Growing Pains: Scaling Creativity While Tripling Business Volume
2007 has been a huge year for the David Williams Online internet marketing team. Over 2007, David and Fred have tripled their business and helped their clients grow at even greater volumes by increased internet exposure.
However, all of this success has come with some growing pains! Growing pains that I hope to experience more of in 2008 and that I hope you will as well!
Overcoming the obstacles of small business or freelance business growth is not a challenge easily tackled. This post could easily cover a multi-part series (and will) but today I’m going to focus on my specific challenges with growth as the person in charge of the creative aspect of copywriting.
As David and Fred continued to bring in more clients it became increasingly more difficult for me to keep up with their client’s demands for creative copy. As a result, I had to figure out a way to scale up quickly without losing the creative aspect. I still have a lot to fine-tune before I can jump to the next level of growth, but these are things that have helped me handle a tripling in business growth:
#1 Be Willing to Relinquish Some Control
One of the biggest problems that small business owners and freelancers face is the fact that they feel the need to control everything. Even if we think we are doing fairly well at delegating, there are probably some time-wasting tasks that we are holding onto that could be delegated. Can you think of any?
#2 Define Which Creative Pieces Set You Apart from Your Competition
There are probably hundreds – or even thousands of business that offer the same thing that you do. What is it about your business that attracts clients to you and keeps them coming back again and again?
If you’re a designer and people come to you because they love your design style, it’s not so easy just to bring on another designer to take on extra work. They are expecting a design from you! The same goes for writing and consulting and many other creative services.
Ask yourself… what is at the HEART of what makes your creativity so unique? You may find that your creative output is 10% vision and 90% execution. What if you could be responsible for only the 10% vision piece task out the 90% that is execution?
#3 Multiplying Your Output Without Sacrificing Your Creativity
If you operate a creative services business, such as consulting, design, writing, etc, you may be wondering the same thing I did… how can I possibly increase the amount of creative services I provide without spending MORE time working?
After exploring this question in great detail, I realized that many of the elements of a ‘creative’ task include tasks that are quite routine. If you’re developed some creative processes, you may not have ever really analyzed the exact steps you take to bring a project together – you just do them.
If you outsource all your creative pieces, you risk losing quality and continuity. What I’ve learned is that if I define exactly what the creative pieces are in the tasks, create a creative framework, and assign out all of the other tasks needed to bring the task to completion, I can get the same quality of results in far less time.
For example, there are certain things that I do whenever I start develop a topic for a page of content or sales copy for the web. Before I analyzed my process, I didn’t spend too much time thinking about the techniques I used to create pages, I just did them and I knew that they worked.
What I’m doing now is creating outlines and templates based on my own creative process and then outsourcing the tasks needed to bring the pieces together. This might take the shape of researching, putting notes in a finalized format, giving a direction for the next person to add their own creativity to the process.
This system can work with design (create a base design and then outsource the process of breaking apart and testing the design), consulting (put your notes together and then outsource the writing of the finalized document for the client), and just about any other creative process.
#4 Have a Damn Good System of Communication
If you’re working with multiple people to bring multiple pieces of a project together, you absolutely must have an effective way to communicate. Some of the things I am using are:
- Basecamp (for communication with multiple people on a single project)
- Backpack (to house information about a client so that when I need to bring another person in on the project, I don’t have to spend hours explaining every detail about the client),
- Google shared calendar (so that everyone is on the same page about when things are supposed to get done.)
#5 Find Great People and Treat them Well
It’s hard to find good people that have a similar vision and mission as you do. I’ve found that referrals and blogs are some of the best ways to find good people. Blogs are a great way to find out if someone shares a common vision and work ethic as you because the signs of this are written all over their online presence.
Once you do find great people to work with, you’ve got to hold onto them tightly. If you treat people as if they are disposable, you’ll effectively grow a disposable business. People are what make a business great.
Even if you don’t have the resources to pay them tons of cash right now, there are small things you can do like thanking them for a job well done, and remembering them on birthdays and holidays with a gift basket or a Starbucks gift card or other token of appreciation. Share your growth goals with them and let them know how you want them to factor into the equation as the business grows. These kinds of appreciative gestures go a long way.
What Challenges Do You Face With Growing Your Small Business or Freelance Business?
Turning down business because you don’t have enough time is a shame. Giving less that your best to your clients because you don’t have the bandwidth is a recipe for disaster. How can you grow your business next year without sacrificing quality? What challenges do you face with growing your business?
December 17 2007 02:07 pm | Business Building
Devin on 20 Dec 2007 at 2:34 am #
You’re damn right! It was a hard year for our start up, but we made it! We managed to double our outcome! Yoohoo! But as you say, we would not be able to do that without good project management software. For us it was Wrike http://www.wrike.com/. Helped us a lot!
Christine on 20 Dec 2007 at 3:58 pm #
Hey Devin – what a great looking site!! I’m so glad to hear that you doubled your outcome. Looks like an amazing project management tool – I’ll definitely be looking into it!