Investigate: Diving Into the First Phase of the Strategic Growth Flywheel

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I hope that you are subscribed, otherwise, you may have missed an incredible series about conference success that you might want to check out, but also, you've missed the introduction to this series. You're going to want to go back and listen to the previous episode. It gives you an overview of what we are introducing to you and going over the first phase of the Strategic Growth Wheel.

We talk about a really great analogy comparing it to going to a doctor almost for your business and really how to think about this and reframe how you think about creating not just strategy in your business but an informed strategy that is unique and specific to your business, how you are currently perceived in the marketplace, how you want to be perceived, what are the opportunities that are available to you based on your strengths, your weaknesses, your customers, your partners, the specific geographic market that you work in, all those things, and how you can really find all of that stuff to create an informed strategy.

But then also, if you find some opportunities, the third step is how do you figure out what the right one is, and lastly, how do you make sure that you don't fall short on implementation? We've all been there. We've all looked back and said, “That was a great idea. Why couldn't we just follow through on it?” We get distracted or too busy. Go back and get that high-level overview.

But as promised, today, we're going to dive deeper into the first level or the first action you would take the very first time that you implement the Strategic Growth Wheel in your business. As we mentioned in that, this could be to develop an overarching informed strategy that's going to help you coordinate and eliminate the boundaries between marketing and sales so you can really increase sales and revenue.

Or it might be what's our next opportunity? Do we want to go in this direction or that direction? Do we want to evolve into a certain type of company or an alternative type of company? What is next? It might be how we position ourselves for successful succession planning.

A lot of my clients are dealing with the day-to-day operations, but they're also wondering about how am I going to make sure that this is positioned to be successful and still really flourishing for the next generation, or for employees to be able to maybe take over or buy into, or to be positioned for an external sale even. But we've got to be really, really intentional.

Most businesses actually never make it into the succession that they want to. The majority of them don't because they're not creating that value inside. Having a strong value inside means having a strategy. When people are looking at your business or thinking about where it's going to be able to take them in the future if they invest in it, they want to see that it has been strategic, that it's also thinking strategically, and it has the processes and systems designed into it to help really create that value, and has the momentum inside of the company.

This Strategic Growth Wheel is exactly what will help you do that. We're going to actually be diving into that first phase. Let's get right into it. I want to start by sharing a simple fact with you that we've learned from research because as we're talking about in this space, we are heavy into the research, but here it is: 72% of CEOs think marketers are always asking them for money, that they rarely explain how much incremental business this money will generate.

If you think about that, what we're seeing is there's not a follow through, there are no metrics. We just don't know what's going to happen. We don't understand the value. We don't trust the value of marketers. We're not sure what we're getting for what we're putting into it.

This is part of the reason why at StoryBuilt, we find that it's incredibly valuable to start with investigation. Because when we deliver our strategy packages to our clients, or we teach our clients how to do strategy inside of their own businesses, we want them to get the full value of anything that they invest in upfront, just to have that data, the insights that are gleaned by somebody going out and investigating, conducting interviews and surveys of your customers, your partners, your competition, also looking at industry trends, looking at parallel industries, what's happening in them to be early indicators as to what is going to be affecting your industry.

What are the unique opportunities to differentiate you in the marketplace, but also still holding you to stay relevant in your marketplace? All of that information can be worth 100 times its weight. If you start there, and we can give you and hand you that filtered out in a way that you could take action on it, that in and of itself pays for itself.

We want to educate actually business owners in the industry to demand that we want this information upfront. We want informed data to help us build a strategy, to help us select the right thing to identify. That's why it's so important that we believe to really start with investigation because it gives you an incredible amount of value right out of the gate.

Just having all of this research, it's like having an R&D department inside of your company telling you how to better create your perceived brand and value in the marketplace. This can be targeted toward workforce, how are you going to recruit workforce? How are you being perceived in the hearts and the minds of your current employees, which are some of your best resources in terms of attracting new ones?

All of that stuff can be gleaned from this first phase of this Strategic Growth Wheel, the Investigation Phase. Here's the red flag that we see inside of our companies a lot: when we know that we're not spending enough time on investigation, and I would say 9 out of 10 businesses aren't because a lot of times, we don't actually have that R&D built into our companies. We're just not sure or familiar.

We don't even know there's an opportunity to go out, hire that, bring it in, have somebody collect all of that data, and bring it to us in a really concise, streamlined way. What happens here, the red flag that we see is you’re focused on the wrong thing. Your focus is just wrong. You think you need to be spending time selling a certain way to your customers, but what you don't know is maybe you're talking about one piece in your sales process and mentally, they're still way back here trying to figure out, “Wait, who are you? Are you a contractor or are you a supplier? I'm confused about what role you play or where you fit in.”

But if you haven't done the research, if you haven't actually interviewed them or had somebody interview them in a setting where they're going to be very, very open and feel comfortable and that person is asking the right questions and you're putting out surveys on a bigger, wider scale to get feedback about how you're perceived or what people think, you may not even realize that.

It's so important to take time. Also, I can think of a specific situation where we went in to help a company that fortunately was growing incredibly well, they knew that they were going to need to bring almost double the size of their team, but they also knew the workforce was so incredibly tight right now. They really wanted to come up with a strategy but we get more intentional and strategic about bringing in workforce, having a good solid pipeline of workforce so that we can maintain this growth.

It was a great reason to tackle this problem and a great way to really take a first step into really developing strategy building a brand strategy. We came in and we started doing the research and we started internally gathering primary data inside of this company. What we found out is they were actually about to have a mass exodus of their people, and they didn't even know it.

