Why you shouldn't focus on quick wins too much

Quick wins. Low hanging fruit. As a marketer and consultant, these are my most hated words. Let me explain why. As our podcast guest, Chris Kalaboukis from Hello Future said: "The best fruit is way up at the top, but you only go for the low-hanging fruit. And then you just continuously go for the low-hanging fruit. Meanwhile, your competitors are going to go for the higher hanging fruit."

Today, leaders cherish quick wins as they deliver easy-to-see results. But quick wins eat long-term strategy for breakfast.

The bottom line on why leaders need quick results

If you were sarcastic enough like me, you would say that an average user in 2021 has an attention span somewhat similar to my dog's focus on a random wooden stick. Everyone wants instant gratification, not just on social media. And every service provider aims to please their clients with said fast results. It almost doesn't matter what industry you are in—marketing consulting, performance marketing, or simply business consulting. You have to be able to deliver super-quick results now, then worry about long-term goals later. If you are old enough, you remember how a business strategy meeting looked like before the 2010s. We planned out at least a year with quarterly tactical plans. Today we are lucky if we can get into quarterly planning with a client.

But what is the purpose of a quick win anyway? It is simple.

Quick wins exist to reassure you that you are on the right track. It would be best if you didn't plan to pick the low-hanging fruit as a goal - but you need to pick it to know that you are at the right tree.

Three points where quick wins harm your business

If your focus is solely on quick wins, there are some ways they can cause more damage than deliver results.

First, you quickly jump into micromanagement. That is the root of all evil. Focusing on quick wins will make you focus on the details, the small little hinges. And while you might see immediate results that will let you calm down during business planning, the results will fluctuate. You will soon end up with some parallel processes, where you need to balance to see the big picture.

Second, quick wins will tie your hands to focus on things that really matter. If you are constantly chasing short-term objectives, you won't be able to plan properly. Pretty much, you will end up in a constant problem-solving process. Without the vision, the time needed to define the big picture, your focus will shift, and the future will turn grey.

Third, there are others, a precious few, who are still focused on meaningful planning.

Anyone who's reaching for the higher hanging fruit will ultimately benefit for the long-term. They put in the hard work. They put in the time. They stayed committed. They never changed their plan, no matter how hard it was to stay on track.

What should you do instead?

What needs to be done is as simple as it sounds, yet only a very few businesses do the way it should be done.

1. Do your homework and plan. There are fundamentals you need to figure out before you focus on short-term results. Have a go-to-market strategy for your product. Do customer research. Learn more about your market. Figure out your long-term strategy.

2. Never mix-and-match long-term goals with short-term objectives. Your goal should be set and should lead you to the future. Your objectives, though, can be short-term. There, you can have your quick wins to reassure you that you are on the right track.

3. Stay committed. If you believe in your vision and your planning work supports you, never deviate from your plan. Even if you have short-term failures, never deviate and change course. It is the hardest thing to do in business, especially in times like these.

My best example I can give to you is a simple one. Imagine a YouTube influencer that you love to watch now. Now go to their channel and scroll way back in time. In most cases, their first 50 videos are of lower quality, poorly edited, and have lower views. Imagine how hard their commitment was with their message. They continued to produce their videos, one-by-one for months, sometimes even years, meanwhile only their close friends and some bots watched their show. But they stayed committed. Eventually, their channel kicked in and delivered longtail results. It's easy to think that they 'hacked' the system and win the race - but you rarely hear about those influencers who quit producing content after 10 videos with zero views.

Plan ahead. Stay committed. Stay on track. Focus on the higher-hanging fruit first. The low-hanging ones will come to you without any effort.

Watch our podcast guest, Chris Kalaboukis talking about quick wins & innovation. Listen to the whole episode here.

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3 tips on how to sell your professional services online

I got my driver's license at the age of 33 - never needed it, always lived in the central hubs of European capital cities, plus I'm working from home, so no need to commute anyway. However, my childhood dream was to own a Jag - an old, rusty, V6-monster with a cherrywood-interior, leather seats, and the comfort of a luxurious battleship. So my very first car was a Jag - and I loved it. A true weekend-car, we had unique experiences together.

I sold her a few months ago, though - with a shameful 20.000 miles extra in her within four years of usage. Most of the time, she was sleeping in a heated garage.

I realized I cared more about the experiences of driving a great car than the actual car itself. Tools and things are not the ones where one should look for happiness, obviously. Relationships inspired by experiences are the ones that make us happy. To realize that, I had to own a 'thing' that I was craving since my childhood.

Why do I tell this story to you? Because your customers will pick you above others, not because of the brand you project for them, but the relationships you build with them. You are in the experience/relationship business, where titles and your background have nothing to do with your sales and marketing efforts.

I believe there are fundamental changes in the way we sell professional services.

Don't be the Jag in the room - stop focusing on yourself

In the people's business, things are your titles: background, skillset, pedigree, brand. While they are, of course, important, but not as important as you might think, if you are a lawyer, for example, the number of clients who work with you based on the family tradition is shrinking.

The new generation of customers doesn't care about your titles, your qualifications, and your background. They only care about their needs and the relationships you can build with them. Instead of focusing on selling you as the service provider, focus on selling your service's impact. Focus on how you can solve your customers' needs, instead of just appeal as you are.

In practical terms, lawyers/accountant/financial experts won't call themselves "lawyer"/"accountant"/"finance expert" anymore - they will focus on how they help others with their specific skills.

Be specific with how you can help others

It's not enough anymore to pick a niche and operate within. You have to be super specific on how you can help others. There are millions of lawyers out there who are practicing family law. Very few of them can help with particular divorce issues that appeal to specific demographics. To market your services, you have to be super targeted and extremely specific in helping others.

