Since February of 2019, I have been running a small business full time. My wife is co-owner, so she handles a lot of the operational side of things, while I’m the “business manager.”
If you’ve ever owned a business, you know there’s no such thing as only wearing one hat.
I juggle a lot of various responsibilities, but thankfully we’ve hired employees and outsourced work to delegate some of the more menial tasks. Things like answering emails, copywriting, bookkeeping, and other more administrative work.
Delegation has helped me to focus the vast majority of my energy on the things that I am best at – relationships and strategy – so I wanted to take some time to share what that actually looks like in my day-to-day schedule.
Sales / Discovery Calls
I have done every single sales / discovery call since we started the business in 2017. Over the last few years, I’ve averaged about 5-10 calls per week that last 30-60 minutes each. Between prep work, the calls themselves, and the follow-up, that accounts for somewhere between 10-12 hours of work every week.
We sell a high-ticket B2C service (helping couples get married on top of a mountain, if you’re curious), and I take a consultative approach to discovery calls. My number one goal is always to find out why the couple wants to get married on a mountain, as opposed to having a traditional wedding at a venue. From there, it’s easy to relate and come up with a plan that solves their unique problems.
One reason that I was never willing to give up doing sales calls myself is because I was always experimenting.
Should I send a contract during the call and go through it with the prospect? What if I take a deposit to secure a booking, and then set up a second call to hash out the details of the package? How do people react to different pricing structures?
I honestly made my life more difficult sometimes, because every call involved trial/error. That’s the nature of the beast when you are in a small business selling a very unique service.
But it helped me to learn. Some calls went great, some not so much. And I’m thankful for every one of them.
Doing calls for such a unique business with no real roadmap in front of me (e.g. no senior sales reps to teach me about how to sell to our target market) taught me perseverance. I feel prepared to pick up the phone in any industry, selling any product or service, because at the end of the day, it only takes so many failures to find what works.
Strategy / Marketing
The other thing that I spend a lot of time on is strategy. Probably at least 25 hours per week, and sometimes twice that much.
From restructuring our packages, to A/B testing email campaigns, to analyzing heat maps of traffic on our website… I have never had a shortage of ideas.
If I’m being honest, my number one struggle has always been a lack of data. Unlike some businesses that can make educated strategic decisions based on real customer data (click-through rates, lifetime value, churn rate, etc.), I was flying blind for several reasons.
1) Generally high-ticket services equal lower overall volume, and lower volume means less data. 2) We sell a niche service with clients from all over the country, making it harder to establish any real trends. And 3) our market has changed so rapidly that data from 3 years ago is no longer relevant.
Because of the lack of data, every business decision takes a blend of intuition and trial/error. That means a whole lot of testing, analyzing, tweaking, analyzing, retesting, and more analyzing.
Over the years, I’ve created email campaigns that have extremely high conversion rates, web pages that rank #1 on Google and bring in loads of traffic, and Meta/Google ads with an amazing ROAS. But every one of those has taken dozens and dozens of hours before they reached that point.
The big takeaway? I am relentless in pursuit of success.
I’ll keep learning, even if that’s just learning from mistakes. I’ll find creative new strategies. I’ll never settle for the status quo.