This year, I’m wanting Knackmap to do really well.
In fact, I don’t want our business to do so well that our revenue flies into the millions over the next 12 months.
If you set lofty goals like this, it’s important that a set of assumptions and activity be set for the year, to ensure that you always have a vision. I believe there is nothing better than holding someone to their word than saying it out loud…hence this post.
So this is exactly what I did. I’m even actioning these as I write 🙂
These execution strategies took a lot of time and research to refine. It’s easy enough to read a big publisher article about growing your business by “Being the best”, “hiring all-stars” and so on, but this really doesn’t give much executional information.
I looked deep into the depths of my network, the net and customer feedback, as well as my thoughts and findings from past efforts and future predictions.
Without further a-do, find below 4 things I believe to be my best movements this year above our current strategies, to be the next million dollar company.
1. Hire passionate, knowledgeable human beings to drive great product/service
Hitting $1M+ in revenue during your first year is no small feat, and it certainly doesn’t happen with a team of “average Joe’s”.
However, I do not believe that hiring a blanket description of “the best” is a good way to look at the hiring process either. It’s way to subjective and so many ways to define “the best”.
I believe that the people who are going to make a business grow fast need to match the vision of that company. They must also have the drive, passion and enthusiasm that’s needed to lift a team to performing the best it can. Finally, there heart has to be in it. The best may be great at what they do, but without the courage to rock up to work everyday and give 110%, you aren’t really getting “the best”, just an unrealised potential for the best.
I also believe that hiring employees’ locally is not always going to be the best way forward. We have a team of designers, developers and customer support based across the world, who are nothing but happy to have the job that they have. They are wonderful at it, too. As our business is mostly cloud, we do not need to rely on finding the right fit within Adelaide+5km. We could look further across Australia and beyond to find the group of individuals who can help us grow.
2. Invest in a CRM-Suite
If you want to shoot for the moon, you need to be absolutely militant about gathering data and acting on it.
We are investing in ZohoCRM Plus. For us, we want to grow up from using a half glued together tech stack to handle our customers, clients, deals and more. Zoho encapsulates all that we need, as well as bringing it all into the one place so that we can best understand our customers, our process, our sales and whether we are moving in the right direction.
Funnily enough, by reducing the seperate solutions for our various business operations and nurturing programs online, we’ve actually saved money in both education management, cost of software and hours to manage strategic execution.
We are already data-driven (hence why it’s not a new growth strategy). But investing in something that can give true hollistic understanding of opportunities, pain points in the business and so on, we can make more measured decisions.
3. Turn every employee into a sales enabler
Regardless of what position each team member has in your business, they should be able to do things that assist with building revenue:
- talking about the business
- referring new business
- creating an uplifting culture to keep everyone on their a-game.
- finding ways to better the business process, and better the business offering
To do this every day is not unreasonable at all, but it’s certainly something that takes more than just “rocking up”. As a result, I think that it’s important to incentivise to ensure that outside of passion to do what one loves, that your employees feel motivated to bring their A-game.
4. Sell what you know you can scale, and don’t take work for revenue’s sake
One thing I learnt over the last year is learning when to say no.
It’s easy enough to say yes to work and money. But when you want to grow, it’s not possible to be a jack of all trades. You cannot build a business to $1M+ upon being everything to everyone.
Scale comes from doing things really well and finding efficiences in the process!
Knackmap is not trying to be something for everyone. We don’t have capacity to do so! However, we have a wonderful opportunity to help our target market with their needs, in a way where we don’t have to be “everything” to them. Websites? We’re not a web development company. Adwords? We don’t run Adwords campaigns for clients. Web hosting? Sorry, it’s not our game. Traditional marketing collateral? See previous response.
By sticking to the double-edged SaaS model (Social as a Service / Software as a Service), we are able to scale our value to customers.
4. Invest in Efficiencies and Automation
It’s hard to not get caught in the routine…but this can make scale impossible if your caught in traditional, heavily laboured tasks that can be automated!
We are looking to move in this direction for our core business processes, to ensure that we can deliver more value for less to our customers.
In saying that, people are what our company is all about and we will never lose this focus.
So, let’s see where this takes us! I’d love to know what you consider to be your best business growth strategies.