Besides the extreme targeting, focus on the outcome as well. If you can coin how your prospective clients feel when helping them, it would be a more natural choice. Professional services are all results-driven - why wouldn't you communicate these results to your prospects then?

It starts with a simple tagline on your professional profile. From "John Doe, based in Chicago, Attorney-at-law specialized in Family/Marital law" to "I'm John Doe, I help young families in the Chicago area to get through their most challenging times." It's just a tagline but can ultimately define your whole marketing strategy.

Battle the shortened attention span further with precise offers and education on your services

I bought my Jag way before I purchased it. As a teenager, I had a poster in my room featuring the particular car. When it was buying-time, it was inevitable to buy that car. However, the world has changed; people don't have years, not even minutes, to decide.

Focusing your services on the results they generate for your clients is the most crucial part. But it is still not enough - you have to make sure when they are interested, they will understand your offer immediately.

For most professional service providers, hourly rates are the go. That is not the case anymore - a packaged service is more natural to comprehend and much more straightforward to buy. Try to package your services - ditch the hourly fees. You won't lose a dime, I promise. You will gain a lot in the long-run.

Some services need the knowledge to understand. Sometimes, the need is not yet there - that is why informing your prospects should be your number one marketing priority for you. On-site, inbound content and marketing activities should be your key activity. Wasting too much time on social media marketing might kill your marketing results instead of focusing on creating compelling content that drives relationships with your prospected clients. Remember, most of your clients will seek out your help proactively - your job is to be there when they need you with a simple offer, a killer results-driven message, and a searchable background for those who still doubt you.

The next few years will be exciting for those who haven't changed their marketing goals in the recent decade. But it is now or never - because those who buy off the shelf because of traditions, childhood dreams, or brand loyalty will be switched off by those who purchase services because they need to solve a specific problem in their life. Be that professional service provider who helps others to live better - to build better, long-lasting relationships.

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How to start your distributed business

Know your business

You have to be familiar with what you do, where you do it, whom you are doing it for and why are you different from others. In this article, we briefly talk about the importance of market research, user testing, product branding, and business positioning. This series is not intended to be a launch-your-business book, but I wanted to touch base on those areas where a distributed model can shine, compared to traditional businesses. First, let’s talk about market research.

Doing market research is a must to minimize risk. Like any other product or service, yours can be tested before its launch.

There are many use cases for you to do some initial research on. You are launching a new product or service or expanding your office to a new location while keeping the business operations distributed. This book is not a UX or market research guidebook though so I only cover those aspects of market research that can be different when you are a distributed business. We will discuss initial desktop research, online user testing, and product positioning strategies.

How to do desktop market research

As a distributed business, your market is where you want to be active. Before entering the market, I would strongly suggest doing some initial market research to minimize the risk of entry. There are three critical goals for every market research. 

• First, is the market you want to enter ready for you? Even if there is no apparent need for your service or product, would they be interested in buying it? 

• Second, is your product or service vital to that market? If you are at this point, you might know if your product or services solve an essential problem – hence it is crucial for the market. However, does this problem exist in the market where you want to enter?

• Also, third, do you have competitors on the market and what are they doing as of now?

All in all, you want to test the needs, the customer insights, and the market insights. 

There are many options to do this right, but keep in mind: not just businesses but markets have limitations as well. The more limited a market, the more likely you need to use local support for market research. Markets are limited by the stage of their development, language, and geography. Doing desktop market research for the UK market from the US – is much more comfortable than doing the same for let’s say the Polish market. You can also skip the whole national market approach and focus on a global product, which can be bought from anywhere by anyone – but if you want to test different markets, you need to keep it in mind when you need local support.   

I want to highlight that as a distributed business, and you can do pretty much anything online regarding market research. Do you want to test if there is a need on the market for your product? Why not try to check how many people are searching online for a product like yours? How many people are following topics related to your service and what are they talking about? Online conversations and consumer habits are pretty much transparent now, and you need the time and effort to gather relevant insights from them. You can use social media monitoring tools for a quick test run to do all the research you need and check the results and insights on one dashboard. Finding competitors is also can be easy and straightforward online. Also, in the end, if you still need help, hire local support: a virtual assistant with knowledge of the local market and language or a local market research business. They can be super valuable to gain in-depth insights into a specific market or industry. 

How to test your business

User testing is vital for those who are building a new product or launching a new service, and they want actual feedback from possible customers. There are many options on how to do user testing, but before you jump into it, you have to determine three things first.

• Who is your target audience? You have to know and profile your ideal customer. It helps a lot on the user testing research because either you use a 3rd party service provider or go out and test publicly on a forum or community, you have to know whom you are expecting to answer and provide feedback. It also helps you to ignore anyone who’s not in your target audience.

• How unique is your product or service? Do you need to explain it before you can gather actual feedback? How can you pitch it in a few sentences so everyone can understand it right away? In the following chapter, we will talk a bit about positioning, which might help to clear things up on this as well.

• What is the goal of your user research? Do you want new ideas? Do you want feedback? Do you want customer opinions and insights? What is the ideal situation that you want to walk away with after successfully testing? 

If you already have a user base and your product or service is an addition to many existing ones of yours, asking for feedback and insights for a little discount incentive from your customers is a must. If you did it right, you already have a social media following community and a newsletter community under your brand. Ask them what they think about your new product or service. 

If your product or service is entirely new or you are launching your company from scratch, turn to remote user research services. These companies offer you the chance to speak with actual would-be customers remotely.

