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5 “Gets” Any Business Must Get To Get Ahead

Have you ever known what business you wanted to run but couldn’t figure out how to get it running already? Yeah, me, too. But let me tell you what I found out.   To succeed at any business, you only need to get 5 things.

  1. You must get known
  2. You must get called
  3. You must get hired
  4. You must get done
  5. You must get paid

If you do these five things effectively and efficiently, then almost always, you will succeed in your business.

My good friend Linley Richter tells me does almost all of these things almost all the time and he is damn near perfect. I hate to tell him, however, “almost” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades and if you don’t do all five of these things persistently and consistently, then whatever you are doing will most likely be wasted.

Get Known

Getting known is all about branding your company, your products, and your services. Entrepreneur Magazine has a great article on branding. Read it. Apply it. No need for me to repeat the whole darned thing here.

Get Called

Getting called is all about marketing your branded company, products, and services efficiently. It’s a digital world, folks; but, don’t forget about traditional media as well. Entrepreneur Magazine has a great article on marketing in this modern world. Read it. Apply it. No need for me to repeat this whole darned thing here either.

Get Hired

Getting hired is all about taking leads who respond to your branding and marketing and converting them to customers who order what products and services you are selling. Holy cow! Entrepreneur Magazine has a great article on converting prospects. All you have to do is read it and apply. No need for me to even say there is no need to repeat the whole thing here.

Get Done

Getting done is something a lot of service-oriented business people like lawyers have a problem getting done. (Yes, I intended that circular statement.) They are great at starting cases; but once they get started, they get distracted getting hired on their next case and put the last case on a back burner. I bet you already know what I’m going to write next. But I’m going to fool you just a little bit. Entrepreneur Magazine has a great article on this. Read it. Learn from it the importance of spending most of your time actually doing the work that directly produces income. Then, take the oldest project you have taken on and get it the heck finished already. That way you and I can both get on the last “Get” you need to get to ahead in your business.

Get Paid

Getting paid is another thing a lot of service-orienting business people like lawyers have a problem getting to. Some folks are so busy getting known, called, hired, and done they forget the last, but certainly not least, thing any business needs to do, which is getting paid. No doubt, Entrepreneur has a great article on this. Read it. Do it.

Figuring out that these five things exist is not what’s important, however. Reading the articles is not what’s important either.

We know all these things. We’ve heard them all before. There are no secrets to any of them. Entreprenuer magazine didn’t make them up. Neither did the authors of their Entrepreneur’s great articles on them.

After you get done reading about doing all these things and perceiving them, planning them, and preparing to do them, check in tomorrow and read about “The Most Important Get To Get To Get Ahead In Your Business.”[reminder]What do you think the most important Get is?[/reminder]

 

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Finding Customers for Pennies on the Dollar Instead of a Dime

Picture of cornucopiaHave you ever thought it would be so great simply to pay one media outlet all your monthly branding, marketing, and advertising budget and be able to get all the leads you could service each month? Yeah, me, too. I’ve both had dreams and lived through nightmares like that. In a prior post, we saw how you could end up spending $2,500 a month for warm PPL (pay per lead) Internet leads and come up short hitting your $25,000 per month revenue goal. So, how can you get more business walking in your door for less, or, better still, almost nothing at all?

First, let’s review all the various ideas that may populate your BMA plan. We saw them a few posts ago. They are:

  • Advertising
  • Alumni programs
  • Attendance at industry, trade or professional association meetings
  • Blog
  • Charitable contributions
  • Client entertainment and gifts
  • Club dues and expenses (e.g., for whatever clubs allow interacting with targeted prospects)
  • Collateral materials
  • Continuing education seminars
  • CRM system or client database
  • Digital marketing
  • Directory listings
  • Events and seminars
  • Graphic design and branding costs
  • Internet directory referral fees
  • Mailings and communications (e.g., newsletters, invitations, announcements, alerts and holiday cards)
  • Marketing-related training
  • Market research and client surveys
  • Marketing staff professional development
  • Memberships in industry, trade or professional organizations
  • Networking activities (e.g., dues, membership, and travel)
  • Proposals and pitches
  • Public and media relations
  • Retreats
  • Social marketing
  • Tickets and sponsorships
  • Web site design and maintenance

Note that “Internet directory referral fees,” which are the”professional referral online marketing organization” (PROMO) services we’ve discussed paying $25 per lead, are almost in the middle of this alphabetical list. This is probably where such things belong in a living, successful BMA plan. There are a lot of things you must invest in before paying PROMO services and there are also still a lot of things you should invest in after resorting to PROMO services.

