The problem isn’t that I need my workers to work harder, hell we’ve been training people to be more efficient since before I was around, but rather I’ve got to get them working on the correct things. I’ve put a lot of passion and energy into my dream and I am not going to walk away from it and let it die a slow death. But in order for someone as stupid as me to find the problems with my business, I am going to have to track them down, because I am not smart enough to find them any other way.
The first thing I want to do is work on my offer, the product that I am selling.
Since I started out creating a web design business I don’t want to do anything to change that part of my business. As a matter of fact I want to actually drop all the other services and have Geeks on Steroids offer nothing but web design services.
However, something that I never thought about before is that a businesses needs to be able to grow and in order to grow it needs to be able to change directions. I need to be able to test and fine tune my products, my marketing, my offer, my production and my website.
And all these things need to change constantly, as we test and optimize them. As a matter of fact for the whole month of October I want to be making at least one change to one of those things every single day. I have to be able to serve my current clients, while improving everything else to find new clients, without losing the current clients.
You see, having a website doesn’t make you high tech, running over five hundred tests and having a team of professional putting their input in on the outcome makes you high tech. And this is exactly what I want to do with Geeks on Steroids.
I want to tweak everything as quickly as I can and let my customers vote on what they like from my products to my marketing. I want to start measuring everything and comparing the number of new customers this month to the number of new customers last month. I want to launch a new product every month and measure the amount of extra money each product makes the business.
The idea is to start getting ready now to do 1 million next year.
I am not talking about doing it with one particular offering but rather a combination of a whole bunch of different kinds of businesses. You see, if I can figure out the correct way to run one business then there is no reason that I can’t have two, three and you get the idea.
But to make any business work I have to figure out how to do things I’ve never done before, like measuring everything from the product, to the marking so we can cut out things that don’t make sense quickly and double up on the ones that do. This means we need to constantly try and improve the amount of time it takes us to build, test, and create new products.
Okay, I don’t want customers to tell me what they want but rather show my by their actions.
This means there is no mistake in what I think they wanted, or what they thought they wanted!
This means testing every single day with a brand new report. I want to be continuously improving every part of our business. The next few months are where I stop making assumptions of what my website visitors want and put in the hard work of discovering what they really want.
This is my new job, I will put together a team of people that will do nothing but analyze every part of our business, every single day and figure out ways to make it grow. We will be doing split testing on everything, showing 50% of the people one site and the next 50% a different site.
By showing one visitor one site and the next visitor a different site I can measure the two versions of the site as well as my prices, products and the way I present my content.
I am able to see how each group behaved to what I was testing. Done correctly the test should show us things that will guide us and direct we, in the direction our customers want us to go. From our prices, to our products, our customers will be building and directing the growth of the business for us. Once I get a system in place for the first site the second site should be a lot easier and the third even easier.
We will be systematically figuring out the products to sale and prices and methods to sale them at. But to learn and truly understand we will need to push each item to its limits. However, as long as we can keep the website visitors at or above 2,000 per day this should not be a problem as we can test new items daily.
One of the other things I want to start testing is the value of the websites we build ROI’s to our customers. And I am not talking about by asking them, I don’t want their opinion but by testing and running the same kinds of test we run on our own sites.
“Success is not delivering a product; success is learning how to solve the customer’s problem.”
We’ve built many websites to spec, websites that we called a success that our customers never made a dime with. If we are going to grow we have to change the way we do business, every client has to see success with his or her website. I want to treat every visitor that lands on our website as an experiment. I want to identify our assumptions, and figure out ways to test them. Using this information, we can make our products and offers more appealing and have the company up and running—on a micro scale—long before the official plan is set in motion.
We can target different parts of the country and experiment in a lot of different ways.
I can target an area as small as few city blocks, and instead of paying for expensive television or radio advertising we can use online targeted advertising. Since the area is so small, I can afford to pay a more to create a high level of awareness in the target area.
We can get a sense of what our clients want in a matter of days allowing us to begin tweaking and improving our site in a matter of weeks.
We can also start testing our marketing messages: What motivates people and gets them to call?
What percentage of people (in the target area), actually called?
By understand my clients behavior I will have a far more accurate understanding of my client than any other market research will give me. You see when a customer interacts with my products, they generate feedback and data.