How to build a public image/positioning

Positioning your company is crucial to your future success because ultimately, your position as a company will define your place in the market. If you don’t have a clear vision about yourself, what your company does and for whom you work, you will lose sight of your progress. However, positioning as a distributed company means much more than that. It will define your workflows and also the very foundations of your company structure.  

First, positioning matters because, with that, you can distinguish yourself from your competition. Also, as a distributed company, your positioning or brand image will be the first selling point for customers. As you don’t have a shopfront or you might not do any robust personal networking, your online presence is the only thing that keeps you in the loop. You should always maintain, change and rely on it.

There are three strategies to position yourself as a company. Of course, these are general concepts, so you always have to apply or combine them to fit your particular business needs.

1. The industry leader. This approach is excellent for those who can claim the such quality of service or expertise that can be fitted with this strategy. No matter your competition, you can argue that your business is the leader or expert in the field. However, there are two problems with this strategy: without relevant background, the leadership claim can’t be fitted, and second, this is the most common approach. It is hard to become an industry leader if you become one, and you might not need to claim the title at all. 

2. Industry pioneer. It is more fitted for those companies that have a creative, out-of-the-box, and innovative approach to their services. The innovative initiative is the very essence of your position, and you can share how differently you do the work. Hint here, by stating that you are a fully distributed company, and you are already a special one amongst others.  

3. The expert. It is excellent for those who are not dealing with an all-rounder approach and only focusing on one thing. If you are a digital production agency, you might be familiar with 360-approach, where you do pretty much anything that is digital. With the expert approach, you can do just one or maybe two types of work, i.e., you are a digital agency that’s focusing only on email marketing. The narrow focus gives you a competitive advantage, and as you are focusing only on one thing, you can claim expert status.

You can also combine the industry leader and pioneer categories or the expert and pioneer categories to get a more solid position.

However, positioning doesn’t stop here for a distributed company. A market position also affects you as a company. If you are transitioning from a traditional setup to a distributed company, you can streamline your operations with a new positioning approach. If you are an all-rounder digital production agency, you can narrow down not just your focus but your team as well, and only work with a small group of experts focusing on one thing. 

We have talked about transparency and its importance before, and I want to highlight that transparency also helps with positioning. With a transparently shared approach, you can design and publish thought leadership materials that can help you to claim the desired position on the market. Any inbound marketing materials you push out, whitepapers, webinars, surveys, blog posts, etc., all of them are tools in your hands in positioning. 

Having a solid vision of where you are and how you approach your industry will help you to attract more clients and raise more awareness about your business. With a stable position, it is also easier to market yourself online. Positioning your company should come after you have a clear vision of the market and your business model’s viability.  

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How to pivot the distributed business model

If you are an already established business with an office and a team in place, you have many options to test how to work remotely. Since the distributed model has one key element that differentiates it from classic business setups, you have to pivot the model with your and your team’s location.

Home office for everyone

Issue out home office for everyone. The longer you provide this opportunity, the more you will learn. Monitor the whole process and gather as much feedback from your colleagues on their experiences as possible. Do the work as you would do it in the office, do not change or deprioritize anything. Use the essential business tools that you would use to manage a fully distributed team – more on these tools later in this book. Everyone has to start working during office hours, but this time, everyone stays at home or in a co-working office. Provide co-working office expenses for those who need it – especially for those who have little kids at home. The key here: everyone has to ditch the office for a while but keep productivity levels regular.

• Before you do the pivot, set up the essential business tools the same way just like you had a fully distributed business. More on these tools later in detail.

• Do a full month. If you want, you can do one day first, then a week, and later a month.

• It is essential not to skip on the first days unless the productivity levels drop dramatically and there are severe issues with running the business.

• Most teams who worked in an office together before will lose productivity levels in the first days, even weeks. Don’t be afraid that is normal. Everyone has to learn the way to work online, and it doesn’t come naturally. Also, you are upsetting an established order here, so a small amount of chaos is mandatory.

• Openly share all the feedback with the team and try to learn from the mistakes: what went wrong, what the flaws were.

• Do not track time. Track projects and outputs. Some managers love to see their employees working in the office, and when they set up remote working, they insist on time tracking so that they can virtually monitor employees’ progress on current projects. Guess what: they do make progress. They often interrupt work with random duties, but at the end of the day, your project gets delivered. Remote workers work even more than office workers – they just spread the hours more widely in the day. So after all, the number of hours worked doesn’t matter. The outcome does matter though.

• Create a pivot report with all the feedback and survey your team members on how they felt about the one-month remote working. Analyze the findings and if you feel comfortable with the results and there’s a stabilization in the production levels in the second half of the remote working period and increased employee satisfaction within your team – then remote working is right for your company, and you can go full-on.

Hire someone remotely

Hire someone remotely and integrate them into your current team. If you have a new open position, consider hiring someone remotely. Make sure that you hire the right candidate – more on how to hire remotely later. Then once the new candidate is ready, have an onboarding session with the new employee. Treat him as you would treat a new employee, show them around in the office – at least virtually – and let them join meetings through video calls. Manage the projects with the new employee online. Meanwhile, gather feedback from your team on their experiences with working with someone remotely.

• Establish the same business tools to manage projects just like you had a fully remote team. Let your “normal” team adapt and accommodate the newly hired remote employee and not backward.

• The key with this pivot is not to find out if you can work with a remote employee. The key here is to find out whether your current team can work with a remote employee – therefore, whether they could work remotely.

• Usually, you will have glitches on your office team. If you hired someone remotely and you did it right – the candidate is already familiar with remote working. Your team, however, does not. Glitches are fixable. Make sure you will gather enough feedback and information on how they worked and what were the issues – so you can learn and solve them.

