Legal Paper, Lead Gen, and Exit Strategies
🗂️ An Exercise For Organization & Confidence
When we’re deep in the trenches of our business, we lose sight of a lot of things.
One of those things is how many goals we’ve actually achieved.
Another? What our goals originally were.
This is a problem.
It’s a problem not just because it’s important to be proud of ourselves (which requires awareness of the goals we’ve accomplished), but also because awareness of our goals — and where we stand relative to them at any point in time — can actually further fuel our progress.
Ready for a cheesy but effective hack?
A few years ago, I began kicking off the year with a new exercise that I now call ‘Goals and Pride’.
I sit down, with one of those ‘oversized’ pieces of legal paper and a fresh pen, and I create 2 columns.
- Column 1: “things I did last year that I’m really proud of.”
- Column 2: “what I want to achieve this year.”
I start broad, and then drill-down further where needed.
I include personal things (“work on calming down on weekends”), and also professional things (“start newsletter in 1H2024”). I schedule my tasks based on the goals I’ve set, and then try not to revisit this piece of paper for another 5–6 months.
Every time I check-in, I feel 1) surprised by how on-track I actually am (when I originally felt like a bit of a failure that’s falling behind), and 2) refreshed and re-organized on what’s left for me to achieve.
If you decide to engage in this exercise, I promise you that you’ll, at the very least, feel more organized. A bonus? Feeling proud of yourself, too.
🤑 Getting More Customers Is Easy!
…you just more new leads. And that is not so easy.
Any business owner I speak to, including myself (yes, I talk to myself) inevitably brings up lead generation when talking about the annoying parts of running a business.
Lead generation often makes business owners feel:
- Overwhelmed
- Stressed
- Paralyzed
- Scared
There are so many strategies, so many aggressive salespeople all promising a magic pill for 4 easy payments of $99.99, so many tactics at our disposal that, to us, seem nebulous.
For today, allow me to share a framework around lead gen that I believe can alleviate a bit of the overwhelm associated with this often-feared task.
- Reset your expectations: many of us have been burned before. We’ve tried something, it didn’t work, and now we’re sour. On the flip side, some of us have tried nothing, as we’re afraid to waste money and time when we’re getting by just fine as it is. Things are always changing. It’s time to refresh your perspective
- Define what ‘good looks like’: clearly establish why you’re actually thinking about generating leads, and quantify how many you realistically need. Until you do this, you will over or under-estimate what you need, and you will jump into the wrong channels for the wrong reasons. Do you have capacity for only 2 extra clients to service each month? Then you need a handful of quality leads (not 1,000). Are you considering digital marketing because your second cousin is singing the praises of Instagram Ads? Not a good reason (necessarily). Get clear on what you actually need.
- Be a detective: and do this before you start deciding what channels to pursue. As a detective, you must figure out where your ideal customers are. If you’re looking for patients in pain, where do people in pain go? What do they search? What do they think? What questions do they ask? If you’re a lawyer for commercial landlords and tenants, at what points in their journey will they need your services? Where will they be at this point in time? Already, you’ll start to figure out places — digital and physical — where they might be found. And that is what should dictate where you reach them, and with what message.
- Prioritize based on efficiency: especially as you start out, you want to try a few different lead gen tactics, and prioritize based on where you can reach the most people for the least money and effort. There are lots of options to prioritize: digital marketing, organic social media, referrals, email campaigns, podcasts, events, giveaways, partnerships, growth hacking, influencer marketing, content creation. Whatever your menu of options, jot them all down, and, line-by-line, think about how effective and efficient that particular tactic will be for you in reaching the people that your “detective-self” unpacked in step 3.
- Experiment: and expect failure. We’re all looking for a silver bullet, but that’s not how you’re going to find your most reliable or fruitful lead generation source. Experiment, source by source. Run an Instagram ad campaign. Email a promotion to your followers. Ask for Google reviews or personal referrals. Very quickly, you’ll be able to see what’s costing you the least, and where you’re getting the highest quality traction. That’s where you’ll double-down, and turn up the volume, to scale up your efforts.
- Spend, but wisely: your time, and your money (and many times, both), are likely going to be required to drum up new business. The most important thing, though, is that the return on your expenditure is positive.
Lots more to come on lead generation, as The Dolphin swims on. But if you have any initial questions, never hesitate to ask me!
🚪 Where’s The Exit?
When you work for yourself, you have to make tons of decisions, and, carry the responsibility for how those decisions turn out.
Oh, and should I remind you that many of the decisions you make affect you personally, and at a deep level?
All of this can cause us to obsess over certain decisions that we fear might have a catastrophic impact on our business, on other people, or on ourselves.
I came across a quote recently, which went something like:
It’s better to structure decisions to be easily reversible than to take too much time trying to make the perfect choice.
We’ll never be able to make the perfect choice. So can we focus our time more on making decisions work for us in the future, such that if we have to adapt at some point down the line, we can?
👋 for now, and keep an eye out for an email next week!
Best,
Jeffrey
