A handsomely dressed business friend grinned at me through a haze of Scotch and asked, ‘Owsitgoinorright?’ He slurped his drink and followed up with, ‘Businessorright?’
Seeing him having so much fun at this almost-impromptu, small business gathering was heart-warming. Fun is contagious. Plus I’d never seen him intoxicated.
‘Yes!’ I was decisive. ‘We’ve done our best month in about two years.’
His eyes popped, and he gave me an uninhibited bear hug. ‘Mate, that’s awesome, congratulations.’
I wasn’t going to go to the event. I was on deadline with client work. But around 2pm, I realised that I had promised the instigator (who is also a client) that I’d be there, that she is big on integrity (it’s her key value) and it was a momentous day for her. She was stepping out of a leadership role of a business group after a number of years. El Presidente, the Smiling Assassin. She’s amazing, and having the opportunity to catch up with an entire cluster of beautiful people is rare enough.
So I downed tools and went. I was late, but I made it!
Another of my friends there greeted me happily. He said he was having a great time (he looked like he was having a great time, to be honest), and brought up the old ‘probably should be at work’ line.
‘But what’s the point of owning your business if you can’t do this?’ I challenged, gesturing towards the shining ball of good times that was bursting out towards the bar.
He leaned back and smiled. ‘You’re right. I guess we’ll just do it on the weekend…’
‘… or late at night,’ I laughed.
Which is still something I feel guilty about when I’m not doing it. Workaholic habits die hard!
Backing up a bit, it’s true that Brutal Pixie has done its best month and a half in about two years.
I don’t mean ‘best’ just as in ‘best financially’. I mean ‘best overall’.
Here’s a snapshot of where we are right now:
We have new, self-hosted project management software that has done incredible things for us even in just five days. Like, now I can see exactly what’s budgeted against what and where projects are, aren’t, and are only borderline profitable. It fundamentally changes how we approach sales, for example, because it’s demonstrated where we haven’t been robust enough in our pricing (or more critically, time tracking).
Every single one of our clients is someone we would love to take to dinner. In fact, I invite them out to fun events on the regular.
100% of our clients pay up-front. Even the clients whose own infrastructure disallows them to use a credit card, or to put payment details in our proposals system, still find a way to pay up-front. Amazing!
We almost hit our sales stretch target in February, for the first time since raising the bar by 100%. I raised that bar probably 12 months ago.
After two years of battling with platforms and spreadsheets, I have finally nailed down resource capacity. For now, anyway. :) I know exactly what’s going on, where, and how everything is scheduled. I wish I could transfer from my chest to yours the feeling of joy that this gives me, so you could feel it for just a moment.
I can take pairs of our clients out for lunch and they end up doing business with each other as a result, which indicates to me that we’re hitting the right demographic consistently.
We’ve gained a bunch of new clients in the past fortnight, and are rolling existing clients over into new phases. I’ve got a new writing mentee, too, and he hit his first target with an absolute explosion of happiness a few days ago. Like, wow.
Thanks to knowing my capacity more intimately than ever before, I’ve happily been able to continue all the feel-good stuff.
For example:
Last week I spent a week at Mache - a coworking space in Adelaide - as part of a pro bono writer project for the Coworking South Australia Association, and I fell in love with the space, the people, and what their future will be like.
Monday coming up, I’m spending an entire day at Wirreanda School as a pitch judge in their ‘pitch to pros’ program. Tuesday, I’m teaching lawyers how to create sticky clients.
At the end of the month, I’m heading to Canberra to spend four days with a friend (and ex-Pixie) who is a bestselling paranormal fantasy writer. That’s an entirely different story. LOL
If you’ve been reading my writing about the Pixie business for any length of time beyond the past four months, you’ll probably have noticed that my tone has changed.
For ages I was getting really down-in-the-mouth about things. And then something happened and I could let go of a bunch of unhelpful ideas. Suddenly, I fell in love with my work again.
That happened because I’ve reoriented myself and the business.
You’ll perhaps recall me talking about selling case studies and how brilliant that’s been (continues to be) for us. Beyond the product, positioning Brutal Pixie, in everything we do, as a publishing strategy firm has been hands-down the winner - especially on a personal level for me. It allows me to tell stories from my publishing days (of all stripes), and it saw my Daily Tips Email list grow from 0 to 30 in just 30 days. I recognise that this doesn’t look like much (because it isn’t) but it’s incredible growth off a website that had literally zero traffic for eighteen months.
How that’s happened is something I’m keeping a secret for now. I’ll reveal it soon enough.
Let’s call it a new mentor in my life, eh?
One of the fun things that has fallen out of the other side of this ‘mentoring’ was a spontaneous bet that I made.
Here’s how that happened.
I got a real estate agent’s flyer in the letterbox one day, offering an appraisal of the house (sigh, don’t they all). I thought, man this is rubbish.
Then I thought -- fuck it. I scribbled all over it, marking up the text, making suggestions… effectively tearing it to shreds.
Then I wrote a letter. I stapled a business card to the letter, included the mark up, and sent it in a personal-sized envelope with a handwritten address.
In it was a bet.
The bet was:
If I can do a better job and lift your call-back rate, you shout me a $100 lunch at XYZ Fancy Pants Restaurant.
The outcome was an email, and a phone call, and a text message, one after the other. (You’ll always know when you hit a compelling call to action, right?)
We met up and he was massively enthusiastic; it turns out he’s a student of direct selling. My little letter rang all his bells.
And so, we made friends. We did a deal at the table, over coffee, for that $100 lunch. We parted with a laugh. And now I’ve got the fun challenge of lifting a known baseline. (Hopefully it won’t be hard. Improving on 0.0003% shouldn’t be difficult, right?) Let’s see if is.
Thus it is that I’m writing much more direct sales copy.
As someone who spends a lot of time writing - I write from 0630 until about 2 pm every week day, just about - there are still areas in which I really suck. Direct sales has been one of them. I’m un-sucking that skill with every passing day. And now I have Real Live Clients on which to test my new-found skills. What’s that saying about you get what you focus on? :)
And then a friend (who will probably read this; she knows who she is) dropped the ultimate shiny thing. She told me today that she misses me in publishing.
You know what? I miss publishing, too. Desperately, some days. My inner publisher never sleeps: I’m that person who listens to other people’s dreams and sees them on shelves, on coffee-tables, in launches. It’s just what I do. It’s why I can turn businesses with ‘blogs’ into businesses with multiple levels of publishing output with minimal effort.
As a result of the shiny thing, I pitched a woman I admire and asked if she’d let me publish her book when it’s written and photographed. She’s still in what we’ll call ‘research phase’. Haha if I told you the topic, you wouldn’t believe it.
Anyway. This brings me back full-circle to where I began.
The publishing orientation of Brutal Pixie is one that makes sense to people. ‘Marketing’ is one thing, but to those with a thought leadership orientation, it feels too much like sales and not enough like making an impact. Publishing surmounts that barrier, because printed works (physical or digital) are still impactful. They always have been, and they always will be.
As an organisation that brings publishing smarts into your business, we are bringing that impact back.
And in the meantime, I am excited as fuck.