Morning all,
It’s 8.24am / 5th October and today I want to talk about the fundamentals of building multiple businesses (or attempting to) using the same model.
It’s taken me 4 years to implement something that in many respects is a straightforward system.
Let’s run through it right now –
So the first element of it – is having a pipeline.
What I mean by this is a consistent flow of leads that come in.
We do this through SEO and cold calling predominantly at the moment. Of course, you can pick whatever channel you prefer or build multiple.
The rule of thumb is to establish one channel as being profitable and scaling that channel before you move to the next channel.
Right now our focus making the cold calls turn into sales (which I am confident they will)
But yes fundamentally – you need:
Table of Contents
Sales and Marketing
With Pearl Lemon, this comes from SEO, cold calling, and cold email. Once I’ve established these channels I can then begin to look at entire other channels such as YouTube.
All in all right now we have Ion & Jude, and then we have Vasco, and some of the newer potential team members in Josh, Axel and Robbie (it remains to be seen how long the latter names will stick with us/will be good enough – but time will tell).
Operations
This is the actual delivery of the work. i.e the work we are paid to do. This would be SEO, PPC, PR, Web Development, and Lead Generation. For all of these areas we have a delivery team in place to ensure the clients get what they are paying for.
This would be Pearl, Semil, Gary, and Kaushal in terms of the heads of operations.
Account Management
Apart from the delivery of the actual work – you need to have people who manage the accounts themselves – i.e the end clients to ensure that everything is running smoothly from their perspective and their needs are being met.
In my case, this is Gary and Vasco – and their roles are to continually check in with clients to give them an update on how everything is going and to ensure that everything they ask for (and even the things they don’t) are happening.
Finance and Legal
This can come after all of the above but it ranges from things such as – are invoices being paid, are salaries being paid, are contracts being signed, proposals being sent and anything that relates to all of this type of stuff.
HR
Is the team happy, are their needs being met – are you recruiting, not recruiting – and anything that relates to the human capital you have at your company.
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Innovation
Is there someone, or some people who think about ‘what can be done to improve the company?’. ‘What can be done to make our same processes better?’
Thinking about these elements can help drive growth by making sure you’re always trying to up the ante with success.
Overall Leadership
Is there someone in ultimate leadership of the team? Someone that the team finally answers to and who can coordinate everything to ensure things are running smoothly?
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These are the things I have put in place (to a degree) with Pearl Lemon.
Basically ensuring that these places have been filled by people is going to be critical to the success of any organization you build I think.
What’s the next business Pearl Lemon is building based upon this model?
Well, we have an accountancy website already set up as well as a recruitment agency. One of the two or both of them seems like great next steps for us.
The way in which we will build will be broadly similar – we’ll focus upon SEO to build the inbound side of the business. But we’ll also launch cold email as well as cold calling to drum up new business.
At the moment the SEO is already happening. We’ll likely get the cold calling started in one month from now once we onboard some new SDR’s.
What I’m realising now – is that if you have an effective way of generating new business – you can build everything else AFTER that.
It’s really taken me too long to figure out something relatively basic.
That’s the nature of success though in hindsight – it can take years to figure out something relatively simple in the end…
Let’s see how things develop!