My products will become experiments; and I will use them to learn how to build a better business that offers exactly what my clients want. We have to use these experiments to identify where and when to invest time, energy and money. We have to get our new product in front of the client as soon as possible so we can start measuring the impacts our changes have made.
We will judge ourselves on what we have learned and set goals for what we want to learn and a time frame for learning those things. We will measure the actions our clients take and analyze those behaviors in ways that help us improve our business.
This information will then be used to constantly change and test new ideas with our products, marketing, website and services that we provide as well as the direction the company will go in. I need to figure out what I need to learn and what I need to measure so I can start improving the business.
We need to lay out a vision and the process to achieve that vision.
Our first challenge is to build an organization that can test ideas systematically. The second challenge is not losing sight of the company’s overall vision.
What makes one business a success story while the others fail?
Maybe the different is that successful business has the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of their plans are working and which need to adapt and change directions. If this is the case then it is unacceptable to take anything for granted or to rely on the reports of others.
I’ve been a follower of the just-do-it school of thought and I am impatient and don’t want to spend time analyzing my strategy. I’d rather start building immediately, unfortunately, because customers don’t really know what they want, it’s been easy to make a total mess out of my business with this method.
If we can provide a superior customer experience, will people give our product a try?
I want to lay out a plan that includes projections of how many customers the company expects to attract, how much it will spend, and how much revenue and profit that will lead to.
I need to learn how to move the real numbers closer to the ideal reflected in the business plan.
As the profits from the sales of goods are reinvested in marketing and promotions, the company gains new customers.
Our rate of growth depends on three things:
- How much we can make on each customer.
- The cost of getting new customers.
- Repeat purchases of existing customers.
The faster we can grow the business the more profitable it will be.
- We want to start with a minimum value product to establish data on where the company is at.
- We then start working from where it is not to where we want it to be.
- Adjust fine tune, tweak and measure again
Over time, if we are learning then we will see our numbers rise from where we are at now to where we want to be by this time next year.
If we are unable to make progress then this is a sure sign that we need to change the product we are offering. We have to measure and improve conversion rates, customer counts, and revenue to show what a good job we had doing. We need to set up a funnel and measure the behaviors that are critical to our business growth: traffic, customer registration, and purchases, repeat.
Every day we will be able to measure our product’s performance with a brand new set of customers. And each time we will revise the product, the brand and the website.
Tomorrow we might change the way new customers sign up and the next day fix bugs, roll out a new visual design, or try a new layout for our website. Every day, we try and make the product better, and then we test it with real numbers. Every day is a new experiment.
The numbers for each day are independent from the day before. We need to measure our overall gross numbers as well as our funnel numbers. Instead of looking at totals or gross numbers such as total revenue and total number of customers, we need to look at the performance of each group that comes into contact with the product.
Our funnel is a traditional sales funnel that is used to manage prospects on their way to becoming customers.
We are going to do split testing by sending a different offer to two similar groups of customers so that we can measure differences in the response rates of the two groups. We have to become skilled at improving our product’s performance, just as designers are talented at making products easier to use.
These activities in a well-run organization offer benefits beyond out imagination. As long as we are executing the plan well, hard work yields results.
We have to become process-oriented and disciplined.
I want the changes to be written like a story, instead of writing specification for a new website that is described in technical terms. A story that describes the feature from the point of view of the customer, the story should help keep us focused on the customer’s perspective throughout the development process.
Each feature needs to be expressed in plain language and in terms that everyone can understand whether they have a technical background or not.
The only limit is that no one can interrupt any task that is in progress.
We are putting in a system that will allow us to change direction quickly and stay light on our feet, and be highly responsive to changes in the business requirements.
I have to work hard to sustain my belief that Geeks on Steroids is destined for success.
As employees we will have to accept and adapt to the product and business’s constantly changing requirements and understand that we are not responsible for the quality of those business decisions. I want everyone to stay focused on creating features and technical designs. Any attempt to for the team to understand the process could undermine productivity.
Changes can be in four states of development: in the backlog, actively being built, done, or in the process of being tested. But only three changes can be in each section. Other words, if you have three things we want to try in backlog and would like to add another you first have to move one of the items from the backlog into production. This means that items have to constantly be moving through the system or everything stops.
