In this episode I’ve got some real talk for you: neglect your own marketing and DIE & always plan for a Milli a Milli a Milli
Adam: On today’s episode, we talk about the cobbler and his shoes, we talk about remote teams, and we talk about planning for a million. Everybody, this is Adam Steele and this is another episode of the Steele Entrepreneur Show. This is episode 14, 14 I think, and we’re gonna do something a little bit differently today. As you will have noticed, we are taping outside and this really probably should have been 13.5. We’re gonna call it 14. We’re gonna do lessons learned, so we’re gonna talk about different things that I’ve sort of picked up over the past seven years and what I got from them and hopefully there might be something that you too will get from them. So without further ado, Rihanna, why don’t you get us started?
Rihanna: The cobbler and his shoes. What is that one?
Adam: Yes. You’ve heard that saying before?
Rihanna: No. What’s the saying?
Adam: I don’t actually know the full saying. I don’t know the full saying but the way it goes is just kind of like the cobbler has shit shoes. So he makes everybody, all his clients, perfect shoes or fixes or whatever but his shoes are just ratty and crappy, right? And so, the way that that relates to me or to others is, I think, we get so busy in the day-to-day of running our business that we forget about ourselves, we forget about our own marketing, we forget about our own website. We focus, you know, just on delivering whatever it is that our clients are paying for. And I know, in my case, I woke up one day and I realized that while we were still getting referrals, which was good, they kinda teetered off a little bit for, you know, maybe it was a few months or something like that and we had nothing else coming in. And I realized that all of my clients were doing very, very well but I was not doing well.
I had let my marketing slip. I had kept and forgotten about my shitty website and it wasn’t working for me. There was nothing that was keeping my business alive and if I were to lose one or two or whatever clients, where would that leave me? So essentially, I was letting my business, my marketing, my whatever, basically stand still, basically deteriorate. And in my business, that just can’t be. I’m a digital marketing company, so if my digital marketing is on point, how do you think…isn’t on point, how do you think that’s gonna look for other people hoping to hire me to do the same thing, right?
So I think it’s really important that you set some time aside, some money aside, for your own marketing and don’t sacrifice that regardless of how busy you will get because your clients will leave you. Your clients, it’s inevitable. The turn is inevitable in just about every business, especially digital marketing. You know, they’ll get approached by some other SEO company or some other person who promises to be better and has maybe a little bit better salesmanship than perhaps you do and so they think, “Oh, the grass is greener on the other side,” and so they jet and they go to someone else. Well, now how are you gonna bring in someone else, right? What new clients are coming in? Well, they’re only coming in if you’ve done things to set yourself up for that.
And so with us, we had abysmal rankings, we had a piece of crap website and it wasn’t until, I don’t know, maybe two years ago that we actually started giving a crap about our own marketing. And unfortunately, that put us way behind the curve. You know, we were still…we are an SEO company and we’re struggling to get onto first page even after two years because we’re up against guys who were just as talented as we are but…or maybe not as talented as we are but they’ve been doing it for 10 years, right? They started doing it when we should have started doing it. And so, that sort of history, it snowballs. And so, it’s very hard to get in front of the incumbent sometimes, especially in this space.
So it’s important not to forget about yourself, not to get so busy that you start neglecting how you are getting new business. And that was a very tough lesson to learn for me because it happened when we were already slow. So we lost a couple of clients because we were still trying to figure it out and I was still learning to figure out how to manage cash flow and things got really sketchy for a little while because I hadn’t thought…I hadn’t thought this would happen and I hadn’t been focusing on myself. I was focusing on my clients. So don’t think that your clients will be around forever, don’t think that your clients can sustain you forever. Always be setting aside a little bit of time for your own parishes, for your own website, for your own marketing. Set a little money aside, set a little bit of time aside, and focus on that. What do we have next?
Rihanna: The joys and pains of an office or not having an office.
Adam: Yeah. There is a certain, I think, glamor that goes with having sort of an office. You can bring clients in and you can have Friday drinks with your team. I worked in this one office where we had like a bunch of old, like an N64 and we had Mario Kart and we would, at lunch, we would go and hang out and play. There is a certain set of camaraderie. There is a certain sort of a culture that comes with an office and it’s always, despite what I’ll say, it’s always been something that in the back of my mind, I’ve kind of wanted. But at the same time, there is a lot of good reasons for not having one. Firstly, do you actually need one? In my case, I do not. My business is completely remote and in a lot of ways, that is a…in a lot of ways, it’s a better business model. There certainly is a lot less responsibility involved when you have subcontractors versus employees. I have a lot of agencies that come to me and they’ll be like, “Oh man, I wish I had set my business up this way.” And I think they are just buried under the minutia, that is, having an office and having to deal with all these sort of office-related activities and responsibilities.
