16 Apr 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Engagement Selling System, Events, Hallux Training, Redhawk, Sales With No Comments Permalink

Event: How to Build an Effective Sales Team

Sticky Post By On April 16, 2017 With No Comments

As part of Hallux Training, Redhawk will be hosting a free event that explores how selling has changed and what companies need to do to build competitive sales teams. Part presentation and part discussion, this event will provide an excellent opportunity to engage with sales experts who have built multi-million dollar teams and sold into some of the largest companies in the world.

During this event, we will discuss the following topics:

  • What happens when your sales efforts go wrong…
  • Relationship selling is overrated.
  • How to build and scale a successful sales team on a budget.
  • How to hire salespeople.
  • Discounting is not a sales strategy.
  • Companies that rely on tricks and shortcuts will, ultimately, fail to reach their goals.

This event is perfect for people looking to build a sales team for the first time as well as those who are looking at ways to improve their sales effectiveness. This will be an engaging and fun event open to anyone interested in learning how to boost revenue and build competitive sales teams.

Cost: FREE
Location: Redhawk Entrepreneur Development Company, 3027 6th Avenue South 35233

Click to RSVP on Facebook or Meetup. To receive notice of future events, like us on Facebook, join our Meetup group, or request more info on Hallux Training.

03 Apr 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Hallux Training, Sales With No Comments Permalink

How to Survive the Zombie Client Apocalypse

Sticky Post By On April 3, 2017 With No Comments

If you’ve spent any time in sales, you have had a Zombie Prospect. You spent time preparing a great sales presentation. You navigated the organizational hierarchy, made the requisite small talk, and assuaged the fears of a skeptical purchasing department to deliver your proposal. You handed it over with a smile and your prospect said they would have an answer for you “in a few days.”

That was six months ago.

You’re not even sure if your contact still works there because she stopped returning your phone calls four months ago. But still it sits in your pipeline, and you ritualistically review its painful existence in weekly sales meetings.

You don’t get it. Your product seemed to be a good fit. The specs were right. The price was discounted below market rates. Your child even goes to the same elementary school as your buyer’s kid. This is the third time this has happened in the last two quarters.

Why do these prospects go full-on Walking Dead?

Most likely, they were never qualified in the first place. There are three things that need to exist in every opportunity to justify going through the pain and anguish of a modern sales process.

  1. Ability to Buy — I know this seems obvious but there are several reasons why a buyer may not have the ability to buy.
    • There may be no budget for the purchase or that allocation hasn’t been approved prior to your sales engagement of the buyer. In many cases, you called them—so they could be taking a meeting with you without the financial means to purchase anything.
    • They may be contractually obligated to a competing solution and breaking that agreement would be costly.
    • Buyers can window-shop for products and vendors just to see what’s out there. When you offer them a proposal, they would be silly not to take it.
  1. State of Flux — Something in their market, industry, or organization is changing and it’s forcing them to reconsider their ability to cope with that change. Starbucks started as a place to buy espresso machines and coffee equipment. Imagine if you were the commercial paper manufacturer that pitched Howard Schultz on your coffee cup line right after he returned from Italy and decided to open European style coffee houses all over the world.
  1. Urgency — There’s a penalty to the buyer if they don’t act. These penalties can range from financial penalties, increased risk, or loss of some competitive advantage.

Without these, you end up with prospects that never make a decision, or keep asking for additional information or changes to the original proposal. You get delegated to an assistant. There is some new “boss” that is reviewing it. The final approval is just a “week away.”

After about 30 days of being increasingly placated, you can’t even get your prospects to answer the phone or return an email.

You officially have a Zombie.

Salespeople are notorious for chasing bad deals. Once we admit that an opportunity is terrorizing a small village and eating brains for breakfast, we have to take it out of our pipeline, justify why the sale went south to our management, and accept that all of that effort was wasted.

The best treatment is prevention. This requires both the salespeople and their management to allow them to justify walking away from opportunities that aren’t qualified. Trust me—this takes a level of discipline and trust in your salespeople many managers aren’t capable of deploying.

Adding this kind of qualification demands some longer-range perspective. The amount of time spent wasted on deals that were never going to close is time that could have been spent building more reliable pipelines and closing credible opportunities.

