![]() You can’t improve if you don't know what to measure There’s an easy way to see how well your business is doing. How much is it billing? Done. Right? Wrong. Of course. There’s so much more to this topic and it covers both hard and soft factors. But before we get into those, let’s start with an important premise: The “before” photo It’s one thing to see how your business is doing now. But it’s infinitely more valuable to see how it’s progressing. Is it getting better? Worse? In what ways? So before we dive into all the things you can measure and monitor, bear in mind that you’ll never know where you end up if you don’t know where you started. As in, right now. Conducting this exercise is, in a way, fun. Because for each thing you’ll document, you’ll be able to think: “How will this get even better?” Hard numbers This one is pretty easy. Of course, there’s your monthly billing. But lurking just outside those numbers are others, which are important predictors of future billing. Such as how many proposals you have out there at any given time. Or, at least as important, your sales-closure rate. Log them now. See how they compare in the future. If they’re going up, great. If not, seek the “why” and concentrate on process improvement. This might sound overly simplistic, but we found we get far higher response rates from ridiculously short (as in, two or three sentences long) initial sales queries than we do from lengthier, more-carefully-crafted ones. It’s a low-tech analog of A/B testing. Here’s another one from the biz-dev side: Effort expended vs. billing realized. Large contractors (e.g., in aero/defense, architecture/engineering/construction, etc.) will have RFP response teams whose first—and arguably most important job—is to make the “go/no-go” decision on a given opportunity. Is it worth the time and effort? You face the same decision all the time. What are your odds of winning that assignment? How much effort will it take you to pursue it? In a perfect world, the answer is “High odds, low effort.” So much for the perfect world. Still, you want to choose those opportunities which you have the best chance of winning, and then nail them. Second-best doesn’t win. Influential factors You can drown yourself in data if you like. You can exploit Google AdWords. You can check page conversion rates for your site. But you can also measure, and track, some other numbers that might not immediately leap to mind. For example, how many new contacts/leads/LinkedIn connections do you actively generate each month? How many people are following you on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter? How many “likes” are your blog posts generating? Which pages on your site are attracting the most traffic? What’s the response rate on your outbound eblasts? And all of these factors, in case it wasn’t obvious, predicate upon the quality of the materials you generate and push out. Your site. Your emails. Your corporate bio. Your press releases. Blogs. Banner ads. You name it. Each one gives you an opportunity to shine—and, simultaneously, rope to hang yourself, if you mess up. So take every item seriously. It’s called the “world-wide” web for a reason. Check back Keep your “before” metrics in a handy, easily accessible/updatable form; a basic Excel spreadsheet works fine. And be realistic about your timeframes. Sure, you want your site’s traffic to grow, but it probably won’t change all that much by midnight. Choose an interval that gives you perspective… and incentive to improve. Need help with any of these materials? Contact us. We’d love to lend our experience and expertise to your cause.
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![]() The tech has changed, but have the tenets? My very first paying job was as the owner of my own printing business. When I was about 14, I bought a used printing press, and set up shop in my parents' basement. I said that that press was used. Very used. I contacted the manufacturer—Chandler & Price—with the serial number, and they told me it had been built in 1896. Civil War vets probably ran it, or read its output, at some time. It was a big, cast-iron monstrosity, a death trap the size of a washing machine with open gears and massive flywheels on each side; its one concession to the modern world was that, at some point in its history, its original human-powered treadle had been removed, and replaced with an electric motor. Attached to a leather belt. So what’s this have to do with InDesign? Hang in there, we’re still reminiscing. If you were curious, I’d learned how to operate one of these things in junior high school; “Print Shop” was a course you could take back then. So these ancient things were still workhorses at the time; indeed, there was a type foundry not far from my house, and I would go there to buy fonts of type, wrapped in brown paper, and still warm from the foundry. Then it was back to the basement, to sort the tiny pieces of lead into California job cases (which are nowadays relegated to knick-knack displays) and set type for business cards, stationery, raffle tickets… whatever I could sell back then. Here’s what’s cute. There would be little sticks of lead, which you’d insert between lines of type to open up the vertical spacing. That’s why it’s still called leading. The individual pieces of type would have kerns on them, which could overlap the adjoining piece. The nomenclature still applies. And that’s not all. The principles of good, clean design, and the beauty of crisp, well-delineated type endure. You might be looking at them on the Retina display of your iPad. You might be reading them in a printed book. But the interplay of positive and negative space (which we’d expounded upon in this article) are still vital to your comprehension and enjoyment of the material. The “kiss impression” That’s a term you probably don’t hear anymore. It’s from the age of letterpress: You wanted to align the platen (the part of the press which meets the “chase,” which holds the wooden-block “furniture” which keeps all the type squeezed in place via “quoins”) so that the freshly-inked type just “kisses” the paper when the two massive pieces of iron fly at each other at speed. Too light, and there’s no ink on the page. Too hard, and the type will chisel right through the paper. There’s some apt poetry in that description. Making something good can be mere work. Making something beautiful is a labor of love. Thoughts? Stories to share? Contact us. We’d love to hear them. |
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