Alright time for another post from me and today I wanted to share and reflect on some aspects of recent success, and by success I mean managing to avoid any major pitfalls.

Marketing may be my strength, as you’d expect, and it maybe an achilles heel for a lot of small business managers, but then I’ve had to face other issues where my suit hasn’t been so strong. Which begs the question - could your small business model handle great marketing?

- But at the same time, I need to learn to keep my blog posts shorter and get to the point if I want to grow my blog!

But don’t we need some background?

Sure. The background is that sometimes, your marketing can be too good. In a time when I was struggling to cope with demand and growth, my business was suffering, I had to take time out and step back and refine my business model to cope with the practicalities of doing higher volumes of business - customer service, infrastructure, systems, standard practices and policies etc.

And now I’m enjoying the benefits of that. Cash remained very tight for a while as I focused away from marketing and operations for a couple of months, but because I’ve now made changes, and grown developments that allow me to explore more opportunities, I’m now building into a much stronger position to keep growing and developing than I was.

Well that’s short and sweet but what is it really saying?

Well once the period of evaluating and refining the business model to address the  operational and service issues was over, I was able to return my full attention to marketing and operations, which I talked about recently:

- operations and service around my core music marketing sevices were eased by my new platform at new music marketing so I was less distracted

- building new websites and campaigns for each of the most profitable niches of my business and zeroing in on my most high margin / high value propositions which I identified as discount dvd duplication and youtube promotion services and building niche campaigns.

- Building up content through blog posts and website pages, optimising for SEO, targeting keywords with research and building backlinks

- optimising propositions with persuasive content that engages and illustrating authority leading to sales, refining sales copy and bringing out essential “stories”

- deploying more optimised and refined PPC campaigns on adwords.

So with a stronger platform to explore more opportunities and deal with issues such as customer service a lot more effectively, I’ve been able to maintain a higher volume of operations, build up cash, and start developing my business in a proactive rather than reactive way, now that I’m not rushed off my feet, dealing with unhappy clients, waiting for the next cheque to clear to pay for more stock/materials!

I always knew if I could get on top of the madness of day to day hustling and operations, and then build a strong buffer of cash,  I would be in a strong position to “level up”.

And that only means that the process begins again.

That it’s not enough to simply say that you will invest more into equipment and hiring staff without a plan.

Without a system that gives you the headroom for growth based on recognised niche for targeting your products or services, it’s not really a strong strategy for expanding.
So what it comes down to in the big picture is: is your business ready to cope with success? If you had an amazing small business marketing strategy, could you handle it?

What you want to do is analyse those areas where you’re experiencing high margins and look to increase demand by refining marketing strategy, and look to increase your margins or your volume where you’re experiencing high demand by refining your business model.