One of my earliest business coach clients wrote a book called The Foundation Factor: Critical Measurements of Business Strength by Paul Hoyt. I refer to this book almost weekly with my clients. He covers the 7 main areas of focus for any business.
- Leadership
- Marketing
- Sales
- Financial Management
- Operations & admin
- Product Development
- Customer Service
We tend to start a business with a vision and a specific knowledge base to help others. We don’t always understand sales, operations, and financial management!
When it comes to serving my clients, I often touch all 7 of these elements. You don’t have to have a 10/10 for each thing on day one to run a profitable business. As each month passes, and you garner wins and lessons, these 7 are still essential to be aware of.
Recently I’ve heard I’m more of a business coach than social media manager and it’s a compliment in my mind. I’m a social media manager who cares for the health of your business, not just your Instagram account.
A good social media campaign will serve your customers of what is possible. It will also cast vision worth following (leadership). When it comes to individual posts on any platform, good ones will lead to face to face conversations and sales appointments being booked. They don’t all as sometimes they need some more marketing magic or will lead to a new product idea.
When I wrote, Financial Joy, I was aiming to serve and bring attention to the area of sales and financial management. So often, social media makes us too social and unaware of our sales efforts and I wanted to create a playful approach to the 30 days in a month. This does not mean I’m a financial expert or becoming a financial advisor. I want my clients to be very aware of our social media efforts and how they show up on your Profit and Loss statement.
So if you are just now getting to your logo and your website, please do not spend all your marketing dollars in once place. You still need to get traffic to your website and plan a healthy sales campaign around those new digital assets.