Here are some of the must do’s you must do before investing in PROMO referral services:

  • You must choose a “result-oriented” customer value proposition to serve as the anchor of your branding, marketing, and advertising plan.
  • You must create a good tagline.
  • You must create, print, and carry plenty of copies of a nice traditional size business card, a more memorable quarter-sheet “ten-second” service card, and a trifold “elevator speech” brochure.You must create and claim your Internet address.
  • You must invest resources in a good, in contradistinction to a “bad” or a “killer,” reader-device-responsive, website. We have talked and will continue to talk about what makes a website “good.”
  • You must claim and optimize your social media accounts, your industry web aggregators’ accounts, and local marketing aggregators’ directory identities.
  • You must relate (i.e. be social) with other people in as many social media spaces your time budget will allow and convince them to follow your blog.
  • You must blog with relevant content that is supplemented, persistently and consistently, at least weekly, but preferably more often.
  • You must create a valuable lead magnet to give prospects in return for them giving you their email address.
  • You must convince people viewing your site (for the first time, hopefully) to let you continue to send them your new blog posts every time you send one.
  • You must create and implement an e-mail drip marketing program including both content and a platform through which to send it.
  • You must invest in and use an effective and efficient customer relationship management program that ties your prospect management into your client management aspects.
  • You must network in person and by email with current clients.
  • You must network around “pools” of prospects and people who can refer you prospects.
  • You must create and implement a referral recognition and thank-you program including a shout out in your blog and at mailing them a handwritten note containing at least a $5 Starbucks card. The size of the gift is not nearly as important as the handwritten note and the fact you personally took the time to say thank you in a demonstrative way.

Contrary to conventional thinking that everyone searches for whatever they want on the Internet, word of mouth still generates a lot of business for small business owners. It also costs you pennies on the dollar vs. pay-per-click or pay-per-lead.

If you do all of these things effectively, efficiently, consistently, and persistently, then you may well escape the need for long-term dependence on PROMO leads.

Nonetheless, come back next post and we will take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of PROMO leads. Spoiler alert! One of my main complaints about PROMO leads and other PPL and PPC digital advertising is PROMO leads only work what little they do only as long as you continue paying the PROMO website owners to send them to you.

[reminder]What’s your experience with PROMO lead generators?[/reminder]

 

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Remember to Plan with the End in Mind

Have you ever believed you had to have a marketing plan that would find every prospect and convert every one of them into a junkie for whatever it was you are selling? And then you over did both the planning and investment and ended up with more business you could handle and had to either expand your capacity of refer your prospects to colleagues. Yeah, me, too. Hurts, doesn’t it.

Business planning — and the branding, marketing, and advertising (BMA) planning that goes in it — is not about getting all the business. It’s about get just the right flow of business to effectively and efficiently hit your volume target so you can deliver products or services ahead of schedule, under budget, and right the first time around and make the amount of income you want, need, and desire to live the life you want, need, and desire.

Prime examples of this are the Groupon and Living Social failures. Worse than killing themselves, however, these marketing portals killed a lot of their customers using their discount coupon generators as well. All people had to do is pay Groupon and Living Social gobs of money and a great flow of new customers would jump across their thresholds. Oftentimes, however, more people picked up the deal o’ the day and creamed the business owners.

So what’s a small business owner to do? Build and use a multi-focal plan with scalable components you can throttle up and down as needed. Let’s peek at how to do this.

Picking up where we left off a few posts ago … we are a professional-service-oriented business that needs to generate $300,000 a year in revenue with $30,000 of BMA expenses. Assuming even average sales each month, but knowing things are going to ebb and flow with feasts and famine, we need to design a BMA plan that will generate $25,000 in monthly revenue for $2,500 on average per month. How do we do that?

The first thing you need to determine is, “How many new clients do I have to attract each month?” This can be revealed as a simple math problem with monthly revenue being divided by monthly spend per client. If each client spends $500 for a service, then one needs 50 new clients a month. Assuming all things being equal, you can spend $50 per client to successfully sign each client. But, wait, there’s more. What happens if you are only signing half the prospects your BMA plan brings in the top of your sales funnel. Then you can only afford to pay $25 per warm lead from the “professional referral online marketing organization” (PROMO) service for which you’ve signed up.

But, wait, there’s still more. Lead generation promoters are not going to be the one and only, be all, do all, end all of your BMA plan. So you can’t spend your entire monthly marketing budget on referral promo services.

