotten around to doing… anything. I just work on the projects we have, as they come, and that’s it. I’ve done almost nothing to advance my company.

I am working with a marketing company now, and we are about to embark on a new campaign that may lead to many new clients (or at least I’m hoping!). And in that sense, maybe I’ll just fall over backwards into success without having to do all of the work.

Or maybe, if this works, the takeaway is that if I’m just not putting in the effort or having success in an area: outsource. Why make things difficult for myself? Just outsource and things will be fine.

But I don’t know that yet, so in the meantime, I should really focus on getting back into working on the business again. Even if it’s just for 15 minutes per day, I really need to do it. Things are a little slow right now and that scares me a bit! But it’s also an opportunity.

Take advantage of it.

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The Power of Having a System

I’ve started seeing rapid gains in my weight-training. After something like 7 or 8 years of little-to-no progress, that really is something!

And you know what really changed?

I have a system.

Historically, I’ve always chosen a handful of movements, and basically just lifted until I couldn’t anymore. Next week I would try again, and hopefully be able to do more reps.

It worked great in the beginning, when it’s easy to grow your untrained muscles. But within a year or two, it stalled almost completely. And I had no system to get me through roadblocks.

But now I have one! It tells me how much weight to lift each week, how much to add for the next workout, and what to do if I fail. It anticipates those failures and outlines a systematic plan to alter the weight I’m doing, grow stronger, and then break past barriers.

And it has been wildly effective. In a month or two I’ve improved more than in the last several years. It really is incredible.

It turned out that the problem wasn’t lack of effort, diet, sleep, form, or any of the other tiny details that can be totally overwhelming. It was just that I needed a system.

Of course, once things start going well, you tend to do everything else right, too. I’ve been eating better, getting enough of the nutrients needed, and being much more consistent in my training. The success is extremely motivating and it’s easy to do the harder things when you know they are going to be successful.

But now I’m thinking: where else can I apply systems to my life to have these kinds of impacts? How can I apply it to how I’m running my business?

I mean, what is my system for improving my business?

That’s a rhetorical question. I obviously don’t have anything remotely resembling a system to improve my business. And that’s bad!

In fact, I think I’ve been relying on this blog to be my “system”, which is almost exactly like how I used to weight train. I have a lot of good ideas, things that can really help. And I’m trying things here and there, hoping something sticks. But ultimately, they don’t lead to results.

Maybe the one thing I’m missing is just a system to guide my actions and hold me accountable. I’m at the tail-end of many months of essentially doing nothing to improve my business. Maybe I just need some structure.

I know I’ve read plenty of books that outline specific systems for doing exactly what I’m describing. I think it may be time to dust those off and take them more seriously.

Because while things are actually going decently in my business (all things considered), I’m really not improving right now. And if I could replicate the success of my weight training with my business, I think it would be extremely motivating and actually lead to even more success.

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What if Most Businesses Grow Because they Invest Money, Regardless of What In?

Today’s thoughts are a little difficult to explain, but I’ll do my best.

The background to this is that I’ve determined I could probably turn money into new clients fairly reliably by purchasing other businesses. It’s a bit costly, but it works.

Most other businesses also grow and also invest money in opportunities, though they don’t typically acquire other businesses.

But my thought is basically this: what if they are only growing because they invested money at all, regardless of where they put it?

Obviously there are free forms of marketing, though they usually take time and therefor have a real opportunity cost, so in my opinion it’s the same in the end.

So if monetary investment of any kind is what leads to growth, acknowledging that fact has some very profound ramifications.

It would essentially mean that if you want to grow, you need to have extra cash on hand in order to invest in worthwhile activities. Without that budget, you’ll struggle to grow.

I think you could also simplify all forms of marketing and just say that all marketing you can invest in has an expected rate of return and acquisition cost for new clients, and while your goal is of course to maximize return and minimize costs, ultimately you’re going to have to spend money regardless.

Furthermore, given your limited resources, why not do everything you can to find the investment options with the highest ROI, and then invest everything into that?

Why bother diversifying at all?

I think so many businesses have so much on their plate with trying to run a bunch of social media pages and accounts, email marketing, SEO, trade shows, branded merchandise, various advertising, and much more.

But at the end of the day, all of those cost something and all of them have differing ROIs. Nothing should really matter other than the ROI, so why would you bother diversifying to that extent?

I think you should find what works best, and then put everything into it.

