Blogging for business

(Not know the reference of the cover image?)

I commonly get asked why I write a blog.

Originally, I created a blog to help startups and create a personal brand. So I started writing about marketing and small business without ever trying to hide who I am personally, a humorous marketer with a love for dad jokes and gifs.

There is no doubt that I am not the most talented writer. I find typos in almost every post I write!

My writing style (like my mind) jumps from thought to thought very quickly. This off road thought logic and writing style can lead my readership to a state of confusion. (Sorry if I lost you already)

Although, after a couple of posts I started to realize a larger benefit.

I commonly come up with an idea, obsess over it, and then try to immediately take action. Oddly, writing has helped me to become a better marketer, businessman, and even carpenter.

I say carpenter because just recently when I was looking to frame a wall, I stared at an empty space for 30 minutes and yet was unable to come to a decision. Here I was trying to make a perfect plan in my mind, obsessing over it, and yet I could not make a decision. It wasn’t until a professional carpenter told me to just start laying out the basics (aka writing) and then improve on it or change it later. This way, I can see the flaws of my plan as I run into them.

Point is, sometimes it is just best to start laying things out and make adjustments or changes later instead of just coming up with an idea and thinking it is perfect.

When working with a small team it is not always possible to get external feedback, or if you are really passionate you don’t want to hear it.

Writing is an extremely effective way to find items early on that are maybe wrong with the concept in question.

In almost every topic I write, including this one, I will throw out a minimum of 800 words on what is top of mind and how I feel about a topic. I then come back to it a day or two later to proof and adjust.

100% of the time I find flaws in my logic, and because I make the blog public, I am encouraged to find ways to iron out these issues prior to publishing (I know, I probably still missed some).

In the process of making those changes, I also change my whole thought process on that topic. This brings in new insights, concerns, and ways to improve.

So how is this helpful to small business and marketing?

I am not saying everyone should write a blog, but I am saying that moving at the fast pace of a startup may have some flaws due to implementation is commonly the following process:

IDEA > IMPLEMENTATION

It may instead be better to slow down a little bit and add a barrier in between:

IDEA> WRITE IDEA & MAKE ADJUSTMENTS > IMPLEMENT

Through adding the writing step in this process, you are becoming objective to your own reasoning.

I know from personal experience, that I have come up with a lot of horrible ideas that I was passionate about. But when you are passionate about something you tend to see what you want through a pinhole.

Completely ignoring the outside world and variables that will lead to its failure.

By writing down your thought process, and your plan in detail and then coming back to it a couple days later, you notice some items pop out of the wood work as you are in a completely different mindset.

You start to see where emotion and quick thinking led you down the wrong path, where your idea maybe has fallen short, or maybe an area of your idea that needs to be added to because it has incredible potential.

It also allows yourself to insert justification for your reasoning and build credibility or certainty to the concept.

When the passion of the idea is not present, you start to insert research and qualitative facts to back up your reasoning. This can lead you to a more detailed plan, or lead to you improving or disqualifying some of your thought logic.

Lastly – It is something off your shoulders.

If you are like me – you get an idea in your head and you obsess, thinking about it 24/7. And although I do cherish my restless nights in deep thought….

This process has really allowed me to remove it from my mind.

By writing it down I get a feeling of accomplishment because I know I am making an effort toward its execution. But instead of my mind recapping the entire idea in my head, over and over, it is all written down to a point where I can also concentrate on parts of the idea instead of the general holistic concept.

Maybe this doesn’t work for everyone, but I thought I would share.

If you have ways other ways to critique your own ideas and expand on them to make better decision, I would like to hear from you. Let me know via comments or message me directly.


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What classifies a full-time job?

It commonly comes down to executing 40 hours of “work” a week. This is where the 9-5 comes from:

8 hours per day x 5 days = 40 hours.

Although, be honest, how often are all 8 hours of the day really 100% productive?

So the 9-5 is not to get 40 hours of productive work done, it is more so just clocking in to get paid for 40 hours.

Think what would happen if you applied this logic to your personal life.

You think to yourself:

“Cooking this steak should take an hour” but then you find out you were able to cook it to perfection in a mere 20 minutes..

BUT YOU ARE ON THE CLOCK.. so you sit on the floor (probably crying) for 40 minutes and wait until the work / cooking is done so you can eat.

That sounds and looks absurd right? (and it is)

But is it really that different from the 9-5? Why would we ever measure someone’s productivity or efficiency based on time? Wouldn’t it be better to be based on completing tasks? or maybe even an overall goal?

