The Only 2 Things Your Business Needs
Key points
- When running an agency, there are two things you need, to deliver value and to make a profit.
- Before investing in software, figure out what your clients need, and how you can deliver it to them.
- Once you have a simple system in place, scale it up and grow your business.
There are a million things you could focus on when running an agency: customer acquisition, retention, sales, marketing, hiring, accounting, technology—the list goes on and on.
But at the end of the day, you only need two things to stay in business...
Deliver value
Make a profit
If your customers aren’t getting value, they’re not going to stay customers for very long. Conversely, if your services are valuable, but you’re charging too little and not turning a profit... you’ll just keep burning money, or go out of business.
Simple as that.
Now, the reason I’m writing this is that we often get requests from people looking to start a new venture using our software. They have no customers and no plan for getting them... but they do want to set up a perfectly automated system that integrates with all their tools and cuts out every last bit of manual labor.
Sometimes they even pay us extra to get custom modules and integrations for streamlining their future business.
I totally understand that. But most of the time when all is said and done, and we’ve helped them get set up, their accounts will sit idle. From there, it’s only a matter of time till I get that dreaded subscription canceled email.
Grow your industry knowledge
Because without clients, they’re not getting value from a client management tool like SPP.
So that got me thinking.
How can we help people become successful with our software?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that you don’t really need fancy software when you’re starting out ... not even our software for that matter.
You don’t need to automate and optimize every part of a business before you actually have one.
In fact, there’s immense value in talking to clients 1-on-1. And it’s incredibly easy as long as you’re using modern business phone services that allow you to communicate from any device. Same for delivering services in a more manual way.
Get a feel for your customers. Figure out what they want and the best way to deliver it to them. Then automate and scale.
Because once you’re up and running, it’s actually pretty easy to switch to a more powerful client management system like Service Provider Pro.