Month of Entrepreneurial Implementation – Summary

Posted by Damian on Nov 25, 2011 | 3 comments

Well, my Business Implementation Month has come to an end. There were good times and bad. A roller coaster ride of emotion and successes. Here’s a list of what I managed to achieve:

• Set up blog to document my ‘Implementation’ effort
• Set up a structure and plan to achieve as much as possible in a 1 month period
• Sent out an email campaign to introduce people to www.christmaspartymagician.co.uk
• Tried to find an app developer to produce my my iPhone magic ideas using my personal contacts
• Tried to find a suitable app developer on Elance
• Added contact forms to all of my WordPress websites (this has significantly optimised initial communication with clients)
• Improved current Google Places entry
• Added Google Places entries for different aspects of my business
• Attended a couple of business conferences (mainly on marketing)
• Developed a new magic promotion which will be stated in the new year (this is a big commitment and needed lots of planning to get it right)
• Set up a few geeky tools on my iPhone so that I am not notified every time someone emails me, but I am notified if anyone makes an enquiry about my magic that I should respond to quickly
• Spent a lot of time changing, optimising and tweaking several different Google AdWords campaigns (I’ve learned more this month than in the last 2 years of AdWords tinkering)
• Experimented with hiring someone to do some tele-sales for Christmas Magic gigs.
• Created several new adverts to go into various publications
• Created trackable QR codes to go on these adverts, to see which forms of marketing are working and which are not.
• Edited a brand new magic promotional video together to promote www.christmaspartymagician.co.uk (this was a massive achievement, it is a huge improvement on the few shot clips I had previously)
• Went to a couple of business networking events
• Did more in terms of Social Media than I have done previously, but lots of it has just been ‘broadcast’. I’ve not had the time to engage with other much.
• Set up a shiny new CRM system (another one of the biggie’s that I’m particularly proud of. I’ve been putting this off for SO long!)
• Stated an argument on Facebook (sorry)
• Made lots of little changes to my targeted websites to improve their effectiveness.
• Had to deal with an ongoing increase in enquiries because of all of the changes .. I estimate this is around a 400% improvement on previous enquiry rates!
• Tried hard to stick to the mantra, “Good enough is good enough”
• Achieved regular increases in booking fees without raising any prices by introducing optional ‘up-sells’ that are of great value to my customers.
• Went to a 4Networking Business breakfast
• Created a quick reference index card to quick data entry from telephone calls
• Went to a couple of different meeting to demonstrate my magic. Both resulted in gigs.
• 70% of the way towards selling a brand new non-magic related product (another biggie .. would have been great to have got 100% there, but I’m happy with the amount I did)
• Lots of competitor and SEO research for the new product
• Lots of competitor and SEO research for other magicians
• Told my first app idea to the developer I most wanted to work with. He’s really into the idea too! We’re about 40% of the way towards getting the idea into the app store.
• Set up Banner Retargeting for the www.christmaspartymagician.co.uk website
• Set up a trial of AdWords Express
• Set up a Wikipedia page about myself (this then got deleted for being autobiographical .. you can’t win them all)
• Got 40% of the way towards a brand new www.gingermagic.com website (another biggie … this was OK 5 years ago, but is in desperate need of updating!)
• Organised for a photo-shoot for the new website (I hate this type of thing and have put it off for about 3 years .. all happening next week now though)

As well as all the day to day work that needed doing along the way.

On one level, there’s not that much work here.

However, If you were to add up all of the time that I have been avoiding doing each of these individual tasks, I reckon you’d get to between 10 – 15 years of work here! That puts it all into perspective a bit. Not bad for a month of effort.

Lessons learned

I’ve learned that I definitely need to be hiring people to do lots of my day-to-day donkey work.

I’ve learned that having plans with deadlines is incredibly useful.

The biggest lesson I learned is that the reason that I have a list of over 150 business ideas (several of which I am convinced could make serious amounts of money) that I am not doing anything with is not because I don’t have the time to do them.

Before this month, I would have sworn that time was my biggest obstacle. This month I had the enlightening experience of removing time as an excuse! The result was surprising to me, but I’m sure not to others who have ‘been there and done that’.

The reason that I have a huge list of ideas that I’m not doing anything with is that doing anything with them is scary! Lists of multimillion pound ideas that may make you rich some day is perversely comforting. Taking one of these ideas and ACTUALLY getting the actual thing onto the actual market for actual customers to actually part with their money for is terrifying! I guess it depends on your background how much of a leap that is, but it’s been a big one for me. I had a couple of huge attacks of self doubt that made me want to throw in the towel and hide under the duvet. I’m glad that I stretched out of my comfort zone as far as I did this month, but there’s still a fair way to go. I’ll get there though.