The thing is, this is a tradition that has been passed on to us. Our culture admires those that work late and questions those that leave early. I myself at time feel bad for leaving early, even if everything I needed to do was completed.

Just sitting there, alone with my thoughts.. until it is 5pm.

Just because you are physically at work, it does NOT mean you are productive.

On the complete flip-side of this, the 9-5 is also the reason for many employees to stop tasks.

Think about any workday, is it the exact same as the one before. Is it full of the same tasks, the same meetings, and the same demand?

If you answered, YES – I am sorry, your job sounds extremely boring!

The truth is work is NOT a constant, it is a variable. Every day has new tasks and new demand, so why should you infer that it can always be done in 9-5. By setting time restrictions to work hours, employees use this as a reason to not meet deadlines, or to not finish a task even if it is near to completion.

[so close]

To illustrate the effect of a 9-5 work environment, here is an illustration:

This is 40 hours of work, but dispersed like a typical work week –  a lot of upfront work.

and typically dwindling down toward the end of the week.

As you can see, Monday and Tuesday have “Past Due / Uncompleted work”. This is because of the tasks/workload exceed 5PM, leaving additional work undone. In some scenarios this is okay if there are no hard deadlines, the tasks can be completed the following day.

But this is not something that should be done repetitively, common rollover of tasks, they pile up and projects typically become behind schedule or abandoned completely, or fall to the responsibility of another team member.

At the end of the week, you notice that there is some unproductive time. This is from the workload depleting and the employee feeling the need to stay at work. This unproductive time has no value added to the company, and the employee is missing out on personal endeavors that they would most likely prefer over sitting at work.

Now, what if an organization was goal or task orientated over time focused?

As you can see, the employee is 100% productive, while clocking in the same amount of time, 40 hours. For the time they have invested extra in the beginning of the week, they made up for by leaving early at the end of the week.

This work style allows for the company to be as efficient as possible, as well as gives employees extreme freedom. If an employee is aware of all the tasks they need to do for the week, they can work more whenever they want to clear up large blocks to leave the office.

Employees that implement this also tend to be more focused on activities that actively help them complete tasks in a smaller amount of time. Due to the fact that non-productive meetings or excursions tend to add more time to their day, they look for ways to automate and streamline their day to be more productive – completing more tasks in less the time.

Source

9-5 practices creates the most unproductive and most expensive workforce

So far we have only discussed this issue on a per employee basis, when really to see the true repercussions of being a time focused company you need to look at it as a whole.

A 9-5 organization creates an excess of work that needs to be done. This leads to one of two outcomes:

  1. The excess work piles up and pushes full departments behind schedule. As seen above, to make up those hours would take 50% more time.
  2. The excess work falls on the shoulders of someone that is a task orientated person, causing specific employees, typically managers, to work long hours to stay on target or meet deadlines.

In the first option, you will find that your business will move slower and deadlines should be taken with a grain of salt.

In the second option, it is possible that with a great manager you still hit deadlines, sadly due to the increased workload of management, the company will witness a high employee churn in management due to the horrible work to life balance.

Managing a 9-5 workforce

To be clear, a 9 to 5 workforce may not always be more inefficient as a task-based employee. For specialized corporate roles that have less variability in their work a 9 to 5 may line up perfectly with the time it takes to complete tasks.

If you are looking to transition to a task-based organization, you may find that the transition can be tough to execute across an entire organization. Everyone has their own preferences, and some employees prefer the consistency of clocking in and out at the same time every day.

For these employees it is best to recognize that because every working day is a constant, tasks assigned and their activates need to be constant too.

  • Limit meetings – Time in a meeting takes away from their tasks
  • Focus on tasks that are more clear-cut over trying new things. More creative or new tasks have more variability in their completion time.

Every employee has an hourly cost and an opportunity (what could someone be doing that may or may not be more productive than what they are already doing) cost. These costs are higher for a 9 – 5 workforce due to the fact that they have a set hourly rate (if there is not fluctuation in their time input) and that time taken from one task, directly takes away from another. These are items to consider when creating new tasks/meeting that disrupt the typical office work schedule.

The transition from time to task orientation

To be 100% transparent, this blog is inspired by 2 books The Lean Startup and Traction.

The lean startup walks through the inefficiency of a workforce that is driven by time, comparing it to the priniciples of lean manufacturing. To do this, businesses should aim to create an environment that instead adapts and adjusts to the workload presented, and finding processes that eliminate bottlenecks for growth. To be the most efficient at doing this, companies need to focus on goals and the tasks that get them to meet their goals, not the time it may or may not take to complete it.

