Do you have sleepless nights scrolling through the endless list of ‘what ifs’ that could cause your business to crumble overnight?

Well, you may not be able to eliminate that completely as an entrepreneur, but you can be intentional about building resilience in your business (and yourself).

I see resilience as a sturdy foundation; it’s not going to prevent missteps and catastrophes, it’s going to increase the likelihood that you can withstand them. 

Also see: 5 Ways to Be a More Resilient Human

We’re going to dive into tactics and strategies to build resilience across your organization, and how to apply the information through both an Operations and Marketing lens.

Resilient businesses run in unity; to move the organization toward the same endpoint, each individual system must communicate with every other system internally.

Unroot and Understand Your Customer’s Experience

Working at Forget The Funnel as their Director of Operations (I just left) taught me a lot about the science and art of marketing. My two biggest takeaways:

1. The most effective marketing understands the problem it is solving, coupled with human behavior, unbelievably well.

2. Customers experience different problems at different stages of their journey. It’s advantageous to understand the stages your best customers go through, and intentionally meet them where they are to help them make the progress they’re seeking.

There are a lot of frameworks used to understand your customers, and most of them are good enough.

However, if they aren’t touching on the journey your best customers take from being unaware of you -> becoming a raving fan, I’d be wary of its effectiveness. 

This understanding should serve as a starting point as you develop a strategy for everything from content to customer onboarding to retention. 

Let’s look at some examples. 

Before you dive in, notice that these journeys start at the first moment of awareness / curiosity, and end at them loving your product and recommending it to others. It doesn’t start when they become a warm lead, and it doesn’t stop once they buy.

The specifics on each are less important (but still interesting).

See if you can pick up on any other consistent (& overarching) patterns here.

Spotify

Columbia Road

TurboTax

How to apply this as an Operator:

Understanding your customer’s journey and helping them progress through it may feel like a marketing-centric pillar on the surface, but implementing this across the organization is an operational task — as well as a linchpin.

The power, as with many things in life, is not in the understanding itself. Instead, it’s how you apply it & how well you can habitualize making decisions while considering the broader customer journey.

In a previous role in 2020 I was a part of an operations team tasked with taking a highly insightful customer journey map (rooted in 3 months of research I also was a part of) and integrating it so that everybody in the company could not only access the insights, but strengthen what they do in their respective departments.

It was a challenge.

Change always is, but I remember thinking it was harder than we were anticipating, specifically changing our existing norms and habits. 

I vividly remember getting a video call with our COO after a team meeting around product development with our CEO and other key members where he asked me, “Did you guys have the CX map open while you were talking?”

“We didn’t” I said sheepishly.

“Why?” he asked.

I didn’t have a good answer. The honest answer was because we didn’t think of it. We hadn’t made it a norm, and it takes time to build new norms and standards. 

What ended up working? Two things:

1. Understanding the use of the CX Map and why it’s actually important for our decision-making.This is a linchpin to its usefulness, and it starts at the top.

2. Then, for better or worse, forced use. In other words, people like myself, our COO, our CMO, needed to lead from the top and learn to build the habit themselves. This helps bring other folks on board & build new habits without requiring everybody to be perfectly on top of it during the transition.

How to apply this as a Marketer:

By: Nick Sorrell

We all know that how you say things matters. 

But here’s an additional angle worth considering:

Your relationship with someone—and the context of that relationship—changes what things need to be said. 

In general, we wouldn’t speak to our boss the same way (or about the same things) we’d speak to our best friend. We wouldn’t speak to someone on a first date the same way we’d speak with them a few years into dating. And while obvious exceptions apply, this sentiment extends to marketing as well. 

You shouldn’t be building a campaign, launch, email buy-back series, or #WhateverTheFuck with zero clue of who you’re speaking to & what stage of the customer journey they’re in. 

Somebody with no awareness of your solution—or who the fuck you even are—may need to be spoken to differently than someone who’s deciding between you and a competitor. 

Somebody who’s a first-time customer is likely living in a different context (and needs to be spoken to differently) than someone who is a repeat customer.

And somebody earlier in the journey does not necessarily mean they aren’t the right fit for your product / services; even if they say no a few times. 

Figuring out who you’re talking to is an important and beneficial distinction to make.

And it’s one that’s made infinitely more clear by understanding your customer’s journey.

Systemize Innovation 

Resilient businesses innovate, whether it takes the form of new products / services, or adapting their current infrastructure to better suit their customers and stay on top of the evolving world.