If you’re a manager, let your salespeople walk away from unqualified leads. If you’re the salesperson, your sales skills are best spent on opportunities that aren’t half-dead already.

Survive the zombie apocalypse with Engagement Selling System. Learn more or enroll.

02 Apr 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Hallux Training, Sales With No Comments Permalink

Stop Inflicting your Salespeople on your Customers

Sticky Post By On April 2, 2017 With No Comments

It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and your account manager just pulled up to their third sales appointment of the day. They whip out their iPhone and feverishly search Google for any information about the company they’re about to see. They find something about the last company picnic and skim the first three sentences of a blog from their former president before they run out of time.

Armed with this information, they walk into the appointment and proceed to conduct the exact same presentation they conducted in the previous 50 appointments. They ask rhetorical questions like “If I showed you how to make a million more dollars, would you be interested?” and “What keeps you up at night?” They regale the buyer with stories about other “customers just like them” they have “partnered with” and for whom they “delivered incredible solutions.” At some point, there’s a glossy piece of marketing material pushed across the buyer’s desk. Next, they awkwardly work in some inane comment about the picnic picture of the three-legged race in an unwelcomed attempt to build a “relationship.” Just to complete the tragedy this appointment represents, they proceed to offer a discount on the “standard price” before the buyer even requests it.

Our salespeople, who should represent themselves as professionals, have the most product knowledge, and display the highest levels of communication abilities are running around like a bunch of dilettantes.

They walk into meetings unprepared and proceed to deploy some atrocious combination of 80s era rhetorical sales questions and “hacks” designed to trick buyers into behaving a certain way. They use an identical approach and ask the same questions regardless of who the person sitting across the table may be. Regardless of the answers they get from those formulaic questions, the offered solution is always—like magic—the same.

Over the course of that 20-minute sales meeting, you inflicted your salesperson on that poor buyer.

You should be cringing right now—not because this scenario is disturbing—but because this is probably being done in your name as you read this.

Just in case you think I’m being dramatic, consider the following questions:

When was the last time you went on an actual sales meeting with one of your salespeople? What sales training have you provided? What resources have you given them since you onboarded them, authorized their email account, threw some leads across the company’s automated CRM, and wished them happy hunting?

Meanwhile, you demand increasingly difficult sales goals in tightening markets without providing support that will help them continue any measure of success. Salespeople tend to be fairly creative. They’ll find a solution in the absence of you providing one for them. Unfortunately, you may not like the solution they employ.

This is not their fault—it’s yours.

We regularly require our accountants to be CPAs, insist our programmers are certified, and expect our HR team members to hold SHRM memberships. Why don’t we support that same level of professional rigor for our salespeople?

In today’s shrinking world, competitors spring up daily, prices are being squeezed hard enough to be considered commoditized, and products are outmoded quickly. What you sell and how it is differentiated has become increasingly marginalized.

For every buyer, there could be four or five sellers.

Professional sales training is something you owe your salespeople, company, and brand. Most importantly, you owe it to your customers.

Effective sales training doesn’t necessarily cost that much when compared to what’s at stake. If the average salesperson were to improve their conversion percentage by 10% on a $500k annual sales goal, that translates into $25k in additional sales. Using our sales training program, Engagement Selling System as an example, we charge $950 per seat for our class. Most of the salespeople attending our training are responsible for generating more than that in sales revenue every day.

How you sell is as important as what you sell. If you have untrained and unprepared salespeople, the competitor who has invested in their own sales training is going to eat your lunch. According to Daniel Goleman in Working with Emotional Intelligence, the top 10% of salespeople produce double the revenue as an average salesperson with similar products or services.

It matters to your buyers that the salesperson you send them is professional and capable. If the peak of their powers is represented in the panicked efficiency they demonstrate when using a smartphone to dig up useless information about their buyer in the parking lot minutes before the scheduled appointment, you need to reinvest in your sales team’s training.

Learn about Engagement Selling System or enroll.