• After a month, sit down with your team – including the remote employee – and discuss the past month. If you think the pivot worked and you have successfully integrated the new remote employee into your team, and also your current team remained satisfied, you can go full remote now.

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How do you know if distributed business is right for you

At my company, Anywhere Consulting, we have a simple walkthrough process during which we help you to evaluate your business and assess whether implementing distributed business models can bring value. It is indeed not for everyone. There are three outcomes of the evaluation.

1. It’s not right for you. Simple as that. You don’t have any processes that are remote, and you won’t benefit from the new approach, even more, it would create chaos within your current setup which will cost you a massive setback. Only 10-20% of businesses fall into this category, mostly because their model is entirely offline – this is what makes them successful. Therefore, there’s no need to change. Another explanation is that the manager’s mindset is incompatible with the new model.

2. You can implement some techniques, but you can’t go fully distributed. The majority of businesses fall into this category. Your company still needs local or regional presence, but you can split your team into offline and remote groups, based on production cycles. The core team can be local or the account management or sales, areas where the very personal touch and networking are still helpful to get new business. However, anything else that is supportive, or production can be treated as a distributed leg of the company. It is much more like outsourcing as we’ve said ten years ago, although outsourcing does not involve good integration to the core team, therefore can’t be as productive as needed. The key in this scenario is to identify those points where distributed techniques can be introduced into the business and help business managers to implement these techniques.

3. You can go full remote. Only a handful of companies can do that. In this category, even the managers of the business are fully distributed around the globe, along with their teams. Tech startup companies are an excellent example of this, but I’ve seen traditional advertising agencies and digital development companies ditch the office and create a fully distributed team. At this level, everything depends on the managers of the business. If you make a full commitment to your decision, this will work. If you hesitate and don’t feel confident about the distributed model, this setup will be doomed.

Setting your goals and expectations

As every business is different, there are general screening options where it can be determined if the distributed business model can play a vital role in the business transformation. Details matter but the very first question I would ask any business owner who’s interested in this topic would be about their goals. Let me give you an example.

Let’s say you are a digital advertising agency, based in Wichita, Kansas. You have a couple of clients, you enjoy your work and your business is stable, but you want to grow. If you're going to expand around the region or open up a shop in the nearest bigger city, a distributed business can help you by first hiring people there online but managing them from your hometown. You can open a new office as soon as your team is profitable enough. This way, you can reduce risk and keep cash flow intact when moving to another city or region. If you have bigger plans and you are serious that your services are cutting edge and you can stand out from the global market competition, you can go entirely distributed. You can build up a global team online and market your services around the globe, but still, keep a core team in Wichita. In the first option, you are slightly distributed, on the second option, you are entirely distributed. Each option needs different approaches and an altogether different focus from the managers. It is why goals matter.

Evaluating your current setup

Apart from goals, the second most important thing is your current setup. How do you find new business currently? What’s your method? If getting new business involves a lot of personal connections, you can’t ditch the personal touch. You still need to network offline. If your services can be visualized, reproduced, and sold online, you might not need anyone to stay in an office.

Most businesses keep a core account management and strategic team together in a smaller office while managing a team of distributed employees around the globe.

After new business, production comes. How do you serve your current clients? If your work involves a lot of repetitive, low-added-value processes that can be a) automated or b) outsourced to a cheaper workforce, you should consider distributed business to save money and allocate to more important parts of your business. If your current team has some weak links but you are struggling to find new talents, and the work is online, you should look into the options as well. In my experience, digital production, digital marketing, coding, software development, sometimes graphic design and UX, and certain parts of sales is entirely outsourced to a distributed team. However, of course, that depends on your current setup and level of comfort to outsource.

A company I used to work with, RebelMouse, is based in New York. They offer a social media CMS solution for media companies and brands. Initially, they had a big team in NYC and an even bigger one around the globe. The office team was made up of strategists, sales and account management, and all the senior people. The distributed team included a squad of developers and production. Eventually, they ditched the office entirely and went full remote. RebelMouse was a startup company with massive investments – but they turned profitable only when they went full remote. The business is still operational, and they serve clients in the US with this fully distributed setup. The new structure allowed them to become more flexible, and agile and they managed to accomplish their development sprints more efficiently.

How distributed structure can help you is entirely up to your current goals, setup, and level of comfort to go full-on with it. If you are not comfortable or confident in making this journey, there are some tests that you can do before committing.

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Challenges with distributed business

Building a business is not a piece of cake, and a great entrepreneur grows after each failure. Every business, every company setup, and every industry has its challenges. Some of these challenges are shared and literally, everyone has to face them. Some of them are unique to the type of business. If we take sales and marketing out of the picture and we strictly focus on business management, most companies have five key areas where they face challenges: communication, motivation, integration, retention, and transformation. Let’s inspect each of these challenges separately.

Challenges with communication

Almost every challenge a remote entrepreneur faces relates to communication. The manager lost the tracking of several projects because employees are not reporting back. A plan has stopped because of an underlying problem that hasn’t been flagged and communicated to the team. Conversations get lost – important information is on the company chat but not in the mailbox or cloud drive. Video meetings are inefficient because people don’t know how to do them properly. There are many other issues and flaws where communication is the root of the problem.

Communication also affects mostly all the other challenges. If the connection doesn’t work, motivation will be the first to fall, then the integrity of the team. An alive and happy distributed collaborative team can quickly turn into an offshore outsourcing center, where the only communication that happens internally is sending out briefs on projects and then getting reviews and revisions.

A company that has lousy communication policies has lower retention of their employees. It is also harder to transform or adapt to new challenges.

