To many times in our lives we are faced with some very mundane things. In business starting a new enterprise can be an exhilarating experience but at the same time there is a period that Seth Godin coined as “The Dip” , that is where the grunt work takes place. It is point where labors outweigh the rewards. This is where many things can fall apart, not just in business, the analogy can be drawn into anything we try to accomplish. It’s how we react during this period that sets the destiny of the outcome. Abandoning something during this period is not necessarily failure sometimes it makes sense to travel a different path.
When I first started my company, that provides online marketing services for car dealers, the goal was to be a turn key solution. I soon realized that was not a valid business plan and narrowed down our known offerings to three core products, automotive seo services, dealer micro sites and craigslist inventory distribution, during the sharp dive in the dip.
This will allow us to become the best at what we do.
We are still working through the dip in our business and it has been trying to say the least. Some days it would seem easier to go back to trading my time for a regular paycheck versus: looking for ways to scale to reach more customers, hiring people to perform tasks such as writing and AR/AP, looking for ways to reach more customers, attending networking events and sharing knowledge, looking for ways to streamline mundane tasks or have someone else do them, keeping service levels high, ad nausem. However, there is no real reward in that for me. So I have been driving on through this period.
Through the sacrifices my family and sanity has made the light is starting to shine, the rewards are becoming evident. The focus has moved away from developing a model to looking for the best systems to insure that our customers get the service they deserve and so we can scale to increase our client base. This is where persistence has paid off in my eyes. I am grateful to be at this point.
Sorry for the lack of recent updates, you can probably tell what has been taking up most of my time.
