Without healthy operations, there is no lasting revenue growth.
This simple lesson is the linchpin of any business looking to grow revenue, and it's the reason I got certified as a Digital Maturity Advisor. As a Growth Strategist, I need to look under the hood of the business and determine what needs attending to before we implement a sales or marketing plan. Skipping this critical step can result in a waste of money, time and frustration for leadership and their teams.
The CDAP grant is there for Canadian clients to have the government pay for the check under the hood and produce a roadmap to level up their entire business, including operations so growth can take place with organizational resilience built in.
9 signs a company is not ready for a digital marketing plan:
Product shortages
New hires immediately don't work out - don't get me started on "culture fit"
Supplier focus over customer focus - measured by meeting time, task time and email frequency
Customer questions are left hanging for days
Testimonials and client feedback are hard to come by
Revenue is mostly coming from one key account
Leadership can describe a vision for 5 or 10 years out, but not 2 or 3
Time always seems to be an issue, for everyone
Orders are written on sticky notes
To be clear, these signs are not a problem; they are a natural stage of a company's development. They are here to send signals that something needs to change, but what?
Operations. A company with 2 or more of these signs needs to attend to its operations before it can successfully implement a digital marketing strategy or sales growth plan. Luckily, CDAP can help Canadian small businesses identify if they have these symptoms and what to do about it before investing in a digital marketing strategy, new software, new hires or other aspects of growth plans.
These days, operations are digitized. Even if a company doesn't have a website, its operations exist digitally. That's why CDAP isn't a NOT digital marketing plan. A digital marketing plan may be an outcome, but with a good Digital Advisor, they are looking for these kinds of symptoms listed and solving for those first so the company can successfully grow.
Operations connect to marketing, sales, product, customer success, accounting, supply chains, impact, literally... everything. Good growth strategies center operations, not marketing.
A simplified version of how operations connect with other organizational functions:
Operations hold information about how well the company is doing. A COO is not "the other one", the introvert, or the person who "doesn't like selling", it's the person who can see the connections between functions of the organization, account for those functions and build processes to make each more efficient and profitable. If the company is the car, the CEO might be the driver but the COO is the mechanic. A CEO may know where the company needs to go, but a COO knows what will be encountered along the way and can help the CEO identify how to get there.
Even with a great CEO & COO or cofounder relationship, it never hurts your planning efforts to have other professionals check your work. If you already know where you're going and how to get there, leveraging the CDAP grant to have a Digital Advisor check the plan can save you time, money and headaches. If you know where you want to go but don't know how to get there, the CDAP grant gives you a big portion of that work with a road map to improve digital operations as you set out on your path. It's a win-win and it's never been more affordable to access professional digital advising services to support your growth.
Contact us for a free consultation or join us on August 15th for an information session to find out more.