Starting to see how difficult this is going to be to do? There are no easy solutions. The good thing about lead generation services is most of them are easily scalable. You can set a budget and the services will only send you whatever flow of leads you can afford for that budget. In our example, if they were charging you $25 per lead and you were putting 20% of your $2,500 monthly budget, i.e. $500 per month, then you are going to get 20 warm leads from your promoter, which, with a 50% closure rate, will only yield you 10 clients and $5,000 in monthly sales volume.

Nonetheless, if you put all $2,500 of your budget in your promoter program, then you are going to generate $25,000. Great, you’re on target. But, what about when your promoter goes the way of Groupon and Living Social? And, what about creating, hosting, and managing your website? What about doing any other type of BMA work?

In order to work out a full BMA plan, you are going to have to find some components that deliver you prospects for less than $25 per head.

More about that next time.

[reminder]What’s your most effective and efficient business lead generator?[/reminder]

 

 

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30 Ingredients for Your Ragu Marketing Plan

Have you ever wished you could just pay someone 10% of your sales per year to feed you all the clients and/or customers you need to thrive? Yeah, me, too. But wishes like that only come true in our dreams. Real people, running real businesses, for real profits, have to have a real branding, marketing, and advertising plan to get there. And such a real, living BMA plan needs to be robusto, like Ragu Tomato Sauce, meaning, it all has to be in there, Ma.

What all makes a sellable marketing sauce?

Generally, a firm’s marketing budget should always include the following categories:

  • Advertising
  • Alumni programs
  • Attendance at industry, trade or professional association meetings
  • Charitable contributions
  • Client entertainment and gifts
  • Club dues and expenses (e.g., for whatever clubs allow interacting with targeted prospects)
  • Collateral materials
  • Continuing education seminars
  • CRM system or client database
  • Digital marketing
  • Directory listings
  • Events and seminars
  • Graphic design and branding costs
  • Internet directory referral fees
  • Mailings and communications (e.g., newsletters, invitations, announcements, alerts and holiday cards)
  • Marketing-related training
  • Market research and client surveys
  • Marketing staff professional development
  • Memberships in industry, trade or professional organizations
  • Networking activities (e.g., dues, membership, and travel)
  • Proposals and pitches
  • Public and media relations
  • Retreats
  • Social marketing
  • Tickets and sponsorships
  • Web site design and maintenance

While many people say, “The whole world uses the Internet now like the old world used the Yellow Pages then,” and while having a platform-responsive website that looks great on a laptop, a tablet, and a smart cellphone is maximally important, social-digital marketing is still not the only thing to think about in your marketing plan.

Take a moment and think about what all these things are, which of them you are doing, how much of each you are doing, what objective results are you expecting from each of them, and how you are tracking where each of your marketing components are taking you, and how effectively each is getting you where you want to be.

Come back to the next post and we will pick at these things a little more.

[reminder]How much marketing can you do yourself and still run your business and sell and deliver all at the same time?[/reminder]

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See Your Branding, Marketing, and Advertising As Part of Your Living Business Plan

Have you ever found your self up to your belt buckle in alligators and remembered that all you really wanted to do at the time was just drain the swamp? Are you so busy trying to brand, market, and advertise to perfection that you have no time to actually provide goods and services profitably enough to maintain the rest of your life? Yeah, me, too.

Usually, such situations almost always result from failing to keep the end in mind almost all the time. So, let’s at least begin with the end in mind. And that end is money. There are more great quotes about money, than at which one can shake a stick. A good one is best understood by reading the entire lyrics to the song, Money (Makes the World Go Around).

Money is the scorecard of business. Money measures gross earnings, costs of goods sold, net income, general administrative and overhead, gross profits, EBITDA, and owners’ discretionary earnings (or what most people refer to as “income”). Money is the common exchange medium for the property component of life’s precious resources.

So, as you begin fashioning your branding, marketing, and advertising plan you have to first understand your score card target of your living business plan, which is money and more specifically the end product of almost all entrepreneurs, the entrepreneur’s discretionary income. How much “money” will it take to make your cash register of life go “Cha-ching!”?

A little data may help you decide. From 1967 to 2014, U.S. median household income has trended up from $45,000 to $54,000 or so. And most people are satisfied with that status, being fat and happy enough living in the middle.

Lawyers earned an average annual salary of $136,260 in 2015, which is substantially more than any other occupation on U.S. News’ list of Best Social Service Jobs. Paralegals make much less than half that. In 2015, paralegals earned an average salary of $52,390. So let’s assume for the sake of choosing an example, we are fashioning a BMA Business Action Plan for a lawyer wanting to make $136,260 and pay one paralegal $52,390 as part of his 53% expense ratio.