You need to be more structured with your communication. The reason is simple, and this is part of the unique concept of remote working: there is a little amount of room for ad-hoc watercooler office conversations where some essential things, brainstorming and corporate engagements happen ‘on-the-go’ and without any structure.

You have to work proactively to implement, maintain and strengthen communication policies within your distributed business.

Challenges with motivation

For employees, motivation is one of the biggest challenges. I can quote hundreds of studies on how large percentages of employees don’t feel motivated at work and how many hours per day get wasted on unmotivated meaningless imitation of work. However, remote employees are always a bit more motivated to do their job because they enjoy the benefits of being remote employees, which we have already discussed previously. However, entrepreneurs still have to find a way to keep the motivation flowing. From an entrepreneur’s perspective, motivation is different, and to know why we have to clarify what we mean by motivation.

Motivation is being able to work on a job on your terms, set goals to achieve and gain success by completing them. Now, small words here matter own terms, goals, and progress. How can a business owner screw this up?

For one, and this is way beyond the most significant issue: they don’t give space to their employees. We all know the C-level manager who does junior-level tasks because he just “can’t let it go.” A micromanager boss is even more dangerous than an unpredictable boss. It instantly kills the motivation in everyone. This micromanagement is even more of an issue in remote working because while the entrepreneur had the physical office where all the employees worked, with remote work, there is no office. By not seeing how others are working, some entrepreneurs react with intense micromanagement. It is one of the most significant flaws – you have to provide autonomy for your people.

In goal-setting, the purpose is super essential for everyone. Communicating a clear mission for your employees is vital for the company.

The more transparent your business, the easier will be for every employee to relate.

They see the company’s goals, and they can integrate those goals into their plans. Everyone needs a purpose to stay motivated, so share the business goals publicly and help your employees to identify their personal goals.

Finally, success. That is the easiest but sometimes forgotten part. Even the most introverted employee needs a hug when accomplishing a goal. That virtual hug can be anything, an email, a ‘nice one’ on the team call, or even more. The higher the goal they achieved, the bigger the compensation should be. Share the joy of success with everyone. Entrepreneurs often forget to celebrate their employees.

Challenges with integration

First day in the office? Depending on the size of the company, that first day or even days spent in the same way for everyone. Getting familiar with new faces, new tools, new setups, new goals, and a unique atmosphere. It is the same with remote work and distributed businesses, except that the things that occur in an office naturally don’t happen online much. So again, being proactive and setting up apparent processes for onboarding a new employee or even a new client, is crucial for a distributed business.

What if you fail to do this? You have been working in a remote environment for weeks or even months, and you still don’t recognize some of the names cc-d on emails – that’s not a good sign. Most employees will feel that they are not part of the team, are not valued, not integrated. It leads to decreased motivation and lowers employee retention.

By having a transparent and repeatable onboarding process in place, you can not only save time but also help your newcomers to integrate into the fabric of your company, to feel valued, and to become part of the team.

Challenges with retention

We have talked about communication, motivation, and integration. These are all leading to one single challenge: retaining your employees.

Companies that have lower retention rates are less successful. How could you be successful if the team around you changes constantly and you have to spend a valuable amount of time hiring new people all day long?

People are leaving a company for several reasons, but the main one would be valuation. More precisely, the lack of thereof. Being valued is not an individual perception or a matter of taste – everyone wants the same: a satisfying work environment, achieved and respected goals and gracious compensation for all the hard work and effort.

All of the above, communication, motivation, and integration add to the company culture. If your company culture is a welcoming, transparent, collaborative, and self-respecting culture, you have higher retention of your employees. If you are a micromanager who looks to their remote employees as offshore outsourcing bots that you can use to achieve your own goals for less money – you won’t be building a successful company.

Challenges with transformation

A distributed business is super flexible, as we have discussed before. Also,… it is not to everyone’s taste. Especially those who spent the majority of their career in the 90s and spent it in traditional offices – flexibility means something else.

A distributed business can be scaled up pretty fast but also, scaled down instantly.

As an entrepreneur, you have to make decisions either way. You have to be comfortable with your decisions, and the decisions shouldn’t be affected by the urge, rage, panic, or any hardcore emotion. You have to rely on your knowledge and logic. For those who tend to adapt more slowly to new environments, flexibility is one of the most fearful challenges.

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Benefits of a distributed business

There are multiple benefits if you are running a distributed business. You are no longer limited by your location, which opens up a vast number of new opportunities. You can also be much more flexible, which helps you to overcome competitors and grow beyond limits.

However, you will most likely be working with a distributed team. There is a subtle difference between working remotely and running a business. It is the border between being a freelancer and being an entrepreneur. To create a successful distributed business you not only have to know the benefits of both sides but also have to align and correlate them to produce an “everybody wins” scenario for all participants.

Reclaim your freedom

Let’s start with the obvious as we are talking about remote work: location. If you are an employee, the first main benefit you receive is the lack of commute. If you live in a big city, a 1-hour commute to the office from your home is average. That is 2 hours of travel – every day. Apart from the apparent money reasons, spending money on gas or public transport, time is the main pain point. If someone works 5 days a week, 10 hours are spent on the train or in a car. That’s one work day. Also, the 1-hour-commute is considered a good average, and if you live in a vital location, somewhere in London, New York, or San Fransisco, this can easily extend to 2-hours or even more.

So working remotely is reclaiming your time.

You can spend this time in various ways, no matter if you are the owner of the company or an employee, you can recover your time.

Reclaim your autonomy

Autonomy is the second obvious benefit. You can work not just wherever you want, but whenever you want. Of course, there are some limitations. People think that this suddenly found freedom will lead to no work-at-all, but the opposite is true. If there’s motivation to work, remote workers work more than workers tied to fix work hours and an office.