The strongest businesses I’ve been a part of did this habitually (pattern alert), and not just when things were bad, or when competition was threatening their market share. 

If you start thinking about innovation / evolution when you need to, you’re too late.

When the cultural norm of your company is to test and learn, it encourages a culture that prioritizes learning from mistakes (or any data, really) rather than one that fears making them in the first place.

Spoiler-alert: This is a really good thing.

How to apply this as an Operator: 

As an Operator, the company’s systems need to support this goal. Relying on memory, or motivation, to gather / use feedback, + make it visible org-wide, is too fragile. It’ll break because humans are humans, and we won’t always stay on top of it.

Instead, consider how systems can positively impact general thinking and decision making. Whether that be removing the recurring thinking required to remember to do something, or increasing visibility on a piece of information to help make an informed decision easier.

For instance, a website feedback form is often a valuable tool to be taking in information in the background from site visitors. In many previous roles we set a system where responses from the web form would auto-populate into a Google Sheet, and each week during a team meeting we’d take stock of any new patterns / responses that came in.

We didn’t always act, and there weren’t always topics to discuss, but it provided predictability around the process that we otherwise would only look at when it popped up in our minds. 

Another example: At one company we build predictability around running customer interviews & noting / sharing new patterns that emerge. We learned how to run effective customer interviews during a huge research project, but once that was done, we didn’t want to stop talking to customers. 

So, we set up an automation for ~2 weeks after they purchase, asking if folks wouldn’t mind jumping on a 15 /30-min call with us so we can better understand what drove them to purchase. 

Then, we systemized how we run interviews by creating an interview template for folks to follow, as well as systemized how we noted insights by creating a template to place feedback into the appropriate places. 

How to apply this as a Marketer:

By: Nick Sorrell

Anyone that’s ever had a creative idea can probably spoil the dirty truth about “Systemizing Innovation” that I’m about to share with you. Which is: Innovation isn’t really something you can systemize at all. At least, not directly. 

But, what you can do, is create a system—or rather, a method—that makes innovation more likely to manifest.

In general, most marketers make one of two mistakes when pursuing innovation, differentiation, or whatever buzzword the internet decided we should use today . 

We either: 

1) Spend too much time wondering what might work, and not enough time testing what actually works.

OR 

2) We spend a ton of time testing (typically random fucking shit), but very little time learning from (or wondering about) those tests. 

To be honest, I don’t know why the fuck we do that.

But I guess, at the end of the day, we’re still just silly lil’ humans forever suffering from our silly lil’ biases & binaries.

Luckily though, a bunch of dorks in the 17th century discovered a method to save us from ourselves and make advancement possible.

This forgotten method—proven across time to be the catalyst behind mankind’s greatest inventions, innovations, or iterations—is also one you may have heard about. 

At least, ya know, if you were paying attention in your 6th grade science class.

Enter: The Scientific Method. 

In case you forgot, here’s a recap of how that works. 

1. Have a goal or question.
2. Come up with a hypothesis.
3. Test the hypothesis.
4. Evaluate the results vs hypothesis.
5. Communicate your findings.
6. With that newly found info, repeat.

Now, I know, I know. Not the sexiest of grand reveals.

Especially for a topic brimming with people trying their best to be sexy while talking about it.

But, as absurd as this sounds, it’s legitimately astonishing how few companies apply this method with any intentionality or consistency.

And seeing as how most companies aren’t exactly radiating with innovation, you’d think there might be a correlation (and opportunity) here.

At least, that’s my hypothesis.

Know Your Numbers

So often worry stems from a lack of visibility, which is totally within our control.

I can’t tell you the number of founders I’ve spoken with who were anxious about their business crumbling daily, but it was rooted more in a feeling than in an analysis of the numbers. 

While of course the specific numbers / metrics most impactful to track will vary from company-to-company and role-to-role, you should know the key numbers most relevant to you (or your company).

If you don’t know what numbers you need to be tracking, go back to the customer journey point above and answer this: What metric is most indicative of somebody moving through that stage?

For instance, new unique website visits could make sense as a metric tied to prospects learning of us for the first time. But it doesn’t make as much sense as a retention metric, or an activation metric.

How to apply this as an Operator:

Generally, as an operator, you should know:

• Gross Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) / Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
• Recurring Expenses
• Annual financial projections rooted in 1) Non-recurring revenue projections + RR and 2) One-off Expense projections + recurring expenses.
• Profit margin (what % of the money that comes in are you keeping at the end of the day)
• Run rate (how long can your business stay afloat at this current trajectory)

Lastly,  know how all of these change as your business, team, offers etc. inevitably evolve. As you’re figuring out these numbers, build them out in a responsive manner so that you can adapt the numbers and play out different scenarios with relative ease.

