Ever heard the phrase, “What got you here won’t get you there?” Even if you haven’t, you probably know what it feels like.
Let’s say you’ve been experiencing a string of successes, growing nonstop, when you suddenly hit a wall. Then, no matter how hard you keep trying to repeat successful habits, you just can’t get past this bottleneck. It’s like everything you’ve learned so far no longer applies.
What gives?
Let me give you a more concrete example of why this happens.
When you’re first growing a business, you might hire a bunch of friends in the early days. You guys are working together and things are actually working out really well. Before you know it, you’re getting sales into the pipeline. You are growing 100% month over month.
When you’re really small, this kind of growth is very possible, and it seems like growth is effortless.
So you hire a couple people, first contractors and then full-timers, and they do a really good job for you. In the first year, things are going really well and you hit six figures in revenue. The very next year, you’re on track to do seven figures.
But to go from six to seven figures, there are significant changes you have to make. You have to start thinking about scalable processes and you may consider bringing in more senior and experienced help. But you haven’t done any of this before, so you don’t know this ahead of time.
Instead, you keep trying to do the same things you did in the past, but without any sign of success.
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Whenever a company starts out, people wear a lot of different hats. Everyone’s open to doing a lot of different things. But when you start to get to the seven-figure level and beyond, you need to hire more specialists. And when you look at companies that do over $100 million per year, you have lots of investment in operations and layers of management, too.
But aren’t generalists better, you ask?
Not always. For example, let’s say one of your best friends helps you build up your company and he’s a generalist marketer who’s really good at getting a lot of different things up and running. In the early days, that might be enough because he’s basically like a Swiss army knife for marketing.
When you’re running on a shoestring, a self-funded budget, a Swiss army knife is a great investment.
But your friend might not be the person who will take you to next level of success with your marketing. For that journey, you need someone with a more specialized set of skills, someone who really understands the nuances of your niche. Specialists are more tuned into the cutting-edge stuff that will give you an edge over the competition.
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The mistake that many companies make in this exact situation is they say, “Okay, let’s just stick with these guys. They’ve done a good job.” And then you stick with them for a couple years, but your growth kind of plateaus, because what got you here won’t get you there.
Granted, you have an emotional tie to the people who stuck things out with you when the company was growing. But at a certain point you have to ask yourself, “Is this person truly the person who will take us to the next level? If not, what do I need to do next?”
If you don’t feel 100% confident in your conviction that this person is the right person, then you’ve got to make a change. Maybe you need to help them adjust to another role. But if that person doesn’t want to move into another role, then you’ll have to make a difficult decision.
You don’t necessarily have to fire anyone. Many people can and will adapt to a new role if they like the company and if they’re compensated well. Those are the people who work really, really hard, and who love to learn. But some people may just want a standard 9-to-5 job, and they don’t want to learn new skills for new roles.
I’ve been in situations before where, as a manager, I had to make those kinds of decisions. Let’s say you hire someone who’s really good at content writing, for example, and they were able to handle all your content marketing. But now you need to produce way more content, maybe even multimedia content, and you need an editor-in-chief rather than a full-time writer.
Not all writers make good editors, and vice versa, so this is an example of something that could become a bottleneck.
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You need to think about these things as you continue to grow because there are people who have had a lot of experience in your niche who know exactly what to do in your situation to get to the next level.
If you’ve hit a growth plateau and aren’t sure why, consider auditing your company. Ask yourself:
These are the questions I ask myself all the time. I’m constantly looking at where Single Grain is today and where we need to go next. We’ve made some huge transitions in our time, from a brick-and-mortar SEO agency to a completely remote PPC team back to an in-person team that’s really good at paid advertising. There have been a couple of major paradigm shifts, but everyone on the team understands that we make these changes to grow the company, and everyone has to learn as needed.
So, ask yourself this question every now and then: “Do we have everything we need to take us to the next level?” Because what got you here won’t necessarily get you there.
This post was adapted from Eric’s Facebook Live videos: Growth 90 – DAILY live broadcasts with Eric Siu on marketing and entrepreneurship. Watch the video version of this post:
How to Generate GREAT Headlines in WordPress in No Time
In the last episode, I talked about Winnr and gave you a url to use to get the tool. The tool I’m talking about today is from that same url, and it’s called Headlinr.
In the last episode I talked about Winnr and I gave you a URL to look to go to actually get Winnr. This is the other one I was talking about. This is actually the domain of Winnr pretty much. It’s Headlinr, it’s basically spelled out Headlinr but knockout the “E” and you will be able to find the website. I’ll leave this in the show notes.
This Headlinr is a plugin that allows you to, it’s a Chrome extension that allows you to come up with countless headline ideas quickly. Basically, you just, when you’re looking for a headline ides, you just click it and you type in a noun and it will literally breakout tons of different headlines for you and there’s also a section where you can swipe headlines from very popular internet marketer site, Ryan Deiss from Digital Marketer, there are just a lot of great stuff there. You don’t necessary have to use those headlines, but, the fact that you just have a plethora of these headlines that you can swipe, will give you your own ideas and you can really modify it to make it your own. You don’t necessary have to use the buzz feed type of headlines, but, if you can work in kind of your own take on it and merge it with like a buzz feed type of headline, I think you’re going to get more bang for your back and of course test it and you can use the plugin I just talked about earlier. You can use Winnr and you can split test them.
So, these two kind of go in hand-in-hand and it’s just make sense to have these. It’s just easy to have Chrome Extension there. It’s not going to take me much more time to dig around and see what type of headline I want to go with.
In general it’s a time saver and hopefully for you it will be a traffic generator as well.
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How to Split Test Your Headlines in WordPress
Most of the time, we’re always trying to think of great headlines because they’re what drive traffic. Until now I haven’t found a really good solution to help split test your headlines in WordPress, but I was searching around for a plugin and I came across Winnr.
I’m going to tell you how you can AB test your headlines in WordPress.
A lot of times when we’re always trying to think of great headlines because we know that it’s, first of all people see the headlines and that’s what’s going to drive a lot of the traffic and the headlines makes a world of difference. Up to know I haven’t seen a really good solution for AB testing headlines that makes it super easy like, I was looking for a plug-in to do it. I was just surfing around and I stumbled across this thing called Winnr, and its spelled W-I-N-N-R, so it’s basically winner without the “E”. To find it you go to headlinr (and its headlinr without the ‘e’) .com/winnr and we’ll leave this in the show notes. But, basically what I found was that, Winnr allows you to test multiple – all you need to do is click ‘use Winnr’ when you’re editing a Post in Word Press, and then you can add different headlines and then you just schedule the post. And then what will happen is Winnr will have its own analytic stash, for that will show you, which titles are doing the best, which ones are driving the most clicks and you could see overtime how you should be optimizing your headlines, what type of headlines is your audience actually responding to and has a much more data driven approach to it than any others could’ve hacked together solutions out there.
Winnr is what I recommend, check it out. I have no affiliation to them. I did pay, let’s see how much I pay for this thing, I forgot how much I paid but I’m looking at their pager now and it says $67 for their professional addition and I think that’s great if you’re talking of getting hundreds or thousands of visits a month or millions of visits, you can AB test the headlines. That’s going to make a world of difference in terms of traffic across the board because some headlines can do much, much, much better, 20X more than bad headlines in general.
So check it out and let me know what you think.
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