Case Studies

The Situation

The client is a business owner who was originally looking for help with SEO to get more customers. Upon further inspection after a few discussions, we discovered that they were having a cashflow problem that was more of a priority than investing in SEO at the moment.

After taking a look at the history of the company, we noticed that their front end of getting new customers had a sales process that was in great shape and performing well. The problem instead was that even though they were executing a lot of business, there wasn't any profit left over, which was the cause of the cashflow shortage.

The Strategy

In all cases where there is no or little profit, the first place to look is for "leaks" in the business's processes. Typically, there are many ways the business operates that can be tightened up, automated, or fixed with better technology. Here is a run down of the top major changes that we implemented over the course of 6 months:

1. Use a customer relationship management (CRM) software
2. Streamline the sales process
3. Quantify the financials in the business
4. Find the hidden leaks of cash and reduce costs
5. Fix profit margins to healthy levels (both gross and net)
6. Optimize the conversion rate of the website
7. Ramp up Adwords use and optimize campaigns for better spending
8. Invest in better SEO for long term marketing (which helps reduce Adwords spending over time)

The Results

The implementation of a CRM software gave an immediate boost in productivity in the business. The software was automatically doing many of the steps that required a lot of paperwork and logistics before. Of course, change is hard, but after a few weeks, the team wondered how it ever functioned before without the new software. It saved around 3 hours of labor per day on average for each worker!

After streamlining their processes, we also found many examples of ways to save on costs. By quantifying the financials, like setting a budget, and monitoring progress, we were able to fix where the cash was going.

Before, they were operating typically at 30% gross profit and 0% net profit and the business had acquired some debt. After, the net profit margin was averaging around 20% and the majority of the debt was paid off. This made a substantial difference in the business, since their revenue was already pretty big.

We implemented best practices on their website to improve conversion rates and saw over a 4x improvement on potential customers filling out their contact forms. 

For the near term, the Adwords effort brought in a lot more traffic which filled their sales pipeline and kept it full over time. They even had to implement a minimum project price so that they could focus on the higher dollar customers, as well as maintain a minimum profit margin. Investing in SEO with the new available cashflow brought an increase of 2x traffic over 6 months, which helped greatly with expansion.

In summary, the company was able to operate their business with a staff of 5 that before took over 30. They also went from not making any net profit for many years, to a net profit margin of over 20%. Their pipeline is now consistently full with new business pouring in and they have to turn away smaller projects.