29 Mar 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Engagement Selling System, Hallux Training, Sales, Training With No Comments Permalink

Why We Created Our New Sales Training Program

Sticky Post By On March 29, 2017 With No Comments

I’ve seen it time after time—small business owners who aren’t happy with their sales team or their results. They call me with a single goal in mind—help me hire better salespeople.

That’s rarely the solution. If you aren’t training your current team, you haven’t set them up for success. Adding more untrained bodies will only subtract from your bottom line, demotivate your existing salespeople, and increase competition for the same meager sales. Firing and replacing your underperforming salespeople doesn’t address the problems in your program, like poor sales management, a lack of performance measurement, poorly designed incentive structures, and misalignment between sales and marketing.

I’ve been looking for sales training to recommend to these clients, but the few programs we’ve found are woefully out of date for the current marketplace, and none address entrepreneurial businesses.

That’s why we’ve launched our new sales training program. It’s called the Engagement Selling System, and it directly addresses the chronic struggle entrepreneurs face building and growing successful sales teams. Entrepreneurs’ business development is different in almost every way from large corporations, but no one has designed an approach specifically with them in mind.

For entrepreneurs, cash flow is a continuous stressor as revenue peaks and valleys are part of the business landscape—29% of businesses fail due to a lack of positive cash flow. All businesses need revenue to survive, and they need to increase that revenue every year to grow without taking on debt or selling equity.

According to trainingmag.com, training is largely deprioritized by SMBs. The average amount spent on training per individual in small- to medium-sized companies has been as low as $554—or less than .02% of their annual operating budget.

When companies spend $5,000 or more for things like a great website, but spend virtually nothing on improving the capabilities of the people responsible for generating their revenue lifeblood, the writing’s on the wall.

We designed ESS to improve conversion rates and create sales professionals who are prepared to outperform their competitors. It’s not enough to have a great sales system, it has to be easy to use and applicable across the wide variety of circumstances salespeople face. The goal of our sales training program is to move the needle by giving your team an approach they can apply immediately and affordably.

Learn more and register.

26 Jan 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Sales With 1 Comment Permalink

How to Create a Commission Program that Works

Sticky Post By On January 26, 2017 With 1 Comment

One issue that routinely crops up with Redhawk clients is designing or updating their commission programs. Caught between not wanting to pay salespeople “too much” and losing them to more lucrative opportunities, managers will toil over excel spreadsheets full of random commission structures for weeks, then end up doing nothing.

Early in my career, I participated in several commission programs—most of which were horribly designed. They all suffered some combination of the following:

  1. The quality or quantity of work the salesperson expended actually had little effect on the goal being met. The market, organization, or product demand predetermined the outcome more than the effort of the person.
  2. The goals were simply ridiculous. No one would even try to reach them and instead spend their time figuring out how to live on the free saltines in the break room until they found a better gig.
  3. Sales priorities and commission triggers were poorly aligned with what the organization could deliver. A friend of mine was tasked with selling $150k of new business each month while production was maxed out at $50k.
  4. Commissions were being paid on top line even when the salespeople were delivering sales that were unprofitable.

Creating a commission program is not intuitive. It’s tough and not something that most people have experience doing until they’re forced to draft one. While there are also financial projections and considerations that need to be made, here are a few concepts to consider when looking at designing a commission program.

Be realistic

If your annual growth rate averages 12%, don’t benchmark the commission program to start at a 120% increase in sales.

Look for the Win/ Win

Ideally, any commission program should be beneficial for both the company and salesperson. Further, that win/ win should continue even if the sales numbers get huge.

Tie the Incentive to the Work Produced

If earning the commission is more about going through the motions as actually putting in the work, you’re only going to retain a mediocre salesforce. The high performers will leave because they can’t earn more through their exceptional work and the low performers get pulled into the average and fly under the radar.

Keep it Simple, Stupid

A salesperson should be able to figure out, without using differential equations, what they just earned when they got that signature. If the commission structure is too difficult to figure out, salespeople will perceive it as fundamentally tilted against them even if that isn’t true. It’s pretty hard to be motivated by something you don’t understand.

Align the Sales Goals with your Operation

When salespeople are asked to sell regardless of what the operation can deliver, you get oversold customers, pushed deadlines, and crappy deliverables. Additionally, if operations are incented on profitability where sales incentives are based on total revenue, they could be working against each other.

