Meagan helpS family-owned businesses grow their brand 2X without losing their existing customers and values through the Solve for Y system.
In a family business, you have a lot to lose. Most family businesses have 70% or more of their sales concentrated in just a few clients or a single sales channel. And the influx of start-ups, venture capital, and corporate conglomerates make it even harder to grow a legacy business.
But it isn't impossible. Solve for Y helps you tackle these challenges while maintaining the integrity of what you've built.
MEAGAN LYNCH
Over the past few years I had been really working hard with our team to kind of create infrastructure in the business. We were working hard on getting the right people in the right seats, getting our operations in order, getting the quality of our services really high. Really like focusing in on our target audience and figuring out how we could best create value for them. Basically, what I was doing was almost like I'm doing everything I could other than selling, because it was just the last thing that I wanted to do.
I don't like the concept of it. I hated the idea of hiring a sales person. I just really loved the work of helping. Family-owned businesses and doing brand strategy work. So, but basically I'd gotten to the point where there really wasn't anything left to do other than get the word out and start to connect with, with other businesses.
Yeah, so I think one was simply like the system and the discipline of the work, like something that I had been really like. Reinventing the wheel. All of a sudden, taking some leaps of faith and just being like, I'm just going to go and try it. So I think just having that system and having something to try those a couple of times where, there was one point where, there was like a recommendation of like ask people who you just met for recommendations, and that might spur a conversation.
And I was like, this feels really uncomfortable. Like I don't. I don't like to put myself out there, like, I'm an introvert. I don't like to do this anyway. So this idea of like asking somebody, I don't know if a recommendation I'm like, huh, that sounds weird. You know, but you guys really encouraging, just like, Hey, like try it.
Yeah, so at different times in the company, we had been over a million dollars in revenue and then COVID hit and a number of our large clients, I think like everybody just kind of people just panicked.
So our revenue dropped, probably about 25%. So we were down to around like 800,000, for the year of COVID, which was a pretty big dip for us. And then looking to kind of see like, like how are we gonna make this up, obviously, like there's a piece of that business with current clients that come back.
So sales that once was kind of like, oh yeah, we'll get there someday, all of a sudden jumped up the priority list, like we need to do this. And also it felt like there was an opportunity to reach more businesses that were in the same situation and could actually use what we were doing.
So we had set up goals originally of just getting back to the million dollar mark, and now we've kind of adjusted that goal to get to 1.25 million, it's kind of what we're on pace for, for the end of the year.
Now it just really becomes about like implementing the system and I'm able to involve, move around a couple of folks in the company and bring somebody in to help me in the sales role to grow it even further. And that was another thing that I'd kind of felt far away, we had kind of said it as a one-year goal of defining a sales position, and so this really became kind of like the answer to helping us fast forward to that goal.
I think one is, that you do need to be prepared to roll up your sleeves and to like dig into the weeds and you really have to be prepared to block out time to do that.
It's like, okay, well this is paying for itself, it's making me money, it's making me excited, it's solving problems that I have, that helped me gain energy. Whereas I think, anybody who has a hard time controlling their schedule, or they don't have like internal support, or they haven't really decided that this is going to be kind of like their top priority.
And so I do think that like, when you make a commitment to something like this, this is something that I tell my clients all the time, I'm like, what got you here, will get you there. And so if you keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, that's the definition of insanity, I think.
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