Increasing Revenue For The Back 40:
The Grand Finale
Grand Finale… of what?
I’ve been a dancer for (almost) my whole life and over the years I’ve found that ballet lends itself beautifully to the art of analogy. Today you will be introduced to one of those analogies!
Ballets are performances that tell a story through dance and they are typically broken down into acts. Each act is separate and whole on its own, yet they are all interconnected—they tell one cohesive story.
For the month of February, I was working on a project. This project was broken down into three mini-projects: one for each week. Though each mini-project was complete in itself, they were all connected and worked towards one larger goal.
The month-long project was, therefore, the ballet. And each week, an act. Finally, today is the grand finale—a wrap-up that is scannable, easily-digestible, and communicates the overarching theme without going into too much detail! (I don’t know if grand finales are necessarily easily-digestible but we’ll just go with it for now.)
Now, without further ado, please observe The Back 40 Business Ballet! (I’m really sorry—I have an unhealthy addiction to uncalled-for alliterations.)
So, what did I do?
If the main theme of this business ballet was to increase revenue for my family’s small business, The Back 40, each act took a slightly different approach to accomplishing that.
Act One: The Marketing Macarena
Here I shamelessly leveraged a holiday (a consumerism-driven holiday, granted, but I digress) to sell stuff. You wouldn’t think that Valentine’s Day would really have anything to do with an artisan bread subscription, but by golly, it worked.
Although marketing was the intended focus of this week, I ended up spending the majority of my time addressing issues with The Back 40 website. So not only did we successfully launch the ad in time, but I also learned about a lot of technical website stuff, came up with solutions to issues that had been bugging us for awhile, and we gained new subscribers!
You can read the in-depth breakdown of this week here.
Act Two: The Sales Salsa
This week involved hours upon hours of sifting through websites, articles, and even Facebook to find events in Minnesota that would be appropriate for setting up a mobile wood-fired pizza oven. (That’s the second branch of our food service operation based from the farm.)
The main point of this week was to produce a highly valuable spreadsheet filled with this information to hand off to The Bosses (my parents) so that they could make informed, timely decisions without having to spend the time researching. I don’t know if that’s technically part of the sales process, because it’s kind of like pre-prospecting, but some cursory research showed that everyone has different definitions of those kinds of things so we’ll go with it for now.
You can read the in-depth breakdown of this week here.
Act Three: The Technical Tango
This week was born out of the need that became evident during Week One’s technical difficulties. Instead of directing more people to a website that was slow, glitchy, and kinda ugly, I decided to just rebuild it from the ground up! Because how hard can that be?! So. . . yeah, needless to say, this part of the project will spill into next month (go ahead and read this week’s post for the full picture).
This week was a pretty significant course correction from my plan at the start of the month (which was to stick to the sales/marketing route). However, if the whole point of the project was to increase awareness and revenue for this business, yet their base foundation for doing so (the website) was struggling, how could I expect to actually succeed in that area? Even though I would’ve preferred to put together another ad campaign, I believe this fits with the spirit of the project and doesn’t tarnish the integrity of this business and their brand.
You can read about the final act here!
So, while the idea of a ballet having an act entirely dedicated to the macarena is not entirely realistic, I hope that the dance analogy helps with grasping the concept behind this project!
And why did I do it?
I have a few reasons for doing so, but one of the main ones was to demonstrate to the world that I am capable of creating value in a real-life setting. If you look at my original brainstorming post, you will see that this project idea (the ridiculously-named Back 40 Business Ballet) was definitely not on that list.
I ended up choosing this project because I wanted to use this chance of proving I can add value to businesses by actually adding value to a business. I am blessed to have worked closely with my parents over the past couple years during the development of the farm. And while this is truly just the beginning for them, I didn’t want to pass up this opportunity to contribute something tangible to the cause.
Furthermore, I feel like I know a little bit about a lot of things. This project was a way for me to increase the depth of my knowledge on some things, demonstrate that I can learn things, and use preexisting skills and knowledge to produce results.
How did I do it?
Because each week was different, my methodology was also pretty different from week to week. I would recommend reading the post corresponding to each week for the full dive into my workflow!
However, there were constants from week to week. Each mini-project (I’m letting the whole ballet analogy go at this point, you’re welcome) started off with a lot of research. I don’t intrinsically know anything about code, how to set up a FaceBook ad, making WordPress errors go away, which events in Minnesota are pizza-wagon appropriate, what prospecting even is, or how to build a website while keeping the other one up and running. Therefore, I did a lot of reading.
Then I would eventually transition into the carrying-it-out phase: filming and editing the video for the ad, building out a new account page, contacting people through a HubSpot configured email account, sketching a new website layout, etc. Sometimes I spent too long researching and not enough creating, and sometimes it was the opposite, but in the end everything evened out and the finished product was present.
What did I learn?
Oh man. I learned so much. I’m really glad I kept freakishly detailed notes, because at this point in the month my brain is a ball of mush of random facts and data.
I learned that redesigning a new site without paying attention to your SEO can be catastrophic (which has literally zero bearing in our case, but I’m convinced that’s something that will come in handy in the future). I learned the very basics of what a CRM is and how to use one. I learned that I get my distaste for being filmed from my mom. I learned that operating a mobile food unit in Minnesota is not as simple as one would assume. I learned how to make the “too many redirects” error stop popping up!!! (That was a big one.)
I learned that I’m capable of figuring things out on my own! I also learned that I don’t particularly like doing that (because it’s so much easier to just have someone spoon-feed it to you), but I also learned that it’s incredibly satisfying to know that I am completely capable of learning and using a topic/tool/etc. — all by myself.
Probably most significant of all, I learned to document my work. I’ve done stuff before, for sure. I’ve created something valuable before, for sure. But I’ve never kept track of what I was doing as closely as I did this month. I’ve definitely never written about it and put it out there for the entire world to see.
Coming from a recovering perfectionist who hates letting people see her learning process because that implies that she wasn’t actually born perfect and all-knowing, this is a big deal. It’s kind of liberating.
Where does this leave me?
I’m walking away from this month with not only a project that can be nicely packaged and conveyed using a handy-dandy ballet analogy, but also a toolbox full of skills, ideas, random pieces of information (and a spreadsheet full of links to articles, videos, and websites to reference for further learning). I made an ad, solved some problems, sold some stuff, rebuilt a website, and learned a lot about the world and myself. It’s been an adventure, that’s for sure.
What’s up next, you may ask? Well lemme tell ya.
Next month I’m writing every single day for (at least) 30 days. I’m deliberating whether or not to full-on commit to a whole 365-day ordeal, but we’ll see. Either way, the 30 day deal will be done, which is a huge task in and of itself.
I’ve never even journaled for more than maybe a week at a time. A whole month? Yikes. And a whole month of posts that anyone from a future employer to my grandma’s cousin’s neighbor could read? Yikes again.
So yeah, you could say I’m pretty excited for it! I know that it’s going to be a hugely stretching experience, and that’s what I’m here for, so let’s get this party started.
Thanks for taking the time to read this far! Check back next month (tomorrow?) if you want to read something from me that’s not 20 pages long. And, like always, if anything that I worked on this month piques your interest, please leave a comment or get in touch some other way (you’ve got options).
Anyway, that’s all for now. Take luck and be blessed!
Also. . . Photo by David Hofmann on Unsplash. Thanks, Dave 🙂