In the Next 6 Months

Six months ago you had goals. How are they going? Do you even remember them? I honestly mean it when I say I hope you achieved, and even surpassed every single one of them. But I also know that it’s very unlikely.

For the agencies I've worked with, growth is an almost constant goal. But like so many of our efforts, good intentions only take us so far. Saying we want growth is like saying we want to get in shape. We know it's true, we even know that it's important, but we don't know how to make the changes or take the essential steps to make it happen.

In 2014, my 30-person agency set out to achieve growth by committing more time and energy to business development. I quickly learned that there were a very few things that actually yielded measurable results. And there were a lot of things that didn't.

In the next 6 months, we cut out the things not working and improved the ones that were until we had developed a concise, actionable, very low cost system that was delivering consistent new business leads from companies already interested in working with us.

In the next 6 months, with our lowest amount of marketing effort to date, we were consistently onboarding 3 to 5 new clients every month, and we had a half-dozen companies interested in the system we were using to grow our agency. One of them eventually acquired that business and in 2016, I had the epiphany that the System we'd discovered is what other businesses are looking for.

You see, when companies say they want growth, what I learned we really mean is that we want a system that takes the many steps of business development and makes it happen for us. Finding/hunting, lead nurturing, following up, educating the prospect, sharing our case studies, setting up the calls. It's a long, repetitive, and often low-yield process.

Relevant Business Development is about taking that process and building it into a system where that is happening, consistently, in real-time, for dozens of micro-targeted prospects each and every day, automatically.

The system is what leads to growth. And then everything looks different in your business when you know where your next 3, 5, or 15 clients are going to come from. And you know you can ratchet your system up to add more clients or ratchet down for a while to add new personnel to your team. But you know that it's happening, with our without you, and it's being done right.

In the next 6 months the calendar will change from 2018 to 2019. Your business will be another year older. You'll be another year older (it's wild how that works, right?). But will you be closer to your goals?

At the end of the year, will you sit down and write out your next year's goal to "Grow the company" just like "Get in shape" is the most commonly found New Year's Resolution? Or will you put a system in place now that guarantees you dozens of new prospects and hundreds of new contacts every month to finally make your company's growth automatic?

We'd love to talk to you whenever you have the time. Unless it's December 31st. We'll be working on next year's New Year's Resolutions.