The only way to start work on new features is to investigate some of the stories that are done but haven’t been validated. This will require a non-designer to talk to customers, looking at split-test data, and the like.
A solid process lays the foundation for a healthy culture, one where ideas are evaluated by merit and not by job title.
We need to make the reports as simple as possible so that everyone understands them.
Reports turn complex actions into: among the people who used our product in this period, here’s how many of them showed the behaviors we care about.
In order for us to run our business and make the correct decisions in running the business and moving it forward we need to know: How many people land on our website, how long do they stay on the site, what do they do on the site, how many feel out the form, how many people call, how many engage in a chat, and how many click onto other pages, and what pages are they clicking on to.
In other words, we need reports that deal with people and their actions.
We need a system to automatically generate a report that contains the latest data for every single one of our split-test experiments every single morning. And I want it emailed to every employee in the company. It needs to be well laid out and easy to read, with each experiment and its results explained in plain language.
I want all reports stored in our system and be considered part of the product itself and owned by Geeks on Steroids but be accessible to anyone with an employee account.
This would mean that any employee could log in to the system at any time, choose from a list of all current and past experiments, and see a simple one-page summary of the results. We can then verify reports by having the salesman ask certain questions to potential clients when they call in. This should give us some insights into why customers are behaving the way the data indicates.
My problem is that the real work that determines the success of a business is never talked about.
I have failed at the real work, the work that is measured by innovation accounting: product prioritization decisions, deciding which customers to target or listen to, and having the courage to do constant testing and feedback.
The one question that I never asked myself was rather or not we were making enough progress to believe that we would meet our original goals. Companies that do not bring themselves to change directions get stuck in the land of the living dead, neither growing nor dying, consuming resources and commitment from employees but not moving forward.
The month of October I want to get everything set up, and then starting November I want to start having meetings once a month where we make companywide decisions on the direction the business is going in. Once we get everything going we may bring in outside advisers to put input into these meetings. We want to see the results from the past to see how we are doing while looking at our forecast of where we want to be to see how we are stacking up.
We have to understand what activities create value and which are forms of waste?
By understanding this we can begin using techniques to drive out waste and increase the efficiency of the value-creating activities.
Instead of working in separate departments, programmers and designers will work together side by side on one customer at a time. This allows us to quickly detect problems and prevent bigger problems from happening.
I also want defense mechanisms that prevent someone from accidentally breaking something important on our website. A system that not only makes sure the website behaves like expected but continuously monitors the health of our business so mistakes are found and removed automatically.
When our system detects a problem, a number of things should happen immediately:
1. The defective change is removed immediately and automatically.
2. Everyone is notified of the problem.
3. The person that caused the problem is blocked from introducing any further changes.
4. … until the root cause of the problem is found and fixed.
We want to practice true continuous deployment—with dozens of changes happening every day.
I want an environment of mutual trust and empowerment.
I will ask teams to adopt these simple rules:
1. be tolerant of all mistakes the first time.
2. Never allow the same mistake to be made a second time.
The first rule encourages people to get used to being compassionate about mistakes, especially the mistakes of others. Most mistakes are caused by flawed systems, not bad people. The second rule gets the team started making an investment in prevention.
Our goal at Geeks on Steroids is to build an organization that can learn how to balance the needs of existing customers with the challenges of finding new customers to serve, managing existing lines of business, and exploring new business models—all at the same time.
1. Any team can create a true split-test experiment that affects only the sandboxed parts of the product or service or only certain customer territories (for a new product). However:
2. One team must see the whole experiment through to the end.
3. No experiment can run longer than a specified amount of time (usually a few weeks).
4. No experiment can affect more than a specified number of customers.
5. Every experiment has to be evaluated on a single standard report of five to ten (no more) actions.
6. Every team inside the sandbox and every product must use the same metrics to evaluate success.
7. Any team that creates an experiment must monitor the metrics and customer reactions (social media reaction, forum threads, etc.) while the experiment is in progress and abort it if something bad happens.
Tags:
Custom Website Designs,
Professional Website Designs,
Website Conversion,
Website Designers
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With the information I am about to share with you, you will learn how to build a massive business without an expensive, elaborate website or expensive monthly hosting.
Putting a website online requires taking risk and making sacrifices. When you hit the first pothole (and it will happen) just keep in mind that you are creating a business.