And now that you’ve found what works, and you’ve acknowledged that all you’re doing at this point is turning cash into growth for your business, the question becomes: how can I free up as much cash as possible so I can grow as fast as possible?

That is, assuming growth is your goal. But this is capitalism, so growth should basically always be the goal. Anyone who is putting any effort into marketing but doesn’t seem to think they want to grow (or more commonly: doesn’t actually have the capacity or ability to handle growth), is confused and should reconsider his priorities.

Historically, I’ve spent almost nothing on marketing; I’ve only put in my time. Which worked for a while, but obviously has a limit. I only have so much time, but money could grow forever.

I feel like I can see a future where I’ve figured out where to put my marketing dollars, where I’m putting everything I make back in and keep the ball rolling. It seems predictable and safe.

But as long as I accept this model as accurate and worthwhile, my mindset needs to shift completely. Whereas in the past my thoughts were always on marginally improving things and… I actually don’t really know what I was trying to do. I guess just grow “naturally”, whatever that means?

But whereas that, my goal now should literally just be to make as much money as possible now, take advantage of my credit, and invest as much as I can into growth. And as I take on more clients and have more recurring revenue, use that cash to grow even faster.

Unfortunately, I’m at a point at this exact moment where I don’t have much cash, and I’m not making a huge amount more than what I need to survive. I do have credit available, and I did just buy a business that will give me extra funds on a yearly basis.

But I’ll need to really think about where my dollars are going now, and how I can leverage them to trigger growth long-term.

As a follow-up side note: I don’t mean to imply that marketing initiatives that take up my time or can’t immediately be utilized or scaled up by spending more money aren’t worthwhile. There’s still room for a cohesive marketing strategy, and content marketing, SEO, and possibly social media advertising may still all end up being pieces of what I’m doing.

But they are all investments, and they need to be treated as such and possibly given money to be allowed to achieve their full potential.

I also don’t know exactly which options are going to have the best ROI for me. That’s part of what I’ll be working on over the coming months.

But if I can buy clients at the rate of $144 each, then that’s the metric to compare against. If I can find a way to acquire clients for less than that, it sounds like a good place to start dumping money.

And as a final side-note: for a typical client, I will likely make more profit than $144/year. So if my acquisition cost is less than that, it means that they’ll be profitable after a single year. And then after that, those profits could be used to acquire 1 new client.

Which means that technically, I should be able to double in size each year if I do things right.

Of course there are taxes and some other expenses that seem fixed will inevitably grow with the business, but even so, I should be able to grow very rapidly if I do this right.

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I Need to Develop a More Robust Marketing Strategy

I’ve been reading a lot of books recently as part of my “One Thing” each day to help prepare me for all of my upcoming marketing plans. And I’ve concluded that there are quite a few things I’m going to need to do.

In addition to rethinking my positioning, rewriting my website content, putting together landing pages, and testing out different advertising options, I think I’m also going to need to plan out email marketing strategies and automation campaigns.

While I haven’t thought all of this through just yet, it’s become clear to me that I probably won’t be able to just put an ad on Facebook and have people purchase my services without any additional interactions.

Most likely, it will require me to turn them into subscribers of some kind first, and then eventually they will buy from me after enough interactions.

Unfortunately, it’s all just quite a bit more complicated and will take much more work than initially anticipated.

One interesting thing I read about is the difference between high-risk and low-risk sales. Unfortunately, I’ve found very little information regarding how to sell the two differently, which is very odd.

Low-risk sales are considered those of less than $200. My services could certainly fall under that category if billed monthly. So if nothing else, a good insight here is that monthly payment options should definitely be considered for new clients because the barrier to purchase is so much lower.

But even as a low-risk service, I think people perceive that going with us for any of our services is a very important business decision, and that they need to be cautious in their choices with it.

I’ve had a couple other interested thoughts recently that are unrelated.

The first is the fact that the clients we want to work with already have WordPress sites, and that we don’t need to sell them at all on WordPress itself. They already understand its value.

And with that in mind, I thought of a brief tagline of sorts that I thought sort of represented our value to those people.

“WordPress is hard. We make it easy.”

Perhaps a bit too simple, but maybe not! It’s not exactly praising WordPress itself, but to a business owner who is struggling with maintaining a WordPress site, they’ll get it. 

That’s all I have for now. I’ll be reading a few more books and then hopefully moving on to the rest of the tasks.