What a year it has been! 2015 has been one for the books for me, personally and professionally, and I’m excited to see what the future holds.
Lessons in life are frequent and recurring; just when you think that you know and are prepared for life’s lemons, another lemon comes to find you. One of the earliest lessons that I learned when I opened my business in 1996 is that you have to work constantly to fill your client pipeline. Keeping your pipeline full ensures that you always have fresh, right-fit clients to keep you and your team’s creative juices flowing. I always say that you must profit to service and survive, and that has been made more and more apparent to me over the past several years.
Although Nevada is finally showing signs of recovery, we all know just how quickly a change can happen. To keep a successful business alive, it’s imperative that business owners remain proactive and involved in every step in building the business. It is very easy to get caught up in the amount of work that you need to do to keep clients happy that you forget to treat your business in the same manner. This step is crucial to ensure that your business is sound and that you have a strategy in place to survive during months when business may be a bit slow.
One thing that we encourage for all of our clients is a yearly strategy session, called the Strategic Marketing Summit ™, where we create a Diversified Marketing Portfolio® or DMP. We keep this document on hand throughout the entire year and refer to it frequently. It specifically outlines whom they are marketing to, where and how we present the brand each month of the year. That way, there are no surprises and we make a concerted effort to constantly move the business forward.
The Result: With prior planning, your business is the most efficient that it can be with the resources to gain the best clients because you have strategically marketed to them and identified them as the right fit for the future of your company.
In addition to creating a plan to develop your business, put a plan in place to develop your team, including yourself. A strategy is wonderful, but if you lack the right team behind you that also shares your vision for success, no one will be able to get anywhere. Not only are these people the face of your company to clients, vendors and competitors; they are your work family and brand ambassadors. At CIM Marketing Partners, the people working here believe in the company just as much as they believe in themselves. Together, we moved forward.
As we head into 2016, I hope that you have done all of your planning. Similar to life’s challenges, the best advise for successful business owners also comes in three’s:
Have a solid strategy, a solid team, and a solid execution. With those three things, everything else will fall into place.
Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!