Not only that, we needed to uncover why was this happening, what were the opportunities to at least partially reverse this and back this up a little bit. We actually had to go back to them and say, “Hey, you actually have two problems. Not just that you need to recruit, it's that you have a major retention crisis on your hands that you didn't even know was going to happen,” because they did not do a very good job on a regular basis of gathering feedback, staying in touch with their employees, which that in and of itself could have gone a long ways towards alleviating the problem.

They really needed to approach the problem from two different angles. But by actually implementing some solutions into the retention piece, they actually found those people were willing to partner with them and help them recruit. It was something that if we hadn't really dived in, they would have continued to focus on the wrong thing, the recruiting piece, which while that was important, they really had a crisis on their hand and they haven't even identified yet.

Helping you focus on the right things in your business. What’s key to help us focus on the right things is data and information. We need that to really help us dictate but how do we get that data? We talked about in the last episode, there are two different types, one primary and one secondary.

Primary really focuses on feedback and perceptions from the people you're directly dealing with or that you're directly paired against. It can be competitors. How are you perceived by your competitors can actually be really incredibly valuable information, but more importantly, how are you perceived by your customers, by your team members, by the people that you partner with in the industry, leaders in the industry, all of that is incredibly important.

When you're doing that research, the great thing about it, it's like double the value. Like I said, doing the investigation can give you so much value in and of itself. You can actually get direct quotes and words from the people that you're interviewing that you turn directly into messaging that sells them on the backside or salespeople just like them, they will actually give you the words for the marketing and the sales team to be able to leverage to really accelerate performance in both of those areas.

The same is true when you're targeting your workforce. They will give you the golden nuggets that you can actually implement on your social media to help build referral campaigns, all of those things right there. There are just gold in this research, especially the interviews.

That's why we are huge fans of doing the work and doing interviews. It can be hard when you're interviewing people directly yourself because sometimes it's a little harder for them to open up to you. But it's also a great strategy to build processes into your business where you are always trying to gather that information.

You can also find incredible testimonials within that research phase that become assets on the backside for your sales, for your marketing, for recruiting, for all of those things, even for trying to develop parts. If you're trying to find new partners to diversify your business or better position your business, we can find testimonials that actually talk about what it's like to be a partner with you. Lots of golden nuggets in those interviews.

The surveys, surveys help us catch, kind of throw out a wider net of data. But it helps us see trends, especially since they're great for workforce research. So many great things that we can get from those two things. Then we'll get secondary data and this is where we're out doing market research. That's really digging in layer after layer after layer, having really great partnerships and relationships with associations because they can be a tremendous wealth. They're always doing their own research and really being a part of associations at The National Asphalt Pavement Association, your local SAPA, or ASA, so many of them, so many great associations out there, they're always conducting their own research too and that can be incredibly valuable too.

But you also want to do research that’s specific to you, your customers, your products and services, your competitors, trends you're seeing, how do you also look at other industries and know what you should be taking from them, and what maybe isn't quite so relevant.

That's more of the secondary and that's more of that R&D, that research where you're getting down nitty and gritty in the investigation phase. This helps us to go from an uninformed strategy, that's what we're trying to overcome. We don't want to just say, “Oh, well, here's one strategy that we see being used,” we want to come up with one that's actually relevant and gives us a unique differentiated position, because it's unique to us.

Poor direction and poor performance of teams and execution of plans come from being too generic with our strategy. Really investigating helps us get really unique, it helps us differentiate, and it helps us uncover the opportunities. Like I said, sometimes what we uncover is what feels like major obstacles or bottlenecks.

Think about the example in the workforce that I just shared with you. They were terrified. This felt awful to them. They didn't realize all of these things. But what we saw it as is an opportunity because when we engaged those people that were wanting to leave into actually creating the solution of the retention, they actually really transported themselves into an advocate for the company and a really intense loyalty much quicker.

The folks that stayed with them or went through that process with them became incredibly loyal. It was way more than if they would have ignored the problem, they would have had that mass exodus, they were able to retain over 50% and those ones actually became incredibly loyal, advocated, and actually were a very, very significant influence on recruiting and filling the other gap that they needed. The opportunities can actually be really, really incredible.

Once again, don't forget to go back and check out the previous episode where we talked about the Strategic Growth Wheel on a higher level. But also, make sure you're subscribed because we're going to talk about identification next. Because one thing that will happen when you investigate when you're doing your R&D is you're going to collect a lot of information. How do you filter through that, really prioritize, and focus on what's going to get you the most results? Maybe we can even find things that are going to solve multiple problems with one really intentional focus and effort.

You're not going to want to miss the Identify phase, which is the next one in this series. Make sure that you're subscribed. Also, we actually have a tool out there that can help you get a little bit closer. It's not a full investigation piece like we talked about here today but what it is, is it's a quick assessment. It takes about five minutes and it's really strategic questions to help you identify what layer or part of your business might be the one where you're going to find your bottleneck or your opportunity.

Is it sales and marketing? Is it operations? Is it legacy? Are you really the company that has got so much going for it but you really need to focus on legacy and succession? It's a really great thing to just help you take those first couple of steps and really help you start getting clarity on “I need to start looking at this part of my business.”

Think about like a little gift from us to help you shortcut some of this investigation. Even though it's a little bit more generic, it's much more than most of us have when we just start playing with trying to develop our first strategy. Take that tool, leverage that, get an assessment, and figure out where do you need to start really looking in on your business and probably get focused to get that next big boost in momentum and growth.

That is going to be found at storybuilt.marketing/assessment. That link is going to be in the show notes. Check it out and make sure you take your assessment. Then, of course, tag me on LinkedIn and tell me what you found out. Let's talk about it. I want to hear what you find out in your assessment.

Make sure you're subscribed so that you are here for the Identification and the Implementation episodes that we're going to be doing really shortly. Also, make sure that you check out all the great content coming out of the Blacktop Banter network as well. Talk to you soon.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.