my 2023 business growth strategy

Summary

one of the documentation episodes I promised. here’s what we’re actually doing to grow in 2023. you can copy any of it, or just listen and check back in a year to see whether I was right.

1. before the strategy, a quick observation. funnels are not magic and humans don’t walk through them in the clean order you mapped. they jump around. they need to see who you are and decide they trust you in whatever order they want. that’s why no single marketing channel ever performs exactly the way you forecasted.

2. so the strategy for 2023 is do everything. we’re calling it the poles in the water strategy. every marketing channel running simultaneously, each one with a dedicated owner. it’s the first time in over a decade I’m not the chief implementer on any one channel.

3. the channels. referrals, with a real system in place. outbound, with a full time human reaching out to help, not to sell. sales, a team responsible for both closing and partial lead generation. email marketing, on a real cadence, educational, with clear calls to action. paid ads across Facebook, Instagram, Google, anywhere we see lift. and organic, SEO and community building.

4. the meta strategy is leadership. I’m not technical anymore in any of these channels. someone else owns each. my job is curation, coaching, removing blockers, keeping the team aimed. that’s a lot more like my time in the military than my time as a bootstrapped entrepreneur.

5. if you’re solo or have a tiny team, this isn’t a discouraging episode. pick one channel and get good at it. when I started, SEO was my one pole. then I added paid ads. one at a time. the goal eventually is more poles in the water because more poles catch more fish. try harder.

Transcript

funnels are not magic

Our strategy for the first time ever is to do everything and to do everything to the best of our ability. The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth.

My goal is for you to shortcut this journey. So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe, if you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. All right. I said when I first restarted, relaunched this podcast, I wanted it to be about documenting the journey. And this one’s going to be something I’m currently working on.

We are working on as a business. And I just want to share with you part of this is documenting for you. Maybe you can implement some of the things that, uh, you know, we are doing and maybe I can come back to this in a year or two years and be like, Hey, that was a really bad idea. We’re glad I did that.

Who knows? We will see. Uh, but I want to give you, uh, the idea and kind of what we’re doing to grow in 2023. So let’s dive right in. Uh, you know, growing a business is always a challenge. I mean, from a basic level, it’s simple. You need something to sell. You need leads to come in. You need to convert these leads.

You need to get results for your customers, like all those kinds of things. And I, and I’ve discussed a lot about that. But what I’ve done a lot over the years is, you know, I go all in on one strategy, let’s call it Facebook advertising or maybe SEO or something like that. Some marketing strategy to try and get more customers and grow the business.

Um, and what happens once I kind of sit down and assess like, Hey, what’s, what’s working, what’s not working. Something I always find is that nothing happened, how I wanted it to, um, in a 100% linear fashion. And you know, that’s what I think is funny about even funnels, you know, like, um, every, everyone’s got a funnel.

the poles in the water strategy

Right. And, uh, you, your business needs a funnel. Um, and I think it’s funny because yeah, like funnels, they’re, they’re not magic and humans are humans. Like they need to see who you are, learn about you, uh, engage, you know, understand who you are. See if they trust you. Like all these things, just because you set up step-by-step how someone should go through your funnel does not mean that’s how they will go through your funnel.

When I say I sit down and like things didn’t go exactly as planned as it’s kind of like the 80 20 rule is like a lot of it worked, but you know, there’s still other things, other factors at play that aren’t accounted for other marketing strategies that were unintentional or something that worked. Um, and so what my strategy is for this year is what we’re calling the polls in the water strategy.

And this is where we’re just going to do everything. And this might be discouraging if you have a small team or you are just yourself. If you’re a solopreneur listening to this, it can be discouraging. Um, but our strategy for the first time ever is to do everything and to do everything to the best of our ability.

And it does take a larger team to be able to do this. So it might not be helpful for you, but I’ll tell you all the areas that we’re focusing on. And for the first time in my career as an entrepreneur, even though I’ve had a team for a long time, I’ve always, I mean I’ve had people working for me, helping me strategizing with me for years and years and years.

Um, this is the first time I’ve implemented this many different marketing strategies and I’ve not been the head of any of the strategies. I am not the chief implementer of any single strategy I’m going to mention to you. Um, I am more the, the one curating it all, helping people get better in these areas, fostering them.

Even if I know I could do it faster or better, I am going to lead and teach other people on the team how to do this faster and better than I can. Um, you know, until I am no longer needed in the area. So what are the areas that we’re focusing on to grow in 2023? The first area is referrals. Uh, we have a great referral system in place in our businesses and we’re just going to try and maximize that, make sure people are aware of it, make sure that it makes sense and you know, make sure that obviously you’re getting really good results for your customers.

six lead channels in parallel

So they want to refer other people. Uh, next would be outbound. So this is an actual human being reaching out to people who may want help. Um, they could be leads in our database. They could be people who we think could be a good fit. They can even be some of the referrals I talked about in the previous strategy.