To implement this logic, traction has offered a step by step process into launching this type of workforce. Through the creation of scheduled meetings, finding issues, and driving accountability, businesses are able to more effectively address what is being completed and find the bottlenecks that are getting in the way.

Conclusion

A 9-5 organization is extremely inefficient. When creating a business you need to find ways to make to make your company more focused on completing goals and less focused on “Going to work”.

A company that is task focused tends to be more productive, accurately meet deadlines, and are incredibly creative in streamlining processes (more you automate, less you work). This not only allows employees to have more flexibility and management over their own work schedule, but it also allows companies to be more agile than their 9-5 competitors.


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Failing small business

Whenever I come across a house project that I am not sure about, I immediately go to YouTube.

YouTube is an amazing resource for those looking to find out how to do something, and receive a step by step tutorial.

These videos are so helpful that, there are literally stories about people that have constructed full houses by only watching YouTube videos:

Sadly, the same does not apply when starting a business.

There is no tutorial that is foolproof to help you create a profitable company. Many people, like myself, may tell you about channels that MAY help, but the truth is every business is so completely different that nothing really applies across the board.

Larger businesses don’t have this problem of figuring out how to get a positive ROI, or find success. They obtain a massive amount of data and history that allows them to invest in channels that they know are profitable.  They then focus on increasing the performance of those channels in the future to promote growth.

Although you may not have history or data points there is something that you do know:

You Know Nothing!

This is tough to hear, but embracing the fact that you do not know what will grow your business is actually incredibly powerful. By acknowledging that you know nothing, you start pursuing knowledge as well as revenue for your business.

So how does this help? In a couple of ways:

Remove assumptions

When I first started in a start-up environment, I was brought in largely for my Google Ads background. At the time, it was believed that the slow lead generation was due to the fact that we were not grabbing enough traffic from people looking for a similar product.

I created a ton of campaigns targeting similar industries, general technologies and sent ads to a lot of audiences that I thought would find our product irresistible.

I could not have been further from the truth.

Every morning when I would check the leads from the previous day I would find a long list of unqualified leads. Yet, I continued to invest time and money into the campaigns to try to make this channel drive growth.

But see, that was the problem.

I made one very large assumption. I assumed that due to the fact that Google Ads has been extremely profitable in my past companies, that it would be the key to our success here too. Instead, it turned out to be a channel that drained my time and our budget – which most likely could have been spent later.

By acknowledging that you, in fact, know nothing, you hopefully do not make the same mistake. You understand that you should try the channel but do not put all your eggs in one basket.

Redefine Successful Campaigns

If you have ever worked for a larger company, most likely you have come across the use of KPIs. Of course, your goal should always be to perform better but there is a KPI for small businesses that are rarely accepted anywhere else.

This KPI is LEARNING.

Not every campaign has to drive revenue in order to be successful. Remember your business at this time is trying to find it’s preferred channels, therefore finding out which channels are not a great fit are still extremely helpful.

Of course, a failed campaign is never as good as a profitable one, but the truth is a lot of learning came from it. Why did it fail? how does this change your marketing plan? What did we learn and how can it be applied to other campaigns?

These are all takeaways that will lead to you honing in on your target market later. Because of this, there is no such thing as a failed campaign, as long as you learn from it.

 

Optimize Later

If you are anything like me, most likely you have some perfectionist tendencies. I like to create campaigns that think of everything, and are optimized for maximum performance.

Although if you are still in the learning phase, do NOT spend time focusing on optimization.

The truth is, optimizing campaigns adds more labor and expenses that could be used elsewhere. By spending time creating a better campaign, you are only adding to the costs of a failed campaign.

Therefore, apply the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) methodology to create more campaigns in a far smaller time frame. Forget about the custom images, the unique landing pages, the custom print outs, or the additional development. Instead, look to clone similar campaigns and continue to just slightly alter your current content.

Source

Keep in mind, your KPI is to learn. Once you learn that a campaign is profitable, that is when you optimize.

 

Conclusion

It would be nice to have the ability to look up a tutorial on how to drive growth for your specific business, sadly due to the uncertainty and uniqueness of every venture that is not possible. You lack of knowledge or uncertainty, therefore, gives you only one option to succeed:

Gain knowledge.

Startups need to embrace the concept that there will be failures. But cumulative failures lead to a path of success.

By learning what messaging doesn’t work and what channels do not drive revenue, you can start simplifying your marketing plan, optimize your time, and focusing on the marketing channels that drive results.

Therefore, your goal should to try everything, fail fast, learn fast, and then double down on what works.


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