Commissions Influence Behaviors

One of our Redhawk clients was commissioning their salespeople more heavily on new customer sales then sell-through to existing customers, even though the sell-through revenue was much more profitable. They also asked them to call every existing customer once a month to see how they were doing and if there were any more opportunities to expand that relationship. Not surprisingly, those calls weren’t happening because the commission program discouraged that behavior.

The classic business article On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B is a must-read for anyone undertaking an incentive program.

Commissions Won’t Manage your Sales Team for You

While commission programs can drive behavior, it can’t drive performance by itself. Contrary to popular belief, a consistent underperformer who isn’t earning commissions won’t necessarily quit—you will still have to fire them. Incentives don’t help people develop selling skills, solve problems, or deliver superior customer experiences. Those things require an engaged and professional manager.

Make the Numbers Work

Think through what happens if a salesperson overperforms by 150%. Will you still love the program or will you have paid so much commission that your CFO has a coronary? I once worked with a terrible CEO who changed a commission program simply because he thought the salesperson earned too much money. Those sales were all profitable and wildly beneficial to the company. He rewarded that salesperson’s incredible year by reducing her pay by almost 30%. She left days later.

Get them to $100k

I don’t know why the magic compensation number for salespeople is $100k but you’ll have to trust me that number is the benchmark. To qualify this, I’m referring to mid-level and senior salespeople who have the skills and ability to generate 8 to 10 times that same number in revenue. Using a blended comp package of salary and commission to get to $100k is a general reference point to consider. If you can’t or won’t get to that level, consider re-engineering or simplifying the sales job requirements so a more junior person can be successful in the role for less money.

Decide if Commissions are Even Needed

Over the last decade, organizations have moved away from incentive-based pay in increasing numbers. Due in part to behavioral scientists pointing to the actual basis of motivation among high-performers, companies have elected to simply pay a premium salary. The foundation of the argument is that achievement is what motivates salespeople and they get that from closing deals—not getting commission checks. The thrill of the win keeps them working hard and the high salary takes care of their financial needs.

23 Jan 2017
Sticky Post By Posted in Entrepreneurship Permalink

Entrepreneurs Should Know the Difference Between Can’t and Won’t

Sticky Post By On January 23, 2017
Retro style image of a rustic wooden sign in an autumn park with the words Courage - Fear offering a choice of reaction and attitude with arrows pointing in opposite directions in a conceptual image.

Fear, skepticism and stubbornness are necessary for entrepreneurs. These things keep you between the ditches and make sure the company you’re driving stays on all four wheels. Questioning the wisdom of each action and assuming the worst possible outcome are things we obsess about and spend sleepless nights contemplating.

“…the terrible and the terrific spring from the same source, and that what grants life its beauty and magic is not the absence of terror and tumult but the grace and elegance with which we navigate the gauntlet.” – Maria Popova

When considering solutions, two words tend to come up repeatedly—can’t and won’t.

Can’t is when you are physically, spiritually, operationally, or structurally unable to do something—you don’t have the option to do it.

You can’t fly, see through walls, or run as fast as a car without mechanical advantages (or Kryptonian genes).

Won’t means there is a decision being made. The decider has some optionality. They can choose to do something or not.

I could go run a marathon but I won’t because it seems really hard, and I get winded going to the refrigerator.

As entrepreneurs find themselves making important decisions, won’t is often misrepresented as can’t.

Can’t is easy to say. Can’t is easy to justify and explain. Can’t ends the conversation. Can’t means you will likely take fewer risks, endure fewer setbacks and in the process, find justification in that risk-mitigating approach.

Won’t can be painful. Won’t is much harder to admit. Won’t is the honest answer most of the time. As entrepreneurs, we sometimes live in won’t but call it can’t.

Won’t limits risk like can’t, but there is far more sincerity and self-awareness in won’t. We had the choice and decided we wouldn’t do it. We considered the opportunity and decided not to do it even though we could.

Won’t can be the right answer but we don’t like categorizing it that way. We are more comfortable telling ourselves and others it can’t be done. Won’t begs for debate and further consideration and we should be more willing to engage in that discussion.

