Our Company’s #1 Challenge, And How We’ll Make You Cash

Yesterday my business partner, John Sexton, and I had a pretty serious powwow about all the various tasks we have on our plate and how we were going to find time to tackle them all.

The list of things to do included:

• Finishing up several consulting projects (ranging from strategy planning, to website UX, design, and development)
• Reviewing all our finances and expenses
• Discussing plans for our Lean Strategy product
• Reviewing our last marketing experiment results and brainstorming plans to set up the next one
• Discussing content strategy for our new Medium publication, The Campfire
• Thinking about overall business and personal goals
• Oh, and putting in some real time solidifying our new-business pipeline — outreach, follow-ups, searching for new leads.

And that’s the hardest challenge we face. Not any one of those tasks on its own, but the accumulation of all of them.

We’re capable of handling each of the tasks individually. I’d say we’re even quite good at most of them. But everything together, along with the switching-costs of constantly jumping between them, adds up to something more than the sum of its parts.

This challenge isn’t unique to us, of course. Anyone operating a small business can identify with both the excitement and crippling stress of having your hands in everything. You become intimately aware of the swap between effort and results.

Not even the most mundane detail can be overlooked or taken for granted. Either I do it, or John does it, or…well, it doesn’t happen.

Now, I know there are plenty of solopreneurs out there saying, “Try doing it all alone, pal!” Believe me, I have. I did it for about 5 years and it was insanely hard. John had his own solo consultancy for several years as well. Having been through that makes us all the more grateful to have at least one other person to lean on.

But the stakes with what we’re doing now are much higher than when we were each going solo. Our ambitions are higher, and our needs are higher as well. We’re both married, I have a son, we have an office space. It’s all the natural evolution of being further along in our careers and further along in life.

So, what can we do to help tackle this unwieldy beast of tasks? We have to break it apart.

Focusing on Just One Part

That last item in that list above is the one we’re focusing our energy on in this article — building up that new-business pipeline.

There’s a reason why New Biz and Sales are usually worthy of their own department. To do them well takes a lot of consistent, focused effort. And it’s really damn hard work. For service-based companies, the personal time investment in whittling down the funnel from lead to paying client can be exhausting.

In addition to the sheer amount of effort it requires, John and I are not natural salespeople.

We both genuinely love talking and getting to know our clients and working with them to dig into and solve their most challenging problems. But we both lean towards the introvert side of the spectrum. This means when we engage with people, we output a lot of energy that needs to be replenished. That creates a challenge when you’re jumping between sales-type activities and then immediately jumping back to executing work.

This isn’t meant to be an excuse, it’s just an honest assessment of recognizing our own strengths and weaknesses.

Because we recognize these things though, we’re constantly exploring new ideas for ways to help with this part of our business.

What can we do to help decrease the bottleneck of time we have for this critical part of our business?

Where That “Cash For You” Piece Comes In

We like to think of every possible avenue of customer acquisition as a “net”. Those nets can include: generating content, in-person presentations, social media engagement, paid ad campaigns, newsletters, organic search results, responding to job listings, and of course the crown jewel, referrals.

With enough of these nets set, you can expect that the collection of them will generate a consistent flow of opportunities.

As an experiment to enhance our most valuable net, and do it in a way that addresses our bottleneck of time issue, we decided to implement something new.

A Referral Program.

Not something “new” in the broad sense of course, though maybe less common in the consulting space (at least from what we’ve seen).

So, here they are, the details of the official Map & Fire Referral Program:

1. Refer someone to us here: https://mapandfire.com/contact
2. If that someone turns into a paying client for us, you get a 5% commission on the total project fee up to a max of $500

That’s it. Pretty simple. A few minutes of your time to make an intro in exchange for a chunk of cash.

Now, just a teensy bit of fine print:

• Qualifying leads and ultimately determining if a client is the right fit for us, is strictly up to our discretion (and the client of course).
• The referral commission is strictly for that one, initial project. Any future work with the client would be commission-free.
• On any commission, you get paid when we get paid.
• The person referred to us has to confirm / acknowledge the referral in some capacity. In other words, don’t randomly tell us “I’m referring Coke to you!” and then expect us to provide a commission if we happen to work with Coke at some point. Coke has to confirm the relationship. (ps- if you actually know the fine people at Coke, please refer away!)
• And of course we’re free to update or change these terms any time.

So, What Kinds of Work Should You Refer to Us?

We’re strategy-first in everything we do. In fact, we developed a process called Lean Strategy as a specific method for helping businesses understand the direction of their company and grow it effectively.

So, if you know of businesses that need help with their direction and growth we’d love to talk with them.

In addition though, we’re also extremely experienced in designing and developing websites as the marketing expression of that strategic thinking.

Our most common type of engagement is a blend of strategy definition to clarify the goals of the business, followed by the creation of a new or redesigned website.

If you have something that you think falls outside of that, drop us a line. We’re happy to respond to any request to see if it might be a fit.

To get more details about who we are and what we do, check out our site, https://mapandfire.com.

Help Us And Help You

If you’re a small business owner yourself, or you have one in your life, you’ll understand the importance of community and networks to help each other succeed.

Even if you don’t have someone you think you’d want to refer to us, hopefully this article highlights challenges that resonate with you and maybe makes you feel a little less alone in the struggle to keep moving ahead on your path.

And please, by all means, steal this idea and try it for your own service. As much as we enjoy experimenting on our own company, we get even more excited when we feel like we’re encouraging others to try new things.

If you’ve tried a referral program like this and had great success or total failure, leave a comment!

Either way, we’d be extremely honored to have you like and share this to help get it in front of more people.

Hope to be writing you a check some time soon!