A How-to Guide for Expanding Small Businesses with Dave Hiebeler and Mike Higgins

Every business, every owner, every employee has lots of great ideas. Now the crucial part is how one should nitpick and prioritize their tasks. "Experience" is not getting what you wanted. You can hire seasoned mentors to avoid making mistakes, period. Hiring trained professionals saves you time, avoids costly errors and gives you an edge. If you think that doesn’t make a huge difference, well, think again. At Align2Compete, you have access to industry experts who could drive you to your fullest potential. Today, we invited Dave Hiebeler and Mike Higgins, co-founders of the organization, to give you a run-through and a clear picture of what they do. --- Listen to the podcast here: A How-to Guide for Expanding Small Businesses with Dave Hiebeler and Mike Higgins Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. My guests today are Dave Hiebeler and Mike Higgins who co-founded an organization called Align2Compete. Now, what Align2Compete does, I will let them describe this more in their own words than in mine, but the basic gist of it is marketing for small businesses and solopreneurs or entrepreneurs so they’re the ones that are actually trying to help a lot of you that are out there listening trying to get some traction, get your business going, getting noticed, and getting noticed is something that I think a lot of people oftentimes don’t think of. I know I haven’t thought of it nearly as much as I should have even though that’s a huge part of the battle. It’s very common to think a lot about the specifics of your product, what you want to build and even why, the why is definitely important, but, oftentimes, this goes, for lack of a better way to put it, on notice. --- Dave, Mike, welcome to the program. Thanks. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. So let’s start with talking about Align2Compete. I introduced the topic but, of course, you know your business better than me translating a couple conversations we’ve had and what’s on your website. So what is Align2Compete about? What are you doing with your mission? I guess I’ll lead off with that, Mike. In essence, we turn strangers into customers for small businesses. That sounds as a simplistic benefit but it definitely is the essence of what we do and makes our feet hit the floor in the morning. Now, no question, it’s more complicated to pull that off and probably the best question that we could ever have anybody asked us in return, “How do you do that?” And so we are a marketing agency and mainly a service agency that helps emerging small businesses get the word out and boost their familiarity and I think you had touched on that, Stephen, that that’s the biggest challenge, like I go to meetup groups, that’s what we do is, yeah, if you’re going to build a deck in your house, for example, and you could go to Lowe’s or Home Depot and buy all the wood and buy all the tools and, yeah, you’ll build something that’s a deck but it’s nice to have a contractor, if you will, or maybe a financial adviser that knows how to use the tools and what tools to use. Mike and I talk about it a lot about we don’t lead with product, push product. We worked at organizations that were publicly traded on Wall Street, for example, that what’s the product of the month that they want us to push and I just don’t like to work with clients that way and I know Mike doesn’t either and so we really want to focus on what is that business trying to do and one of the questions that we’ll always ask is, “Stephen, one’s the lowest, ten’s the highest, how would you rate from a 1 to 10 the familiarity of your business?” and it’s always an interesting answer we get. Somebody will say, “Well, we’re a 3,” or, “We’re a 5,” and then we’ll say, “Okay, where do you want to be a year or two years from now?” Because we know a lot can change in even those timeframes. “Oh, I wanna get to a seven.” Okay, cool, get a gauge of how aggressive they want to pursue and expand the word. You might want to add to what I’ve missed but, anyway, this this allergy is doing a thing on me. I’m just curious about when you say the familiarity, do you mean like how familiar people are with your business or how familiar you are with your customers and your market? So every business should have a -- Mike says it best, you should have a cardboard cutout or avatar of maybe three or four ideal customer prospects that you think, (a), you can help with your business, they’re a perfect match for you, near perfect match for them. Many go in, for example, and haven’t even thought that through and it’s one of the first things that a business should do is to really focus on who are your ideal prospects and then we want to boost your familiarity to your ideal prospects and so that’s like the top level starting mission. I guess the one thing that I get confused by a little bit is that why anyone would