29 Dec 2016
Sticky Post By Posted in Funding, Sales, Start-ups With No Comments Permalink

For Most Startups, Revenue Isn’t Optional

Sticky Post By On December 29, 2016 With No Comments

Your logo is badass, your product or service sounds really innovative and those business cards seem to be made out of some kind of cheetah fur.

I’m interested in hearing about how you plan to scale your user base and grow your adoption rates. I’m also interested in hearing about what conferences you are going to attend, the panels you plan to participate in and how you will attract that rock star CTO.

But I’m more interested in how you’re going to make money, how much you’re going to generate and when you’ll be at breakeven.

At some point in the not so distant past, there was a slide in a pitch deck that showed a potential revenue number against some trillion-dollar market opportunity that may or may not actually exist. Investors got excited about that logo, those sick business cards and that recruiting plan for the Michael Jordan of CTOs and stroked some funding checks.

Seven months later, you’re planning your four-month-long schedule for raising a second round because your expenses have outpaced your revenue faster than expected.

You had to re-design your UX, improve your security back-end and launch an expansive social media campaign. You gained thousands of users, received a few accolades for your startup and generated some revenue. You didn’t hire that sales guy you knew you needed or re-price the product to improve margins and instead spent that time, money and energy on making a better product and gaining users. Unfortunately, that sagging revenue is shortening your runway.

In a startup, you’re constantly prioritizing and reprioritizing work. The tension between product development, creating scale and maintaining positive numbers on your balance sheet can be a daily struggle. There are always more things to do than you have the resources to complete.

Generating revenue should be your top priority.

Like it or not, generating sales revenue is the path for success for most startups. Venture capital passes on all but a few of the deals they are pitched and less than half the tech startups will even attempt to pitch VCs. There may be no investor cash available.

We see the Techcrunch headlines and Medium articles about the startups that sold for $50 million even though they never actually created an operational profit for themselves or their investors. Behind that small selection of successes lie the other 90% of startups that folded. Running out of money is usually cited in most of these collapses as a primary cause.

Think about the optionality sales revenue provides.

  • The option of pivoting your offering.
  • The option of going after your competitors more aggressively.
  • The option of taking a risk on a new set of features or an additional product line.
  • The option of reinvesting the profits back into the growth of the company.
  • The option of upgrading your human capital.
  • The option of taking on additional investors or bootstrapping your growth.

Sales revenue also provides a wider margin for failure. Your financial projections, budgets and planning are mostly works of fiction so when something doesn’t go the way you need, that extra cash will certainly help you smooth out that rough spot.

Lastly, generating positive cash flow is a signal to future investors, employees, vendors, and other stakeholders that the product is viable and worth their participation.

Sales isn’t as fun or sexy to talk about as UX or branding. You usually can’t do it at 2am or between rounds at the shuffleboard table. But if the rest of you want to eat, you need a solid sales program staffed with competent, motivated people. If you’re not sure where to start, give me a call.

21 Dec 2016
Sticky Post By Posted in Entrepreneurship, Start-ups Permalink

Read This Before You Join an Accelerator Program

Sticky Post By On December 21, 2016

I’m not creative and have never had that moment of total clarity where I had an idea worth turning into a product and company. I’m a services entrepreneur and love what I do. However, founders and startups comprise a large segment of my client list. While I’ve never participated in an accelerator program as a founder of a startup, I’ve been involved in programs as a mentor, resource and even in organizational design projects. Over the course of the last few years, I’ve become increasingly fascinated with accelerator and incubator programs.

At their core, they represent an amazing approach to helping startups gain perspective and traction as they throw themselves into making the next great thing. What’s even more amazing is talking to the people who’ve participated in them. I’ve tried to capture the things they’ve learned and shared with me. Hopefully, this will help aspiring participants make some decisions about which program may be right for them.

There are some globally-recognized programs that have impressive lists of graduates with several branches throughout the world. Techstars, Y-Combinator and others are the Ivy League of accelerators. They take the top 3% of the applicant pool. Their programming, mentorship and cohort selection breeds success on a scale not realized on other platforms. If you are selected to participate in either of those programs, you definitely should.

