I’ve read over and over again how email saps your creativity. It pulls you into someone else’s issues and desires.

When those issues and desires are your clients’ issues and desires you are very tempted to make them your own.

However! I strongly believe that is not in the best interest of your clients.

If you are the business owner there is nothing more important than for you to make your business as strong and healthy as you are able.

A weak, limping company does no one any good:

• You
• Your employees
• Especially your clients

A strong, healthy company makes everyone else’s life better. You can provide better services and you can provide a better work place for your employees.

As the owner of your company there is nothing more important than making sure your company is strong and healthy.

That is the wisdom I’ve learned over 11 years and two recessions. I’ve lived through getting that wisdom.

If you are new to business please trust me on this. Your business’ health is your number one priority.

But then again, the only reason I’m writing this is to convince myself not to look at my email right away. I still am so tempted to deal with other people’s needs and desires.

Coming into 2012 I have a laser beam focus: I want to get SageRock to $3 million.  I’m probably at a 10th of that for  2011.

There are two ways to get there:

• Sales and marketing
• Acquisition

The fastest way of getting to the $3 million is to acquire companies.

The problem with that is that: A. I don’t know the first thing about acquiring companies. and B. I have no money.

I’m thinking about trying to get some money from JumpStart Inc.

But I’m not confident they would be interested in funding a service business like mine. Although, I have some interesting offshoots like SageRock Places and SageRock System.

Those might peak their curiosity.

They other strategy could be to look into giving companies we partner with a percentage of the business. You never know what might happen unless you try.

But I feel I still have my own weakness: Sales.

Part of me believes that I need to shore that up before I do anything else.

Ultimately, however, I think the two need to work in tandem: Acquisition and Sales.

I’ll do that for a while and see which one sticks.

Now… to that email.

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.

I am an optimist at heart. But I’m especially optimistic about 2012.

Here is an economist that makes my case better than I ever could.

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2012/01/my-last-death-threat-in-2011/

Remember 2000 when everyone said, “man, I wish I knew a boom was coming in 1996.” Well, here we are again.

I’m a bit of a fan of P Diddy’s music (or whatever he is going by today).

But I’m a HUGE fan of his online marketing. He gets it.

He asked bloggers to post the message below. Because he rocks… here you go Shiny Suit Man:

iamdiddy: Attention all BLOGS ! Post this now pls! @officialcas: If u wanna see the official trailer, go to http://t.co/NweLdtLB now!! Xx Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/iamdiddy/status/145303010782875648 Sent via TweetDeck (www.tweetdeck.com)

There was about a month in my business (last month) where there was peace.

We were in a space where we were making a little more money than we were putting out. It was a lovely time.

It was especially nice because so much of 2011 was painful.

But welcome to December. It’s the complete other world.

We are in the money… and in the work.

We have 3 full time people: Me, Greg and Denise.

Rocky is secretly, behind the scenes, working part time. Don’t tell her I said that here. She doesn’t want that getting out.

As I try to look out 3 months from now I am very unsure. We could easily go right back to where we were in November. Or we could just keep going forward.

I like to put odds on these things. But honestly, I don’t have a clue how it’s going to turn out.

So right now I’m looking at putting together a system of partners and contractors. Most of these are, so far, in Ohio. And the vast majority of these relationships are in the U.S.

I’ve had pretty poor luck with using cheap labor from overseas. I keep testing it occasionally. But if I want something done well and fast, the U.S. is the place to go. The Philippines and India are just pet project right now. They aren’t used for mission critical stuff.

That said, the real reason I’m writing this post is to try to get my head straight on what needs to be done. And in what order.

I see December as a month that is giving us a unique opportunity to take on.

In my big picture mind I see Greg and myself as puppet masters. We need to try to (as quickly as possible) move out of the “doing” of things and pivot to “orchestrating” things.

If we don’t do it fast enough we are going to drown in a sea of work. Which will have bad consequences, as you could imagine. If we do it right we will be able to ride this wave for some time.

I believe Greg needs to be the master of Operations. He needs to oversee the work and make sure it is getting done at the level we have always had. I’m proud of the quality of work we have put out all these years. Greg has always adhered to that standard. But now we need to try to get others to do the work and he will oversee making sure the work stays quality.

We have aggressively been building out our content marketing strategy all this year. I believe it is how we have gotten into this position we are in today. We can NOT let that stop. Every iteration of SageRock so far has been: Market => Produce => Market. We spin up marketing. We get busy and stop marketing. The work slows down and we start marketing again. Come hell or high water I am not going to follow that pattern this time. The marketing will not stop!

But right now I need to help Greg develop a system for managing work and workers. (This is the point of the post where I start to get unclear.)

We need a way where we can quickly bid out work to our partners and contractors.

We also need a clear way to see what work needs to be done and when.

Contractors:

I’m wondering if I setup a Facebook group and I invite partners and distributors into the group. We could then post work in this group. And if they want the work they could bid on it. I could also do this as a Google Group. So work would be emailed to everyone in the group. And of course there is LinkedIn.