want to be anything other than a 10 on that scale of 1 to 10? Because I’ve had previous guests describe the idea of passion about your business and say if you’re going to start a business and they asked you on a scale of 1 to 10 how passionate you are, if you say anything other than 10, you’re not going to make it work. So what does it mean when a business says, “My familiarity is about a 2 or 3,” and that’s the whole cold starting, that big issue, but then they say, “My ideal is 7 or 8,” as opposed to 10? It has to do with money and resources available, let’s start there. That’s an aggressive play and it depends, obviously, on, number one, how competitive of a field that they’re in or an industry that they’re in and so how much lifting is it going to take to boost familiarity to get them from a 5 to a 10, for example. If it’s more of a mature industry, then you need more money than God to pull that off. You’re spending money at the level of Progressive, Allstate, State Farm, for example. And the question is less like what do you want to be and what are you, it’s a good framing conversation to start with just in terms of listening to somebody sort of begin to walk themselves into an understanding of the work that they have to do. Think about working with small businesses, most of the time is they’re not looking at generating 100, 200, 300 new customer relationships a month. Probably 10 a year. So, when you’re working with smaller businesses, the scale can be smaller, depending upon what you’re doing. Like, for sure, right now, we’re helping a local charter school who’s looking for school teachers, it’s a very competitive situation right now, and we’re helping them dip into four or five other states, they’re really going out there saying, “Hey, look, we have some pretty competitive salary opportunities here at this school.” It’s a small academy that’s competing for teachers in a market that’s very competitive for teachers. I think in the Denver Metro area, they’re known. When you get outside of Colorado, they’re not. Oh, I see. That factors into helping them develop an understanding of what it was going to take. Because, inevitably, more so with small companies, but always with businesses, they’re very aggressive in terms of timelines. They’re not like, “Yeah, six months from now, we would love to have some new customers.” And that’s why in the white paper really that Dave wrote, we have this picture of this farm and it’s like the farmer talking to the soil saying, “Give me the crop first and then I’ll plant the seeds.” Well, you can’t do it. Plant this, then the crop grows, because people are -- and I don’t want to generalize by saying everybody but it’s difficult to sustain something when the results aren’t immediate. That’s why a question around what is your familiarity score in your own mind, it frames the job to do, to come in to somebody and say, “Look, it’s a six-month lift at a minimum,” if you really want to begin to dig in and get a name out and start to own some real estate for yourself, relative to the problems you solved and how you solve it. It’s not a single this or a single that, I’m not going to run an ad on Facebook, I’m not going to have a rapid little search engine campaign. It doesn’t work that way. You got to be in it for a little while and that’s part of what Dave and I do is we sort of have to set that expectation to say, “Look, this is not something you can do overnight, unfortunately.” Yeah. And so you’re talking about becoming noticed, having people familiar with whatever business someone is starting. Now, my question is, how far does someone need to go with that? Because I know there’s some people that really want to take a business and they want to grow it, like gangbusters to be known throughout the world and other people that are more content with serving their niche, whether it be in their community or their one group of people that they tend to serve best. So, it’s part of this initial conversation as well as the initial conversation that any of you listening out there need to think about as you’re planning what business you’re trying to start or whatever initiative you’re trying to start, trying to figure out how much you need to be noticed, how much the world needs to know you for you to continue to fulfill this mission, this passion that you have. Mike and I talk about this frequently. He coined the term “trial and sow, own your patch” and so you just spoke to that there, Stephen, in that, let’s say you’re just starting out, you’re in your first couple years of business, and the goals, you’ll want them to be achievable, more than anything. I mean, you all probably heard of SMART goals and that’s one of the acronyms, it’s doable, it’s doable over the next three, six, nine months. You can stair step your way to that. So, it might be that what’s good for you as a business is to use nextdoor.com where you can buy two or three zip codes and really