So while it’s, you know, it might be really cool, you might look really legit, I don’t know that I would be any more successful if I had an office. And I venture to guess 95% of people who have an office could be just as successful without one and probably live a much more happy and free entrepreneurial life. Not to mention there are employees as well that probably wouldn’t mind leading the same, wouldn’t mind the ability to work from home and work when they wanna work as long as the job gets done. I understand that is impossible in every business but I certainly believe in a lot of these sort of digital businesses, my own included, it’s very possible. I know it’s possible because we’ve done it and we are managing just fine.
So I think it’s important to sort of chart your own path and not have an office just because every other successful company seems to have an office. I think you gotta just kind of do you and figure it out for yourself and not assume that everybody has it kind of figured out, that they are doing it the right way. It’s not true and I talked about it in episode…a little bit in episodes 13, I think, with regards to structuring your business and your organization, organizational structure and all that. There is no one way to do it. You just gotta sort of do you and figure out what makes sense for you and try both ways.
I had a little office for a little while and it sucked. Nobody wanted to show up. Not that I have a lot of people here locally but people just prefer to work at home and if they were happy, then I was happy. So maybe there’s some sort of happy medium, maybe there’s some sort of half an office, you know, you only have to be there half of the week, I don’t know, but I can tell you it’s worth experimenting. It’s worth trying both options and trying to find something that just sort of works for you and works the very best for your team. So what do we got next?
Rihanna: Plan for a million.
Adam: Yeah. I don’t know that actually. This was sort of a last-minute addition. And I don’t know that I really have a lot of material to talk about when it comes to planning for a million but basically, what it means, and I wish I could remember where I’d heard it first. But essentially, the idea is if you plan for a million, when you get to a million, you’ll be ready or you’ll be some factor of more ready than you would if you were just sort of planning for what you had, what you had at the time. So what I mean by that is if I plan to run a multimillion dollar company, well, that, planning to run a multi-million dollar company would be much different from planning to run a $100,000 company or a tens of…$70,000 company or a $50,000 company.
Running a multi-million million dollar company, at least in my case, involves lots of people. It involves managing lots of personalities, it involves having proper accounting systems and proper accounting people. It involves having the proper or some sort of proper organizational structure. It requires processes. It requires setting things up in such a way that people know what to do. You don’t have to tell them what to do. You’ve got guides set up. You can onboard people quickly. You can scale quickly. You have infrastructure in place that when you get pressed with more and more business because you’re growing, that you’re able to take it on. You’re able to take it on in sort of an efficient and non-destructive type of way.
So when I think of planning for a million, I’m not just thinking of, you know, be positive and think that you can create the biggest thing, you know, the biggest thing ever. I’m thinking plan, plan to grow, plan to have to have systems in place that would support 10 times what you’re currently doing and always be picking away at those processes and those systems so that they can support the next 10 clients, the next 20 clients, or the next 10 people you hire or what have you. And I didn’t get that at first but later on in business when things started to really snowball, it made a huge difference in the way that I was able to… Hey buddy, do you wanna be on camera? So cute.
Male: [inaudible 00:12:21].
Adam: Yeah.
Male: Because he just wanted to photo bomb this thing.
Adam: That’s okay.
Male: Hey, Java.
Adam: What’s her name?
Male: Java.
Adam: Java. I like that. Hey, Java.
Male: I first thought it was [inaudible 00:12:36], coffee thing.
Adam: I like that. Thank you. Have a good day. Very cute. What were we talking about? Plan for a million. I’ve gotta say, I don’t think it’s just like a positivity thing. I think it’s actually sort of a structural thing and you just have to set yourself up to be prepared for huge growth. And when you get there, you’re gonna be much more prepared than you would otherwise, than you would’ve been if you just sort of sat around and built something that supports what you currently have but not prepare for what’s coming, for the future. That’s it, isn’t it?
Rihanna: That’s it.
Adam: That’s good. Okay. Well, let’s stop there. You know, as always, I want to thank you guys for checking out the show. I appreciate that you guys would take 15, 20, 30, sometimes 40 minutes out of your day to listen to me speak about my business experience. I hope that with each episode that you get at least one little thing that you can take away. If you know anybody that might be interested in listening to the same, I hope that you’ll let them know about it, you’ll send them our podcast or you’ll send them our YouTube show. And as always, if you guys have any questions, you can hit me up in the comments section. You can send me an e-mail at adam@magistrateinc.com. You can hit me up on Twitter @AdamGSteele. There’s a million ways to get me. We are on Instagram. We’re kinda everywhere and that’s kind of the idea. We want to create content that is sort of easily digested by every type of person, people that just wanna listen to something while they’re at the gym or somebody who wants to sit in front of their computer and actually see me. So if you have any questions, please let me know and if you haven’t already subscribed, please do that and if you wanna just leave a review on, say, iTunes or something like that, I would really appreciate it. Thank you guys. Have a great week and I will see you on episode 15. See you.