By letting employees work on their terms, you will most likely end up with employees who work harder and in more diverse working hours.

Reclaim your focus

Speaking of work, the focus is also a significant benefit. However, this is a misunderstood concept. People usually think that a remote worker doesn’t have interruptions like chitchats and water cooler conversations or popping out for lunch. However, this is not true, even if you work from home, you have the same small interruptions, plus, you have access to the internet anyway, which is the most significant source of disruption.

The main benefit here is the lack of lengthy disruption – so-called pointless and meaningless office meetings.

I remember when I was working for a big global advertising agency in London, one day I had 3 hours of actual work – the rest spent on meetings. All of them were utterly pointless, and the whole agenda could have been discussed over email or a series of short stand-up meetings. As a remote worker, you don’t have that, which gives you the ability to focus on broad, meaningful work. Think things through, dive deep into a problem to find a solution, or just like this book for me – write for hours with continuous focus. This reclamation of your attention is key to your success.

Reclaim your money

Besides reclaiming more time, focus, and freedom, you can also retrieve a lot of money. No matter if you are a freelancer or an entrepreneur, you have two ways to reclaim the money. Salaries and office costs. As an entrepreneur, you don’t need to pay for a big office with all of its supplies. When I had my own office with my company, I paid for workstations, office rent, and tons of other supplies. With a distributed business, I pay for online tools, and that’s it. I save an enormous amount of money. Also, you pay less for remote workers. However, I always want to highlight this: you pay for the same knowledge and skills you would pay for a typical office worker so the difference between standard and remote salaries shouldn’t be a big gap. It is shrinking now, and the two salaries are close to each other, an excellent skilled developer could earn almost as much in cash as a developer in the Bay Area. As a freelancer, you don’t need to spend money on commute and supplies that come with it. You are probably eating out on a daily basis in cafes and delis and business lunch menus. Half of the internet’s money management sites are about this topic: how to save money on your work and cut back costs like eating out. If you are working from home, all of this will change. So if you are someone from a location with a lower average cost of living, you can earn above the average salaries in your region with remote work.

So ultimately, either you are a business owner or a solo freelancer, you will have more money in your pocket with remote working.

Reclaim your control

Overall, I think the most significant benefit of running a remote business contradicts the biggest fear of every entrepreneur. That fear is the lack of control. No actual office, just a laptop, and people who are working with you online – you don’t have control over your business. The opposite is, and that is the most significant benefit of the remote business. You gain so much more power.

You reclaim time, focus, freedom, and money which you can use to grow your business. You have unlimited control and flexibility with your company.

Of course, some people are afraid of this amount of freedom. There are no excuses if you don’t succeed. You can’t just “disappear” into the office and pretend to work. To me, a distributed business is the ultimate frontier, full freedom, I can do anything I want to grow my business, and nothing interrupts, limits, or pulls me back from success. It is right for failures as well – if my company fails, it is my fault. I had all the resources, time, and opportunities to succeed.

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The problems with traditional business setup

Entrepreneurs have to face many issues every day. As an SME, you’ve indeed realized that competition is higher than ever, innovation costs skyrocket, plus hiring and building your team requires enormous efforts. Solving issues and staying on top of the game have severe financial implications for the company. 

For you as a startup, entering the market needs more planning and even more cost-efficient solutions. It’s not like storming through the door anymore. Even if you’re lucky to have full funding for your idea, building a new business is insanely hard today. 

Businesses may encounter various types of problems. There’s the product & service problem when your product or service has some issues. This book won’t help to solve it as this problem exists in traditional and distributed businesses as well. There’s a marketing problem when you have a great product or service, but your sales are struggling. However, doing sales and marketing online can be more effective than traditional ways – this book only touches the surface. 

Moreover, there’s the limitation problem. Location limits businesses. In business, location means access. You have limited access to tools, opportunities, and talents which limits your potential to grow. This book covers the techniques to overcome this limitation. 

Limited by location

Do business where you are – but what if you are anywhere? I genuinely think the location is the most crucial factor that determines the success of a company, apart from its product. Even more, if you have a great product but you are in the wrong location, no one will work for you or buy your product. 

Your location can determine three primary factors of your business: your cashflow, your team, and your growth. Solving the first issue usually involves the solution of the other two questions as well. 

Your location means access. Access to a market, a group of prospects, and a pool of talent. No matter where your office is, you will lose cash in some way. 

Let me show you an example. Let’s say you are a tech company based in a tech hub. We don’t even need to think about the Bay Area here, though that would be the perfect example. Let’s say you are in one of the critical tech hubs somewhere in the U.S. You spend insane amounts on office space. The living expenses are super high, so you have to pay yourself and your local team members a very competitive salary. Most of these tech hubs also have high taxes and every other service charge final prices. Overall, even though you have a talented and kickass team with a great office, you are losing tons of money in cash flow which limits your growth potential. Of course, having a fully backed company by investors can help, or you might be the next pink unicorn – but chances are, you aren’t. Of course, with this high price, you will gain access to a broader pool of talent and opportunities. 

Now let’s look at the situation from another perspective. Let's say you have a tech company based in a small town in the U.S. Your costs are low as there’s weaker competition, plus the services are also cheaper there. However, you have limited access to new clients or better talent. No matter where you are, you will have some competition, and in time, you will see that the clients you have access to are circling you and your competitors. You might be able to step out of the town of your and cover the region with your services, but in time, this growth is still slow and low. Also, hiring new talents is insanely hard as most of the ability has already left the area for the high-paying tech hubs – even if you can find great talent, you have to pay much more to keep and retain them. Otherwise, you will stick to mediocre team members, which also affects your growth potential. Overall, even if you are not losing as much money from your cash flow as you would be in a vital tech hub, you will lose in the long run by limiting your growth potential with your location. 