So we actually have someone full time reaching out, uh, you know, seeing if they need help. And what’s cool about outbound and where I think a lot of people missed the mark on outbound is you don’t reach out. So outbound is you reaching out, right? You don’t reach out with a cold email to someone you have never talked to and say, Hey, I think you should be a customer.

What do you think? That’s not how it works. People are people. You hear me say something along those lines all the time. And it’s, I always say that to remind you and to remind me that if you have an online business or you’re operating a lot behind your computer, like there are other humans on the other ends of these email addresses, right?

You need to always remember that. And so in outbound, the real goal is you’re trying to be as helpful as possible. You’re trying to start and maintain a relationship. It’s not about outbound to just sell things. You know, that’s, I get those emails all the time. I break it a dozen a day of someone trying to be like, Hey, we create an app, you need our app.

How about you give me money? Like a lot of horrible cold emails. Uh, when in reality you should be reaching out to people to help get them to help you as much as possible. All right, the next is sales. So we have a sales team and they are, this is marketing, getting new customers. They’re also responsible for fielding a certain number of their own leads.

Uh, some of you have sales teams, some of you won’t, depending on what kind of a business you’re running. I would think a majority of the people listening to this podcast probably don’t have a sales team. Uh, but something to think about having in the future to some degree, you probably have people on your staff who do sales, but not like a dedicated sales team.

leadership over implementation

But either way, they should be responsible for their own KPIs and getting in a new clients and customers. The next one is email marketing. Just making sure that we’re adhering to an email marketing schedule. Um, and we’re, we’re engaging with our emails. We’re educational. Uh, we’re making offers. We have calls to action, all those kinds of things.

Uh, the next one would be paid advertising across multiple different platforms, Facebook, Instagram, Google, uh, anywhere we feel like we can see success. We will do that with advertising. And then the last strategy would be organic. Uh, so organic could be, um, uh, social media, um, which is kind of lower on the, on the strategy right now, but like search engine optimization, uh, you know, different online communities, creating con like communities, fostering relationships in these communities, um, anything that’s more organic.

So you’re putting in your time and you’re earning these leads. Uh, and like I said, for the first time in my entrepreneurial career, and I’ve been an entrepreneur for over 10 years, we have all these strategies and my name is not the, not on any one of these strategies. It’s someone else on the team who’s being either, who already is better at these areas than me or people I’m training up to be better than me in certain areas.

And so that’s, that’s what we’re doing in 2023. I’ll update you guys periodically to see how, to let you know how it’s going. Um, see if it’s too much, but the, the real strategy here, if you had to like zoom out is leadership. Um, I have to be, uh, a really good leader. I had to have all my ducks in a row for this one to work.

So that’s what I realized. Uh, you know, I have a lot of technical skills, like I have a lot of know-how in these areas. That’s from being a bootstrapped entrepreneur for over a decade and doing so many things myself. And I’ve also had to balance leadership, but leadership’s almost been the side project of all the work I’ve been doing.

And now I’m flipping it to where it’s like, okay, you need to be a leader 80, 90% of the time. And then you need to train some of the technical stuff that you know how to do the other 10%. And this is a lot more how, to be honest, my military career worked. Uh, you know, you’re, you were a leader, a majority of the time, your technical know-how was almost unimportant because your staff was trained through military schools to know how technical know-how your job was to, you know, lead the people.

where to start if you’re solo

And now I finally get to be in a position like I was when I was in the military, where I’m focusing predominantly on leading and making sure people are hitting KPIs and we’re moving in the right direction and have all these different humans to manage and personalities and everything else to make sure that we are moving in the direction we want, which is a big challenge, but something I’m really excited for.

Now, if you’re listening to this and it sounds overwhelming, just think about all the different areas I hit, hit on, you might not be in a position where you can have one individual, one human being in responsible full-time for every single one of these areas. And that’s okay. It takes a long time to get there, but think about all the areas I just mentioned.

Could you be doing something in those areas? And if you do have a team, could you be getting someone on the team to assist where, while you focus on one of these other areas? And if you’re like brand new listening to this, I would just pick one. That’s what I did. I would just pick one of these areas.

My first area that I got good at for several years was SEO. And once SEO started to bear some fruit, I moved to paid advertising. So it was just one at a time. Okay. So just focus on one and you absolutely can grow a business. But then at some point you have to realize that it won’t be one marketing channel anymore.

It’s several poles in the water where you can catch more fish because the more poles you have in the water, the more fish you’re going to catch. And that’s the goal.