Most startups won’t be granted a spot in one those programs, but with the proliferation of smaller accelerators, you may find some that are worthwhile. There are several new programs gaining an incredible reputation after only a few cohorts.

First, let me start with the basics.

  • Most accelerators will offer some kind of seed/award/prize money for being in the program. You don’t always get it up front. You may get it in a series of smaller payments or after clearing certain hurdles.
  • These programs are broken into cohorts between 5 and 20 companies depending on their format and programming. It is most common to see 10 companies in a cohort.
  • Programs usually take place over 12-14 weeks.
  • Within these accelerators, you will’ve some kind of administrator or director, an entrepreneur in residence (EIR), mentors and investors. Some programs will have a stratified management layer of managing and non-managing “members.”

These accelerators can attract some amazing talent and be a critical springboard for your startup—provided you pick one best positioned for you.

Here are a couple of things to consider when picking a program:

Who’s Running it?

The directors, EIR and management should be successful entrepreneurs. You should look for programs where the leadership has been successful in a specific aspect of business where you also need to succeed. If you must generate revenue and scale your business, an EIR who exited their previous company with $2 million in debt may not be a good fit for you. Accelerators can become a form of “business welfare” where friends and associates who are otherwise unqualified to serve in those capacities get lucrative EIR positions or board seats.

It’s also a huge benefit when the leadership has been through an accelerator program—especially a prestigious one. Nate Schmidt of the Velocity Accelerator in Birmingham is a Techstars graduate and will be able to relate to his cohorts in a powerful way.

General and Specialized Accelerators

Specialization is an encouraging new trend in accelerators. Instead of operating general “tech” accelerators, savvy programs are starting to look for the underserved or emerging industries ripe for innovation. The Dynamo Accelerator in Chattanooga and Boomtown Healthtech in Boulder are great examples of this kind of specialization. By focusing on a specific market, they can attract better companies and highly qualified industry experts as mentors and programming that focuses on the specific challenges of that industry.

Funding Sources

Consider the motivations of those who are funding the program. For accelerators that have industry or venture capital support as their main source of operating cash, you may see a higher level of execution and greater sense of accountability than those backed primarily by academic or municipal stakeholders. For the former, they are participating to make money, benefit from the innovation created and boost their prestige as an accelerator. For the latter, the PR alone is often worth the cost of the program. They are largely spending tax money from a general budget or endowments that were granted out of philanthropic interests. If it is successful, that’s a bonus, but they win simply by participating and launching the program. That isn’t to assert those can’t be successful or that industry giants don’t get significant positive PR from sponsoring an accelerator. Understanding what the “money” gets from providing the funding is worth considering.

Benefits Provided other than Money

Excellent programming, mentors, EIRs and leadership can make an under-funded or new accelerator incredibly worthwhile. The inverse is true as well. Top programs should be actively helping you connect with important outside resources and finding new customers even before the program is over.

The mentors can be an incredible source of business deals and networking—provided they are the kinds of mentors you need. Are you building the next great wearable technology? Maybe you should take a second look at that roster of mentors dominated by bankers and lawyers.

Participants in the Cohorts

I’ve heard from dozens of accelerator graduates who’ve talked about how much they gained from the other participants in their cohort. These success stories range from finding their new CIO to merging with another graduate.

Are the other companies as hungry as you are—financially and ambitiously—or are they simply taking easy money to half-heartedly pursue a side project while they maintain their full-time salaried job? I’ve seen some startups play the system by participating in as many accelerators, launch programs and competitions as possible to generate cash. I know of one company that participated in three programs in 2016 alone.

Are they from various parts of the country or world or are they all from the same place? That may not matter to you, but if every company comes from the same town, you’ll sacrifice the unique perspectives only a diverse cohort can provide.

Choosing to participate in an accelerator is a big decision. The time it takes to even apply is a significant commitment. Make sure you consider what you want to get out of the experience and whether the programs you are considering can deliver.