This means our targeted gross income from attorney’s fees collected will be $289,914.89, or so. Let’s assume the lawyer graduated law school in 1990, which means (s)he will have to bill (really, collect; but that’s another thing to worry about) the $300 average hourly rate for lawyers with 25 years of experience. This means the lawyer has to collect for about 966.382966666666667 hours, or so. Let’s round that up by the 5% effective collections rate of law firms to come to the understanding that a lawyer with 25 years of experience wanting to net $136,260 annual income must gross $289,914 a year needs to bill about 1,000 hours per year.

Established, medium and large firms spend about 3-4% of their billings on marketing. Smaller, growing law firms spend about the average of 10% for all small businesses on their marketing. Therefore,, we need to perceive a BMA plan that will generate $300,000 in billings for about $30,000 a year.

$30,000!

Besser! Have you lost your mind?!? No one spends 10% of their gross revenue on branding, marketing, and advertising. Well, many solo practitioners and small (2-5 lawyers) firms do. They may not realize it but they do.

To get a grip on how much it really costs to branding, market, and advertise a small business, in this case a law firm, start off by reading this old article from the ABA Law Practice folks. The data is just a little dated, but the theory is still fairly current and it applies to almost all small businesses providing goods and services.

So, go read the reference article and come back to the next post to begin working with the end in mind, developing a BMA plan that will result in $300,000 a year in annual collections.

[reminder]What’s your BMA plan? And, more importantly, if your BMA plan doesn’t work, then what is your plan B?[/reminder]

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Who Should Brand, Market, and Advertise Your Business?

Have you ever felt completely disintegrated in your branding, marketing, and advertising efforts; wondering what the heck you are doing vs. what you should be doing vs. who else you should get to do it for you vs. how you and them should be doing it; such that you then make the worst choice of all, which is to do nothing but depend on letting God work it out for you? Yeah, me, too. I know how you feel. I’ve often felt that same way. But, let me tell you what I found out.

Having a better business action plan for branding, marketing, and advertising leads to much better preparation and practice of that plan for persistently promoting your practically perfect performance of not only that plan, but also the rest of your business.

Confused? I was, too. But, thank me, I’m doing much better now.

First, you have to understand the difference between branding, marketing, and advertising and how each fit into your branding-marketing-advertising (BMA) plan.

Second, you have to understand the difference between being the entrepreneur, the manager, and the technician in your enterprise and let each of those three people living schizophrenically inside you have their say and do their work respectively on and in your business.

Third, you have to perceive your BMA plan as your entrepreneurial self, manage your BMA plan (naturally) as your manager self, and do the actually work of your BMA plan as your technician self.

Go get a copy of The E-Myth Revisited and E-Myth Mastery by Michael Gerber, zip through them over the weekend, and come back this coming Monday ready to get to work on a Better Business BMA Action Plan.

[reminder]How should you brand, market, and advertise your business?[/reminder]

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3 Reasons Most Business Websites Suck at Branding

 

Have you ever wondered why that spiffy new, professionally crafted website you spent a few grand developing to show yours is a “serious business” sits all alone on the web, unvisited, unfriended, unshared, untweeted? Yeah, me, too. Rereading a long series of articles written by some “people who ought to know” about marketing in the age of social media may, however, clue us all in on an answer to this dilemma.

  1. Most business websites’ owners are too tight-assed to use the word suck on their websites when it’s really appropriate. People, especially serious business owners, seek to be universally loved and understood as serious, professional, prim, proper, and absolutely neither common, crass, nor, heaven forbid, vulgar. Being so, they for darned sure aren’t willing to let their hair down long enough to really relate with real people who are quite comfortable saying something, like your perfectly coifed website, sucks when it really sucks.
  2. Most business websites’ owners try to create a culture around themselves instead of trying to serve a culture that is coalescing around a topic bordering their businesses’ workspaces. Coca-Cola made this mistake with its Coca-Cola Journey digital magazine. Under Armour apparently didn’t when it took over where Nike left off and began UA’s “I Will What I Want” program by addressing issues of concern to UA workout clothing wearers somewhat more rowdily and randily by letting the public it was seeking lead the discussion
  3. Most business website content is designed to sell instead of enlighten, educate, entertain, and enthuse those viewing the website.

So, what can you do to do better than your dull, boring competitors?

First, do the opposite of these things.

Second, do the opposite of these things in a way that doesn’t overtly look like you are trying to do the opposite of those things.

Third, come back next time and we will learn some details of cultural branding.

[reminder]Would you stay on your website more than three seconds after you first see it?[/reminder]