A Taste of My Own Medicine

monopoly community chest

Winning the lottery

Or… what to do when you don’t

Are you expecting a tax refund? And if so, what will you do with it?

windfall

The question recently popped into my head while reading about an innovative new working capital loan provider for small business called Kabbage who are expanding into Australia.

It is a nice question to think about.

What would you do if you had an unexpected windfall in your business?

I suppose you could just pull it out and treat yourself, nothing wrong with that.

Stop and think about it for a moment…

Monopoly

monopolyWhat would you do if you suddenly had an extra $25K to play with in your business… The old monopoly card: “The bank has made an error in your favour, please collect $25,000”

I won’t tell you what to do with the boon… your circumstances are unique to you… But how might a financial injection without any strings attached change your life?

Let me tell you what I’d do:

I’d spend the money on a digital marketing campaign. Maybe 12 months at $1500 per month (and a $7000 for a nice holiday with my wife.)

$1.5K a month would get me a high quality digital lead generation specialist, such as Motive Marketing in Sydney and I’d get them to design and run a marketing campaign in Facebook, Google, Linkedin and wherever else to get people to download my book – The Ten Truths for Making Business Fun.

ROI

You see it’s all about ROI, return on investment.

My theory would be this: If I spend $1500 per month over a year on lead generation, I’d need to have maybe 500 small business owners downloading the book… that would be 6000 in a year and if I get 6000 small business owners to download my book and I start talking to them with my articles, videos, webinars, surveys and all kinds of other free tools and resources… a small proportion of those 6000 people will ultimately become my clients… I would expect that it would not be unreasonable to expect that over time between 10 to 20 people who download my book will become paying clients of mine.

Now that would be an amazing ROI. when you think about it… 15 clients are worth around about an entire year’s revenue for me, so by spending $18,000 I gain a year’s income…sounds like a brilliant investment, doesn’t it.

And I’d get to have a nice holiday as well.

Hang on… lets look at that again

But wait a minute… The question was: What would you do if you had a sudden windfall in your business… what would you do with it… Obviously I just outlined a great investment, but what’s to stop me from making that investment anyway?… why don’t I go and talk to Scott from Motive Marketing and work out a plan anyway… if the investment is that good, I’d be a mug not to make it anyway right?

That’s  why the question came up for me when reading about Kabbage… if it’s a god enough investment, why not go and borrow to money to do it anyway… valid argument I think.

medicineWell, rest assured… Scott and I will be talking in the coming weeks (he doesn’t know it yet, but he’s getting a phone call from me next week.

But what about you?

Are you holding off on making an investment because you haven’t got the money yet?

I hear it a lot when I talk to prospective clients: “Well, I’d love to work with you, when I can afford it” … really… Maybe you could argue that once you can afford me, maybe you don’t need me anymore… the question is: Can you afford not to work with me.

Think about it… in the mean time, I’m calling Scott… time to take my own medicine.

2 comments on “A Taste of My Own Medicine

  1. Great article! I’ve never thought about investment the way you made me think about it, thanks so much for sharing.

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