There are five areas where a business can lose money: infrastructure – office space and tools that are needed to get things done – they all cost money. Production – anything that is required to manufacture your product or maintain your service; if you are in the service industry, this amount will be significantly less than if you have a product or shop. Payroll costs a lot: team salaries and other team-related services. There is the management cost – things that are needed to run the business, including taxes. Also, finally, sales – anything related to marketing your business.

Your location means access.

If you are a traditional business, in general, you have around 20% allocation in each of these areas. Your expenses align according to that, 20% on infrastructure, 20% on production, 20% on the team, and 20-20% on management and sales.  

If you are not limited by location, you have full access to everything plus you also don’t need some of these areas at a 20% allocation. It doesn’t mean that going along this way, you will spend less on your business, everything will become cheaper, and you will win by saving a ton of money. It is the greatest misconception with distributed business and remote working. 

If you are not limited by location, you have more freedom to balance this 20% allocation. You ditch the office and most of your infrastructure costs, but you still need tools to get things done. Let’s say you reduce that cost to 10%. You need to keep the production costs at 20% because it will affect your service. You incorporate in a more business-friendly location and reduce management costs and taxes by 10%. You then end up with an extra 20% to allocate to team and sales. On your side, you will pay the same amount of salaries but for better talent. You might pay less for repetitive administrative work than you’d do now but still, you spend the same amount overall. On sales, you have more cash in hand, which will drive your growth forward. 

Ultimately, having a distributed business won’t save you money, but it does give you more freedom to become more flexible and the opportunity to focus your business assets where they can provide more value to you. 

Flexibility is the luxury of those who have full access to everything. By ditching your office and widening your location coverage, you will have more access to tools, talent, and prospects, which can help you grow your business in the long run.

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The secret to a zero $ marketing machine

If you spent any cash on marketing so far, you would probably be familiar with cost-per-lead and cost-per-click terms. There is a quantifiable figure on how much you need to spend to get a client. How much does it cost to drive a prospect through your funnel and turn them into a client? We bet you would be thrilled to know that this figure can be zero $ - or even better, you can make a small ROI on every dollar you spend on marketing without considering your usual sales figures.

We discussed previously that value-based marketing is a good call to reach potential leads. Now you need to prepare a sales offer that turns leads into clients.

Most businesses go with one or maybe a few high ticket offers. But most people are not ready to buy a high ticket offer from you right now. But that doesn't mean that they are not prepared to buy. If you ignore these people, you will leave a great deal of money on the table.

Enter downselling. You have to create an offer that is low-priced but still high-value. This offer will convert most of the leads in your pipeline on day one, increase your customer base, and pretty much pay out their acquisition cost, making your whole marketing budget liquid. And the best part? Micro-offers like this can instant-qualify leads into sales-ready customers. Anyone who bought something from you is a potential customer who will buy something else.

I'm sure you are familiar with IKEA, the furniture store. Did you know that putting an affordably-priced restaurant plus a food court in their stores was and still is part of their marketing strategy? IKEA was one of the many furniture companies selling affordable furniture via its warehouse-style stores. Serving food was one of the prime distinction from their competitors. It reinforced their family-brand, plus it is easier to sell furniture to someone who's not hungry. Today, more than 1/4 of their visitors come only because of the food, which accounts for 5% of their revenue. Buying a couch is above $1000 - getting a meal for the family is below $100. It is the power of downselling.

Our practical tips on creating your low-priced downselling offer:

• Even if it is low-priced, it has to have tremendous value. Remember, it might be cheap to eat at IKEA, but it is healthy and tasty and distinctive. Where else could you get Swedish meatballs with gravy? Your downselling offer shouldn't be a low-priced, low-value version of your full-priced offer.

• Connected to the point above, never highlight the bargain value of your offer. Your offer's weight should be much higher than the price - it is the only way to generate buy-in from your customers.

• Learn as much as you can about your customer through this downselling offer. Those who bought-in on the proposal are all potential buyers for further, higher-priced offers. The more you know about them, the more comfortable you can sell the high-ticked offers.

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How to provide value to your customers with marketing

In recent years, the concept of value-based marketing became a practice only within young entrepreneurs - but the rest of the industry forgot about it. Why? Because of two things - first, customers attended too many 'free webinars' and other bullshit solutions masked as sales calls. Everyone became more paranoid and cynical. Second, giving value is hard - you have to understand your customers' problem, create a solution to solve it and provide value around it. Most businesses fail even with the first step.

To understand value-based marketing, you must understand the principle behind it: you provide value for your customers without asking anything from them in return.

You can't pull them into a webinar on whatever topic, which is essentially a sales call. You 'just' provide a webinar with an insane amount of value in it; that's it.

We don't waste time with story-mode, but there's a great story that helps everyone understand how value-based marketing works. Bruce Henderson founded Boston Consulting Group in 1963 - at a time when other companies like McKinsey dominated management consulting. Despite the fierce competition, he managed to grow the company so big that it is now part of the Big Three, the world's three biggest consulting companies. How he did it? With a simple marketing technique: value-based marketing. He published his ideas in short stories called Perspectives and sent it to potential clients. He provided value for free and showed a genuine understanding of his clients' problems, and with his insights, he actively helped them succeed. Within years, the company grew above the sky because of value-based marketing that served BCG an influx of leads.

Today, it might not be the best option to write short stories and mail them to senior executives. But though formats change, tactics stay the same. Content that adds value still acts as a powerful magnet for leads. Frankly, you are reading a piece like that now.

