Month 2 - Madness vs progress

For anyone that's new to my profile. Each month this year I'm documenting my thoughts on starting my business - Tuned Social: B2B LinkedIn Ads Agency.

February was all about balance, a healthy mixture of madness and progress. It went by like a steam train and I feel this was the first taste of the real ups and downs that people have described of being in business.

What I've learn from month 2...

Start as soon as possible...

I want to take time to make a shout out to the ‘hustle bros’ and ‘LinkedIn grind influencers’ that had been screaming at me for years, telling me how “the best time to start was yesterday” and “time is money”. As like most people - I’d been ignoring it. However, I now realise those "grind-never-stops" characters may have a point.?

Maybe I'd have listened if they weren’t shouting at the feed all the time.?

Since starting the opportunity cost of not starting earlier has become painfully obvious. In reality, you have to ignore it because the opportunities are still everywhere and come faster than I'd planned. I do use it as a reminder to be grateful that if I hadn’t started in January I’d be currently missing the current opportunity.

For example, I may have missed:

• Clients who have said it’s ‘perfect timing’.
• The hunger marketers have to upskill on LinkedIn Ads right now.?
• A 'Business Fundamentals' course I did in January
• An opportunity to work with a strategy partner who's also just started their business
• Perfect mentors who were searching for mentees
• A fully-revived work ethic

Timing is everything but if you don't start - you don't have timing.

My clients are first priority...

In terms of business structure, the foundations have been put in place - all I have to focus on right now is customer success and marketing. But customers take priority. If I don't have time to post or write - I don't. I want to build a small set of very happy clients rather than a big set of unhappy clients.

Valuable content works...

A highlight from Febraury was some of the reaction from posting on LinkedIn and from the long-form newsletter I’m writing. You know those crazy people who can shout their opinion into the abyss of a social-media feed? Yeah, well - I’ve discovered that I'm one of them. I enjoy it.

Lucky that, because content is the marketing lever I decided at the start of the year to focus on and so far it’s working.?The messages, reactions and in-person comments from clients I've got have given me a lot of new energy for it. I only have just over 2,000 connections/followers. I don't really know if that's good or bad but I'm going to stay doing what I'm doing and if it keeps providing value to the right people, giving those people ideas and signalling to Heads of Marketing that a specialist should be doing their LinkedIn ad strategy - then I'm reaching all my KPIs.

That process is now ready for the next couple of months of growth and now I'm balancing madness, progress and excitement.