For the past two years, I have been working on helping small businesses grow their business. In the process of helping my clients, I have been growing too. I have worked with businesses that offer passenger services, roofer services in Manchester, online tshirts in South Africa and so on. Each of this has been a unique experience that has taught me some extremely valuable lessons in growing my business. Here is a snapshot of some of these.
Be Honest With Your Customers
When I started out, most of my customers came from online marketplaces like Freelancer and Odesk. One thing I noticed was that most of my fellow competitors who bid on projects opened their conversation with blatant lies like wrong assurances, suggesting illegal tactics that could harm the client website in the long run, etc. As a customer, who does not have an idea of what is right and what is wrong in the digital landscape, it is a rude awakening for most of them who hire such providers. I decided to be honest and transparent with my clients telling them the perils of going with services that offered performance guarantees or suggested grey hat tactics. Of course, the number of clients I got after this was lower than what I could have got through those dishonest tactics. But I am happy to see my clients doing well in their businesses and that’s something that keeps me motivated at work.
You Cannot Do Everything
When I started, I wanted to take up everything that the client threw at me. While it was manageable in the beginning, things started to get clumsy when I started having so much on my plate. I have come to realize that with growth comes growing pains. And if you have to handle this properly, you will need to know to let go off some tasks. I do this my subcontracting small bits of my work to third parties so that I can continue to serve my customers best.
Quality Is Paramount
This is an advice that follows from the previous paragraph. While outsourcing work, it may be tempting to let go off as many tasks as possible so that you can make money off somebody else’s work. You need to realize that despite how much growth you see, it will all come to nought, if your customer feels your quality is not good enough. For this reason, I always outsource only those things that can be easily measured in quality. For instance, I do a lot of blogger outreach. I let freelancers do this outreach for me and I pay them based on the number of quality outreaches they get back successfully. This helps me let go off a critical task without having to compromise on the quality of the final product.
Word of Mouth Is The Best Form Of Marketing
Recently, I experimented with calculating the return on investment from all marketing activities I have done - this included bidding on contracts on Freelancer (isn’t that a form of marketing your services as well). I realized that none of my physical outreach programs have had as much return in terms of revenues as word of mouth. That is, customers who were happy with my work referred other customers to me - if you consider the quality of work I did for others as the “marketing activity” that helped me get these new customers, then it is fair to say that word of mouth is the only marketing effort where I get paid to do the marketing (that is, in every other activity I had to spend time or money to reach out to potential customers).
Growing a business is hard and takes a lot of time and effort. Surely, running a business is not for people looking for a magic bullet. It needs a lot of perseverance. As someone who did not have this specific quality, I guess that is the biggest lesson through my experience running my own business.
Be Honest With Your Customers
When I started out, most of my customers came from online marketplaces like Freelancer and Odesk. One thing I noticed was that most of my fellow competitors who bid on projects opened their conversation with blatant lies like wrong assurances, suggesting illegal tactics that could harm the client website in the long run, etc. As a customer, who does not have an idea of what is right and what is wrong in the digital landscape, it is a rude awakening for most of them who hire such providers. I decided to be honest and transparent with my clients telling them the perils of going with services that offered performance guarantees or suggested grey hat tactics. Of course, the number of clients I got after this was lower than what I could have got through those dishonest tactics. But I am happy to see my clients doing well in their businesses and that’s something that keeps me motivated at work.
You Cannot Do Everything
When I started, I wanted to take up everything that the client threw at me. While it was manageable in the beginning, things started to get clumsy when I started having so much on my plate. I have come to realize that with growth comes growing pains. And if you have to handle this properly, you will need to know to let go off some tasks. I do this my subcontracting small bits of my work to third parties so that I can continue to serve my customers best.
Quality Is Paramount
This is an advice that follows from the previous paragraph. While outsourcing work, it may be tempting to let go off as many tasks as possible so that you can make money off somebody else’s work. You need to realize that despite how much growth you see, it will all come to nought, if your customer feels your quality is not good enough. For this reason, I always outsource only those things that can be easily measured in quality. For instance, I do a lot of blogger outreach. I let freelancers do this outreach for me and I pay them based on the number of quality outreaches they get back successfully. This helps me let go off a critical task without having to compromise on the quality of the final product.
Word of Mouth Is The Best Form Of Marketing
Recently, I experimented with calculating the return on investment from all marketing activities I have done - this included bidding on contracts on Freelancer (isn’t that a form of marketing your services as well). I realized that none of my physical outreach programs have had as much return in terms of revenues as word of mouth. That is, customers who were happy with my work referred other customers to me - if you consider the quality of work I did for others as the “marketing activity” that helped me get these new customers, then it is fair to say that word of mouth is the only marketing effort where I get paid to do the marketing (that is, in every other activity I had to spend time or money to reach out to potential customers).
Growing a business is hard and takes a lot of time and effort. Surely, running a business is not for people looking for a magic bullet. It needs a lot of perseverance. As someone who did not have this specific quality, I guess that is the biggest lesson through my experience running my own business.