Value is useful. Value is entertaining. People are more likely to buy if they are learning something useful in a simple, digestible format.

The most useful tactical advice we can give you when it comes to value is a simple one. Provide value all the time. Don't waste anyone's time - value should present itself even with a simple headline.

Lastly, the value should be actionable for both sides. Your customer should find it useful for consideration, even for implementation. But it should be actionable for your business as well. The value should drive your customer further into their buying cycle. Make sure you include a call to action at each lead magnet content piece you create. Call to action shouldn't be a sales offer - just a drive for further action.

After all, though value can be free, your help is not.

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How to broaden your audience and get more clients

Essentially, you can increase your sales with two tactics. You either increase your conversion rate on your current flow of leads, or you can increase the number of leads you get to get an overall impact on the figures. We believe that you need to combine the two efforts into one with one tactic: focus on the few who are ready to buy from you now but always talk to those who are not there yet.

Your audience segments

Generally, your audience has five segments. There are those, the majority of your potential clients, who are not problem aware - they don't know that the issue you are solving exists yet. Others are aware of the problem, but they don't know how to solve it. Some see the solution and actively looking for those who can provide the solution for their pain. And others are aware that you exist and you offer the solution. A few of them are ready to buy from you. Most sales teams focus only on these few - they are easier to convert as they are aware of the problem, know you have the solution, and have a genuine interest in buying.

In a previous post, we said you need to create a solution that solves their immediate problem. With different tactics detailed here, you can increase your sales team's conversion - but that works only for the few who are ready to buy. It would be best if you also increased the incoming flux of prospects, so you have a funnel set to provide enough leads for your sales team.

Ultimately, you have to increase your traffic, generate more buzz around you, make people aware that you exist - you have to talk to the many.

How to do it

What is the best way to achieve that? A simple combination of content and targeted ads. While ads can deliver a high impact on a short timeframe, content is more longtail. You need some content to supply ammunition for the ads, but the most effective long-term strategy is to become a thought leader in your industry. You have to become the authority who has the solution to your customers' problems.

You have to be everywhere, highlighting that the problem they might not know yet, exists.

You have to promote the ideal solution everywhere, furthermore, stress that you offer that solution. The tools you need to use are different for every business - it can range from guest posting on blogs, answering forum questions, being very active on social media, providing free webinars and other content, etc.

However, the ultimate goal is the same: put yourself at every stage of your customers' research. Your sales team can convert more easily as your ready-to-buy leads will want to buy from the best in the industry. Those looking for a solution will find you quickly, and with an efficient marketing funnel machine, you can move them quickly to the stage where they are ready to buy. You can get on the radar for those who are not aware of the solution or even the problem.

Your active ad campaigns should reflect your approach - the more platforms you use to drive traffic, the segmented your visitors will be. It is worth balancing your marketing budget between multiple ad platforms, even if your resources are limited.

Speak to the many, broaden your audience. With this tactic, you can increase your conversion rate and the number of your leads. But to maximize the impact, you need to provide value. In our next post, we define the concept of value-based marketing and what is really behind that.

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Why you need to learn about your customers' pain points?

It might sound a bit too dark but hear us out. You probably heard about the thing about painkillers vs. vitamins. Painkillers are easy to sell because people need them right now to solve an immediate problem. Vitamins are harder to sell because they don't fulfill an immediate need. Everyone knows that certain apps can help you have a more balanced diet, but when you are on the road and hungry, Google Maps enables you to find the closest grocery store.

Your goal is to become an essential solution for your customers to solve their immediate needs now. After all, no one will buy you anything if you offer something that your customers might need or will need. You have to provide something that is needed right now.

If you want to jumpstart your sales, you need to create offers that solve immediate problems. To do that, you need to learn the pain of your customers. What is their most pressing issue that you can solve? What is the single most crucial pain-point that keeps them away from achieving their goals?

Once you know the problem - you can offer the solution.

How to learn about their pain?

Well, you need to do some research. There are three main areas where you should start.

Start with the most important and widely-used platform, Google. Everyone is typing their questions into Google in desperation to find a solution to their problem. Check keywords around your existing product or even within your industry - what is the most searched phrase. Check related Google searches, which gives you the exact questions your prospects are searching for answers. A simple Google search can provide you excellent top-of-the-head value around the most excruciating pain points your customers have. You can top Google searches up with tools like the Google Keyword Planner or Answer The Public - the latter is one of the most powerful marketing research tools.

Funny how the internet hasn't changed in the last twenty years.

After the casual search options, the second area where you need to look at are the forums. Online forums are places where people ask questions, socialize, talk, and exchange ideas. They are not forums per se, but platforms like Facebook Groups, Quora, Reddit, or any industry-related groups are the best options to get the gist of your customers' problems. Find the most active forums, groups, or threads - they usually have enough insights for you.

The last area where you need to look is the world of public reviews. It depends on your business, but platforms like Amazon, Yelp, even Facebook or Google My Business are an excellent way to gather relevant insights. Good, 5-star reviews are OK but focus on the bad reviews. People provide points that are missing from a product or a service - if you can create solutions that solve these missing points, you are in for business. Focus on your competitors first, then broaden your search within your industry.

We always recommend gathering the information into a spreadsheet for later use. It is essential to check the pain points but equally crucial to follow how your customers explain their pain. What words are they using? How they phrase their problem? That information can help you craft better ads, better headlines, better offers that address your customers' pain points with their own words. To your customers, you will become a mindreader with this tactic.

But pain is not enough - that addresses only those who are ready to buy now. What about those who haven't faced a problem yet? Click here to learn how to focus on the broader audience from the following tactical advice.

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