I am one of those guys that feels like his business has puttered along for the last decade doing OK.

I’m actually very proud of the work that we do. But I’m not overly impressed with the growth of our company. If I were an investor, I would consider SageRock the sleeper investment in my portfolio.

Unfortunately for me, it’s pretty much the only thing in my portfolio.

I’ve recently been asking myself why that is. Here are some reasons off the top of my head:

• Smallish market in Northeast Ohio (being in a larger market might give me access to bigger accounts).
• I’m a piss poor sales person. I’m pretty good at awareness building. But I’m SO bad at sales. It’s a miracle I’ve gotten this far… especially because an expensive service requires so much sales. 
• I have no product. Selling a product doesn’t scale that well. This actually has not been a huge problem for me because of the previous point. But still. I think it contributes to keeping us small.

I would say those are the three biggies. If I was analyzing my business as a third party (which isn’t terribly easy to do) I’m pretty sure those would be the big 3 hurdles holding me back.

I’ve been pondering these 3 issues for a while and have been tentatively putting together a strategy for dealing with each of them:

• I’m considering getting a small office in Manhattan. 
• I’m thinking about testing some outbound calling people and/or services.
• I believe the SageRock System is a particularly good product for distributor/dealer networks. I’ve actually sold two of those to different companies that sell through dealer networks.

These are the ways I’m considering dealing with these weaknesses. 

The issue I have is: Should I try to attack all of these at the same time. Or should I pick one at a time?

The second and third points actually would work well together. I could use an outbound calling program to test reaching out to these dealer networks. 

As I work through this here it all makes me think about at least starting with the second and third ideas at first. Plus NYC in January and February is not the most pleasant

I will say this, however, I feel strongly about pushing hard in 2012. All signs are pointing towards this being a good year. 2011 ended quite well. We’ve worked hard at continuing to increase our awareness 

I really feel like we need to reach out a bit to people to talk with them about what we can offer.

If you see any glaring errors with any of this please let me know.