I’m not sure why but I somehow gravitated towards a Google Group for this. Since writing the previous paragraph I created this group:

http://groups.google.com/group/sagerock-partner-work-request

My thought is that I will be able to add partners and distributors to this group and we can post work to it. That should work well, I think. I still have to start inviting partners to that group. But that shouldn’t be hard. If you would want to know about work that we need done feel free to use the link above to invite yourself into the group.

Next up: Organizing work.

There is a variety of work that needs to be done. We have client work of course. But we also have internal jobs. For example we need to get our Christmas cards out.

The issue is that most work is time sensitive. For example, Christmas cards need to be sent out before Christmas. A company needs 10 links each month, 5 pages of optimization, a statistical analysis report each month, etc.

We need to be able to see work that is coming up, work that is recurring and work that has been accomplished.

This seems harder to me than the partner/distributor group thing.

We should be able to look at December and say:

• These things need to be done by the end of the month.
• These things need to be done by this day.

I just talked with Greg about this a bit. We are wondering if we could place all work that needs to be done in a Google calendar. It has the option of even sharing the calendar with partners outside of SageRock so they could see what work needs to be done and when.

I’ve tested this by sharing the calendar with my personal gmail account. The events on that calendar show up on that calendar automatically.

I think I’m going to go down that path. All activities for clients and for internal to-do lists could go on this calendar. I think I might keep it primarily for SageRock people. But as partners become more ingrained we could offer them this calendar so they could see the work.

Alright. Next up:

1. Get partners in the Google group.
2. Get work in the new calendar.

It seems like a decent plan.

If you have any other ideas on any of this please don’t hesitate to let me know. As you can see, I’m just making this up as I go.

We all want what we can’t have.

This is true in marketing, war and love.

My aunt would always tell me: “You are going to chase her until she catches you.”

The #1 amateur move to guarantee blogging failure is to not blog regularly. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

In quitting drinking you often develop what you think are “reasons” why you can’t stop drinking now. But they really are just excuses.

That’s the same with not attending to a blog. They are just lame excuses.

Blogging is either important to you or not.

The values of blogging are immense:
*Emotional connection.
*Continual outreach in a very soft-sell way.
*SEO.
*Content marketing.
*Prequalification of your abilities.

If I didn’t have a sinus infection that has made it difficult to think – finding a place in the refrigerator for the pita was beyond me last night – I probably could come up with some more blogging benefits. They are crazy powerful.

I know the value of blogging. It has been the secret to our business’ success since the beginning.

I have 3 writing areas that are valuable to me:
*The SageRock blog. (I’ve been keeping up there well.)
*This blog.
*Getting my first book out the door.

Those are all reinforced by Twitter, primarily, which connects into LinkedIn. And with Facebook and Google+ secondarily.

There is nothing more valuable to growing my business than these things. I know this for a fact.

I just can’t lose sight of that.

I’m going to print this for my office.

Rand Fishkin is a guy who gets what content marketing is about. He is open, genuine and sincere.

He recently tried to raise a round of funding that ultimately ended in failure. 

If you have thought the answer to your business problems is money from a venture capitalist, read this post:

Misadventures in VC Funding: The $24 Million Moz Almost Raised

In an effort to keep my thinking open and creative, I wanted to start making lists of different things.

This is my first list down that avenue.

I get surprisingly little business advice.

Every movie I watch is filled with people saying brilliant things to each other. I was kind of under the impression that would be how owning a business would be like. One business owner to another spreading wisdom. The world is not typically that interesting.

The process has not been completely devoid of advice, however.

There are a couple things I’ve always carried with me.

One was: “Don’t work with assholes. It will turn you into an asshole.” I believe that to my core. I do not allow people to treat me or my team poorly. It just will make you mean, angry and spiteful. It runs the risk of spreading on to other clients that are really great.

The advice I most often think about is: “Don’t do. Think.”

This is a huge failing of mine.

I know my name is on the building (actually it’s not yet. I need the sign) but I really rarely feel like a business owner. I feel like a worker.

I think of my worth as how much sweat equity I put into the company.

I don’t care if it was just me and Rocky or when we had 15 employees (We’re at about 5 now.) I judge my value on how much time I was in the office and how hard I pushed out the work.

My belief has been that is how everyone inside SageRock judged me. I don’t know if they do or not. I assume they do.

I’m not at the office right now and I feel guilty about it.

This is wrong.

I’m currently sitting at The University of Findlay in their commons area. I taught last night and spent the night here. I prefer to avoid driving at night.

I’m trying to use the time to think a little.

I’ve got a few issues that need worked through:

• SageRock seems to be growing again. I want the growth to be intentional. I want to have a strategy for how the company is structured. As teams grow I want to have a framework for that.
• I’m giving a lot of thought to expanding our practice. We have always had such a narrow focus. I believe in specialization. I have no intention of getting rid of that concept. But I’m thinking of focusing on  a couple core industries. And also staying focused on traffic and conversion. But we would potentially provide a wider array of services that are all geared towards that end. I’m thinking the focus would be on: growing your business. That’s a big subject. We wouldn’t do all of the work. But we would be the center for bringing in partners to help facilitate that.If we were to do this, the areas we potentially would help guide would be:
• Market position
• Brand position
• Image representation
• Traffic generation
• Conversion optimization
• Lead management
• Sales process management