[Note: This is the first in a series of posts about the health of our business. We are currently a small team doing great work. We’re hiring.]
August put Simplifilm back on track.
We have big goals for the rest of the year, we hope to deliver another 23 projects.
Our growth, I credit with a slick, high tech system (see below) to help us manage that:
The 10/13 spot was spoken for tonight, so that’s a good thing.
The Back Story (How We Got Here)
In November 2014 my former partner and I agreed to terms. We had massively different ideas on what “quality” was, both defensible. My view was that if a client was stressed about delivery, it couldn’t be quality work. His view was that a client should trust the magic, and as long as we made the final deadline we’d be forgiven. This was a factor. We never quite turned the corner.
An honest disagreement about the experience, the final product, and the rest.
He and I agreed to part ways – as amiably as these things get. There were payout terms, and that ended around mid “July.” August was something of a fresh month for me.
Theme: We didn’t set a theme for August, but if we had one it would be “American Hustle.”
June was a month I took largely off, attending to graduations, vacations, weddings, and details like that. July was recovering from that, triaging existing work to make sure we were serving clients at a high level. August was, for the first time in a long time, a month with a clear path and clear sailing. I spent a lot of time selling and the results were improved (relative to prior months).
We sold, and built a pipeline. And we simplified, vastly, our selling process. The board says a lot.
New Hires:
We hired a marketing director: Carly Cais. We didn’t have a great process to tell her story .
She did here. We’re working through some systems to help that happen, and we plan on hearing about that next week. She brings solid design skills, a first class animation, and a tolerance for the overwhelming tasks.
We created a “loop” system where we deploy everything then improve it all over time. So far it’s working very well for us.
Numbers:
Relative to recent month, our
Projects Contracted: 8
Revenue Collected: $68,000 (August 2014 was our worst month, and we earned something like $14,000).
Projects Completed: 6
What drives average price down is change orders. On some level maintaining a file we’ve had for years is a responsibility we have (especially since we haven’t typically given source out). On another level, it is a grind that is often about as difficult to do as an original project. Sometimes these little things wind up having interdependencies.
Sometimes, a minor change order can wind up causing a cascade of other changes that will then take 50 unexpected hours. We have got to figure out a policy for making this profitable because 2 change orders were $4500 in revenue yet we could have done $20-30k in work in the same time.
Marketing & Sales Numbers:
This is the first time we’ve paid attention to marketing. In the past, we’ve been driven largely by abrasive-but-effective emails and instant messages to influencers. We’ve worked a little bit with Don’t Panic Management in order to to wrangle some inbound numbers.
Quality Leads: 16
Source of Business:
Repeat Customer (Contracted): 5 projects (63%)
Repeat Customer (Completed): 0
Referred Customer (Contracted): 4 (50%)
Referred Customer (Completed): 2 (33%)
SEO/Marketing Driven (Contracted): 1 (13%)
SEO/Marketing Driven (Completed): 2 (33%)
This is interesting in terms of a percentage as well as an absolute number. Provided that we are healthy enough to earn repeat business, I’m perfectly comfortable with marketing outshining referrals. Being “only” 25% referrals gives an incomplete picture if the gross number is rising.
Prognosis/September Goals:
It’s going to be very difficult, but we want to hit $100k in each of our buckets (contracted, completed, collected.) At the very least an average should be there for us.
We ‘manned up’ and paid out a lot of our debt that had accrued during the time where we were a dysfunctional company.
Our goals in September:
Bucket $100k in each of our buckets. (So far we’re at 28%/1 Clear out of our 404 problems)
Systems Work:
- Have a new hire process (use Process Street- but holy hell curtail it).
- Have a better onboarding process.
We’ll do more stuff but it’s OK to do stuff:
I have intended to do this for a long time, but I was prompted into action – finally – by my friends at WP Curve, I did one. The next one will hit mid October. Til then…
Next month, I’ll start adding balance sheet and WIP numbers to this thing; it’ll evolve over time, but we’ll keep some historical numbers.