Category: Entrepreneurship

New York City is an expensive city to start and operate a small business. My digital agency Boucher + Co. was recently reminded of this fact, after having pursued our first expansion this past June.

We spent the better part of June searching for new, larger office space, and hiring approximately ten part and full-time team members. All sounded great – until it came time to pay for everything. Talk about sticker stock. Our overhead alone – through rent and personnel – more than tripled. Then came the headaches, second thoughts, and lots of stress.

For the first time in a while, I didn’t love what I did every day. Our agency was in over our head – and something had to change. I decided to spend the weekend at the beach and evaluate things. That was the best decision I made in a while.

The solution to our growing pains was simple: grow a leaner agency. One with less overhead. By the beginning of August, we had expanded our offices without greatly increasing our rent (a difficult, but possible feat in NYC), and changed our team structure once again to accommodate our employees and budget.

Small businesses must watch their cash flow religiously. Failure to do so usually means a death sentence for the business sometime within 3-10 months. Overhead cannot consume a majority of a company’s funds. Funds must be available to make business purchases, meet payroll, or acquire vendors or partner companies. Growing a lean company ensures that it is strong, adaptive, and responsive without being expensive. Simply operating a business should not be a costly and stressful process.

Boucher + Co. became lean, and that made all the difference in the world.

In the new economy, marketers frequently double as salespeople. After all, they have to. Marketers without sales experience miss out on an opportunity to channel a brand or product’s message directly to the client or customer. This is true of the team at my digital agency – every team member must be competent in sales, and if they aren’t, we provide comprehensive sales training to them. Educated and empowered talent is the best investment we can make.

Marketing and sales go hand-in-hand, and it’s important to possess both skills when looking to get your brand out there and attract new clients or customers. But mastering sales can be confusing. Not sure where to start? Read these three tips for being a better marketer and closing the deal every time.

1. Know what your client wants – every time.

Sit back and ask yourself what any one of your clients want to accomplish using your skills. Could you come up with one sentence that truly describes their goals, aspirations, and long-term objectives? Chances are you can’t. After all, clients are sometimes overly enigmatic and lack a clear vision.

How will you ever get to know your client, then? The key is for you to define what your client wants to accomplish for themselves. It’s up to you to ask the tough questions, get several answers, and work with your client to narrow down these various objectives into one, long-term goal. Define for them what they can’t define themselves. Your help will be highly valued and you’ll be viewed as an asset to their business.

2. Skip the lingo, jargon, and other BS. Tell them how you’ll make things easier and more productive.

I mention the importance of reducing web bounce rates and draw a blank stare from my client. Talk in simple terms to avoid making your clients think too much, or worse, confusing them.

It may seem cool to talk in technical or specialized terms, but technicality confuses most people and turns off clients. It also opens opportunities for clients to ask plenty of questions, worry too much, and derail a deal.

Talk and write for the average person, not for your industry. Avoiding overly used technical jargon, lingo, and other tried terms greatly helps the chances of a successful deal.

Jargon is great – for those who have hours a day to research all those confusingly different terms.

3. Be flexible and offer a true deal. There’s no such answer as no deal.

Absolutism won’t close any deals. Not now, not never. You must be ready and willing to compromise and be flexible on key elements of your proposal. The best place is to start is with an enticing offer.

Think of something you can offer clients to build confidence, save time and money, and give them long-term certainty. Business hates uncertainty – it’s a fact. Sometimes a great deal is the difference between a successful or failed deal.

More is better – right? Wrong.

In today’s hyperactive consumption economy, its easy to believe that. After all, we are bombarded with ads for nearly everything. Not too long ago, I was a adamant follower of the more is better doctrine. I wanted to try everything. From a consumer standpoint, this was never necessarily a bad thing. The problem, however, was that this doctrine didn’t stop at consumerism. It was brought to the workplace.

The idea that more is better is dangerous in the workplace. Late last year, my digital agency Boucher + Co., was preparing to move to a new office space in Manhattan’s Flatiron District. This was an exciting time for us, and we sought to expand the company in many ways simultaneously. At first glance, this did not seem like much more than daunting problem. We had the cash flow, the manpower, and the space to complete our company to-do list. We were good to go.

Shortly after we moved into our new offices and were settled in, several team members pitched me the idea of hiring extra staff to handle what would surely be a new influx of business. All those new clients would need better servicing, they argued. I liked the idea, so we hired. Then we hired some more. Soon enough, we filled up almost every desk in our office.

Things went well – for a week or so. After that, our entire team was overcome with too much stress. Instead of performing their stated functions, new hires tried to involve themselves with radically different tasks and overly engage other team members. This was distracting for existing team members and caused us to veer from our original mission – providing really good marketing services. I was distracted from my task of growing the company. Though we strive for a team culture each day, there is a line that should not be crossed when delegating team member functions.

I wound up making a tough decision – to downsize the very team we had just expanded. I truly believed in our original team to deliver our mission in a timely and effective manner. And I believed that when pushed enough, compensated enough, and when under pressure, our team would deliver. They did. After downsizing our team, we expanded our output and wound up doing less with more.

The decision to downsize our team – and “trim” the excess staff from our agency was a tough one. I took a lot of criticism from within my own team. But in the end, we downsized for the long-term. We’d rather be a (very) sustainable agency that delivers great marketing services for years to come, rather than a bigger one that loses out on its main goal.

Sometimes, less really IS more. And sometimes, it makes all the difference.