That Pam Chick

It’s been over five years since I left my job and started consulting for a living. I had a good year of business being great before the economy really tanked, leaving me and many other small business owners in the weeds. There was a long period of time where I wasn’t making enough each month to cover my bills and had to decide between buying groceries or paying my credit card bill (guess which one won).  After floundering for a while I made some changes and within a year I had a successful PPC consulting business. So, how did I do it so quickly and how can you do it too?

Pick one thing you’re good at and focus on that. How many people do you know that offer PPC, SEO, SMO, ORM, PR and every other acronym on the planet? How good do you think they are at all of them? Chances are there’s one or two things they are good at and they just do the other things to make money. Do you want to refer clients to people who are just doing something for the money? Neither does anyone else. Pick the thing that you are the best at and focus on it. You will have happier clients, you will be happier and you will become better at what you do. Partner with someone who offers the services you don’t so you can still be a one-stop shop for clients without offering subpar work. There’s plenty of business out there for all of us, so if we all focus on what we’re good at and refer out the projects that aren’t right for us we can all be more successful.

Network. I don’t mean go to conferences and rub elbows with “rockstars” and I don’t mean retweet everything Neil Patel tweets. I mean actually make friends with people in the industry. Real friends. Friends that would bail you out of jail are more likely to refer business to you than people you buy a drink for three times a year and never interact with outside of industry events.

Don’t disappear when business is bad. Falling off the radar when business is down is the equivalent of failing companies cutting out their marketing budgets. If you aren’t visible, people will forget about you and will refer business elsewhere. This doesn’t mean you should go into debt going to every conference trying to drum up business. It means you should pick the one or two that will give you the most bang for your buck and be seen there. There are ways to save money on conferences so you don’t blow your budget. You could choose a conference that is near you so the travel costs are less. You could choose to only go for a day or two to reduce hotel costs. You can share a room with someone. You can skip the expensive dinners and go to the free cocktail parties. I know people that go to conferences and don’t spend a dime on anything but their hotel. Networking is marketing for a consultant so don’t eliminate your networking budget entirely.

Let people know what you do. I realize this sounds silly. I thought it did at first too. But it’s not silly. There are people that I’ve known for nearly 10 years through the conference circuit and yet I have only a vague idea of what they do. If I had a client to refer to them, I wouldn’t know that I should refer the client to them because I don’t know what services they offer. I’m pretty sure that there are people that I’ve spent hours talking to yet they don’t know for sure what I do.  Update your Twitter bio, your Facebook profile, your LinkedIn and make what you do very clear on your website. My bios never said anything about what I did because I didn’t want to be one of those “I’m an SEM guru!” jerks and because my Twitter is anything but professional. So, I married the two worlds by adding “awesome at PPC” to my bio as a humorous way to let people know what I do. Shortly after making that change I saw a dramatic increase in inquiries.

Let people know you are taking on new clients. Don’t waste all that time you spent networking by pretending you’ve got more clients and money than you could ever possibly need. If people think you are too busy for new clients, they will send them to someone else. After casually mentioning to a small group of people I know well that I was taking on new clients and would appreciate any referrals my business increased dramatically.

Don’t be too eager. Contrary to my last point, don’t walk around handing out your business card to every one in your path letting them know you are open for business and have great rates. When you go to a restaurant and they have oysters on sale and the waiter keeps pushing them, do you think “wow they must be really great oysters, and at such a great price!”  No, you think “stop trying to sell me crap oysters that are about to go bad.” You need to find a balance between letting people know that you are available to take on the right projects and looking like an SEM bargain bin.

Refer business to others. If someone comes to you and asks you to do something that isn’t your forté, refer that person to someone you trust. The next time they have a project to refer, there’s a better chance they will send it your way. Quid pro quo.

Take care of your clients. Nothing is stronger than a client referral. Doing a good job for your clients is the best way to ensure they will stay with you long term and will bring you additional business. If you can’t do a good job for your clients due to lack of time, knowledge or skill, no one will be happy in the long run and you’ll end up constantly having to find new clients which will get harder and harder as your reputation dwindles.

Do you have a company that you’re tired of running or do you just want to watch your company slowly and painfully die? Follow these steps to ensure you will lose your employees, piss off your clients and end up as WalMart’s only greeter under 65!

• Hire people because they are your friends, not because they know what they are doing. Your friends will be loyal and it will be really fun working together!
• Be afraid to fire people who aren’t pulling their weight. Firing people makes them mad and making people mad is so uncool. Not cutting the low performers makes you a cooler boss and everyone will like you more even while they are doing twice as much work as the slacker sitting next to them.
• Don’t document anything.  It’s better to talk about the same thing over and over again because you can’t remember what you decided last time you talked about it. This will give you the opportunity to talk to your employees more frequently and they love talking about their projects over and over again.
• Use email as your project management system.  Sending an email to someone ensures they will complete it.  You don’t need any system in place with deadlines, project planning or resource management.
• Regularly forget to attend meetings that you set up. Your employees like getting together in the conference room and waiting for you for 20 minutes until they decide you aren’t going to show up.  It gives them a chance to chat with each other.  And they probably aren’t that busy anyway so it’s not a big deal.
• Every few months, freak out and call a bunch of meetings to find out what’s going on. After those meetings, promptly forget everything that you were told.
• Drastically change priorities regularly. You don’t want your employees getting too comfortable. If they never know what the goal is they will always be on their toes.
• Don’t measure anything. Trust your gut.  It’s always right and will tell you how those tests would have turned out anyway.
• Trash talk your employees to other employees.  Rely on that information getting back to them so they improve performance so you don’t have to waste time on performance evaluations.
• Don’t offer benefits to employees.  Your company is so unique and awesome that people should want to work there for free.
• Argue with employees in front of their peers. This lets them know you care about their projects.
• Go around managers and task their employees. Rely on the employees telling their supervisor what they are working on. The managers will be grateful for you giving their underworked staff something to do.
• Be “too busy” to properly communicate or use tools that everyone else uses to manage projects.
• Never hire people that are smarter than you. You don’t want them showing you up.
• Consistently tell your employees how busy you are. They aren’t busy so hearing how busy you are will make them realize how important and smart you are.
• Have your employees send you lots of reports but don’t bother reading any of them.  Then regularly stop by and ask employees for updates on projects even though the full update is in the reports you ignore.
• Give vague directives like “follow up on the email I sent last week” and assume your employees know which email you are talking about.  When they ask which email, pretend they are stupid for not knowing what you’re talking about.
• Be impatient.  Employees are really motivated by you standing over their shoulders while they work. Also, calling them every 30 minutes to find out if something is done makes them more efficient.

Sadly these are all things I have witnessed far too regularly.  I actually did witness them all in one company, which coincidentally isn’t doing so hot.  I’ve done some of these things myself.  But through years of being the low level employee, then being in middle and executive management, and now running a business of my own, I’d like to think I’ve grown and learned a few things.

So take a hard look at yourself and your management style and make sure you’re not a major offender. If you are, you can change. You’ll find that not only will your employees be happier but you’ll be happier with their performance and output. Having good communication with your employees will always result in a better product or service for your clients and a stronger company overall.