31 Oct 2016
Sticky Post By Posted in Redhawk Permalink

Celebrating Two Years of Success

Sticky Post By On October 31, 2016

Starting a new business from scratch is scary, doing it on Halloween is just asking for it. Redhawk Consulting was started on October 31st, 2014 at 1:30pm. As we celebrate another All Hallows’ Eve and our second year in business, I’m reflective about how much has changed since 2015.

In our first year of operation, we were laser-focused on revenue and generating the “next” client. Because we work with only entrepreneurial companies and non-profits on a project basis, we are constantly working ourselves out of a job—by design. We don’t advertise our services; almost all our clients are referrals. The next client is crucially important to us.

When I talked to people in that first year about Redhawk and what we did, I spoke in theory since most of that work had not been done or proven to be effective yet. I was confident in our approach, even if it was purely philosophical at that point. We killed ourselves to deliver value as our approach was far from refined.

Having survived the first year and proven that our business model was actually viable, we started to expand our client base, the services we offered, and our efficacy. I started the business in 2015 with one very large client. I hadn’t done any of the business development activities normally associated with starting a new business, because I was too busy working on that client’s projects. It was almost a full year before I started pounding the pavement and talking about Redhawk in our own local market.

The grind was real. I wasted time trying to farm members of the local chamber of commerce. I participated in several “networking” groups that were equal parts useless and creepy. I spent countless evenings going to startup events. Of the hundreds of meetings and other activities, only a handful of those produced anything worthwhile.

Then I started focusing on finding professional connections for whom I could add value. I demonstrated how the consulting we could do would directly benefit their clients, associates, friends, or other stakeholders. Stealing a page from Gary Vaynerchuk, I worked to create value first and relied on that to generate opportunities in the future.

Through that combination of brute force, strategic networking, and value creation, we started capturing more opportunities. Here are some highlights from our second year:

  • We went from 4 clients in 2015 to 24 in 2016 (and growing)
  • Clients’ total revenues in 2015 were $12 million; in 2016 that number is more than $100 million
  • Redhawk engaged in 18 new industry sectors in 2016
  • Of the 20 new clients added in 2016, 18 of them were referrals from existing clients
  • 90% of our clients hired us for additional work after our initial engagement
  • We added marketing, branding, and legal consulting to our slate of services
  • We donated 17 hours of time in 2015 and more than 100 hours in 2016
  • We have zero dollars written off to bad debt, despite generous payment terms

We’re looking forward to growing, learning, and developing Redhawk in 2017 and beyond. To our families and friends who’ve put up with our constant rescheduling and dereliction of personal responsibilities—thank you. None of this would be possible without your understanding, generosity, and unconditional love.

03 Aug 2016
Sticky Post By Posted in Marketing & PR, Start-ups Permalink

Credda: The Lawfully Good Leasing Company

Sticky Post By On August 3, 2016

The only thing better than competing in a business competition is enjoying one from the audience. You get all the thrills of watching energetic young businesses share their value propositions and competitive advantages, with none of the chest-crushing stress that comes from waiting for your own results. All pitch, no panic attacks.

That’s how I met Credda. This leasing company out of Spartanburg, SC pitched at the 36/86 semi-final held at Iron City on April 6 of this year. I immediately loved their story and their commitment to providing empathetic service to leasing customers.

I got to visit them in June and help them identify their core brand values. I’ve done this for dozens of companies—it not only informs your marketing messages and corporate culture, it also helps you make business decisions and communicate your purpose to a variety of stakeholders.

This was the first time I found a company who had more than a set of core brand values—they had a moral alignment. This nerdy term comes from Dungeons & Dragons and helps define a character’s outlook on life. The tool has been used to describe lots of characters outside the role-playing game universe, too.

Here’s an overview of the concept:

lnc-archetypes

What I love about Credda is that they are inarguably the Lawful Good. They’re unceasing in their approach to helping their clients make money while helping their end customers save money. They do it through rigorous analytics, relentless legal compliance, and an empathetic outlook wherein they put themselves in customers’ shoes.

credda core brand value map for blog.001

What’s your company’s moral alignment? How does it fit with your core brand values? Do you know your core brand values? Do they separate you from the pack, or are they generic? The better your values describe what’s unique about your company, the more likely they are to help differentiate you in the marketplace.

 

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