Today was day 8 of 8 of Operation Get Profitable (OGP) where I visit 10 salons a day for 8 days.
I almost didn’t do any selling today. I was up with my 5 month-old son last night from about 3am to 5am, so today I’m tired. I also had some errands I needed to run or else it would bite me in the ass later, so that left me short on time. Also, I think I misplaced my balls somewhere and my courage level as of this morning was somewhere between “baby” and “little girl.” So I decided to just stay home and cross off many of the long-overdue items on my around-the-house to-do list. For this I am ashamed of myself.
But then I noticed there was a new episode of Bootstrapped with Kids, “The podcast journey of two dads bootstrapping a SaaS business (or two) to achieve financial freedom.” Since I’ve been ravenously consuming this podcast for the last couple weeks I know that the hosts, Brecht and Scott, tend to read their iTunes reviews aloud in their podcast, and I recently left a review, so I thought maybe they read it. Not only did they read my review but they talked about me for an amazingly long time and Brecht mentioned me having gone “balls out” and having “put my big boy pants on” with this Operation Get Profitable thing. So basically Brecht said I was out there being kicking ass but in reality I was at home being a pansy. So I decided to stop being a pansy and put my big boy pants back on. So Brecht and Scott depansified and repantsed me. Thanks, guys. I owe you one.
For certain reasons I decided that it would be a good idea today to do 100% cold calling instead of canvassing. (Maybe my big boy pants weren’t all the way on?) I started by calling back all the warm leads I have right now who I hadn’t called in the previous 24 hours. I was 0 for 3 on that but I’ll pick back up next week with those. Then I just started googling hair salons and trying to talk to the owner. I believe I called a total of 11 salons today and I got through to one salon owner. I decided to try my How to Open a Hair Salon article idea and the person I talked to did give me some material for my article. None of the other owners were available. It really is difficult to talk to the salon owner over the phone.
I kind of want to explain my reasoning for trying the calling instead of visiting thing. I seem to be running out of salons to visit in my area. There are plenty I still haven’t visited, but at this point they’re so geographically scattered that it will be woefully inefficient for me to drive around to all of them – I’d be able to get to like 4 a day. I suppose that’s not too terrible. I guess I’m just having a hard time facing the fact that in order to get one solid lead it takes a ton of driving and a ton of visiting duds, and then it takes a lot of solid leads just to get one sale. I guess I might as well admit to this reality and stop looking for alternative ways to sell until I get profitable (which was kind of the whole point of this OGP thing, YOU IDIOT!). (Idiot = me)
So this week I believe I visited 11 salons. That combined with last week’s 24 is a total of 35, which is quite a ways short of the target of 80. That’s lame of me, but just because this arbitrary little burst of activity has reached its end doesn’t mean I have to stop selling. I intend to continue in the coming weeks.
So was Operation Get Profitable successful? Did I actually Get Profitable? Anti-climatically, I won’t know until a while from now. I got one customer but I don’t know whether or not the next customer I get will have been a result of OGP. If any one of the five strong leads I got out of the deal becomes a customer, then yes. Otherwise, no. Whatever happens, I’ll be writing about it here.
Don’t lose heart. Keep at it. You’re doing great.
You rock dude! Way to stay accountable and continue to write.
Jonathan
Your accountability and transparency are inspiring! I feel like we’re on the journey with you and I want you to win. It’s a slog, but then there is freedom.
You’ve obviously been plugging away at Snip for quite some time, so I guess my question is, at what point do you decide that you don’t have product/market fit and need to
a) Pivot
b) Start working on something else entirely
It seems like one of the most difficult things is being able to tell the difference between “this isn’t going to work” and “this hasn’t worked *yet*, and I need to keep hammering”.
Good question. Every so often I ask myself the question, “Have I tried everything that could be tried?” If ever the answer to that question is yes, then I’ll consider moving onto something else. So far that answer has always been no. For example, my website’s funnel is probably operating at about 1% of its potential effectiveness right now due to an unoptimized design. That can be fixed. Also, I haven’t given a serious go yet at PPC as a customer acquisition method. That’s another thing I would be irresponsible not to try before giving up. I think the reason I haven’t had profound success yet is probably that I started off really, really clueless about marketing and even though I’ve been working on Snip for almost three years, I’ve only been marketing it for about one year, and only very part-time, and I still have a lot to learn and do.