How to apply this as a Marketer:

By: Nick Sorrell

God, there are few things marketers enjoy quite like metrics. In many ways, this is for good reason. Numbers may not always tell the whole story, but they do tell part of it — and so, they’re important.

Unfortunately, more often than not, we find ourselves drawn to the shiny numbers that aren’t so important at all. Typically this is because we haven’t taken the time to question which numbers we should be paying attention to. 

Generally, as a marketer, you should know metrics that demonstrate things like:

• Awareness (website visits, social impressions, etc)
• Sales pipeline health (quantity and source of leads, rate at which a lead moves through each stage of your pipeline, what drives folks through each stage, what loses leads, etc)
• Key conversion % at various junctures (website -> free, free -> paid, email)
• Customer Acquisition Cost (how expensive is it to acquire one customer based on your marketing spend?)

Etc etc, blah blah.

Obviously there are more, but the key is less about focusing on any specific metric you’ll find in an article and more about figuring out which metrics matter most to you.

To do this, go back to the customer journey and consider which (trackable) action(s) a prospect may take at each phase.

Pay attention to what they are (or aren’t) doing. Pay attention to the behavior you desire. And pay attention to which action seems most linked to them taking the next step on their journey. 

Sometimes this is very obvious.

Other times though, it isn’t. 

Pay attention — see which numbers apply to you. And then, get to know them.

Know Where You’re Going

As an ‘outsider’ inside of organizations attempting to make an impact, one question I’m often asking is “What’s the purpose?” Another common one might be, “What are we trying to achieve with this?”

This type of clarifying might seem simple (and it is) but it not only helps center us back to the root of what we’re trying to accomplish, it also shines a light on any misalignment or the vacancy of purpose behind something.

Said another way: It helps ensure we’re all on the same page and moving in the right direction.

This applies down to the task level, all the way up to the company’s vision. 

And if the broader vision is unknown / unclear, it’ll be difficult to align the pieces underneath it.

Ensure that your 1, 3, 5 (arbitrary numbers, use different ones if it makes sense) year picture is painted as clearly as possible both in your mind as well as in the minds of the company’s staff. What are our goals? What are we doing then that we’re not able to do now, internally & externally, and why? Ideally, everybody involved in the company would speak to a similar future if asked. 

Of course, everybody has a plan until you get hit in the face with reality. Obviously. But crafting a clear vision isn’t meant to mitigate the unpredictability of running a business, it’s meant to give you and your team direction in your decision-making and paint an exciting & impactful future. 

How to apply this as an Operator: 

Operationally, your role here is similar in principle to others: Create predictability around achieving this, so that we’re not leaving it up to chance.

From the company vision level, your job is to set up the CEO / Founders / Leadership team (including you if you’re on it) to define the vision well. 

For clarity at the project level, I broke down exactly what you need to get shit done repeatedly as a team and person. In short, once you have clarity of the path you’re taking, you need to have a system that you can plop work into and feel confident it’ll get completed, and you need a bridge between those two.

How to apply this as a Marketer:

By: Nick Sorrell

As a Marketer, it’s your job to ensure your organization’s touchpoints, messaging, positioning, & everything in between (to prospects & customers alike) is pointing the company toward the high-level vision. 

For example: 

If your company is built on longterm trust or relationships, it may make sense to shy away from the click-bait and treat people like people.

On the flip side, if your company likes to live on the edge (whatever tf that even means), feel free to push the envelope a tad. 

Another example: 

If your company prides (or differentiates) itself based on a particular feature or goal, it’s your job to make sure that sentiment is threaded throughout — from the first touch point to the last. 

You’re a key part in ensuring that both the public-facing marketing, and the internal language / positioning, are all reflective of the bigger purpose. 

Live and breath the customer journey. Spend time getting to know who you’re speaking to. Lead by example by using shared language internally & externally.

And, maybe most impactful, challenge yourself to communicate this vision to others better than it was communicated to you.

In Closing

Integrating stability and predictability into your business is a realistic journey that you can absolutely embark on & achieve with intentionality, patience, curiosity, and a willingness to keep building.

While it’s valuable to absorb these points independently, it’s most powerful to absorb them holistically.

In other words, all of these areas should work together to build resilience in your business. 

It also doesn’t happen overnight. It can feel daunting when you focus on every gap you need to fill. If you find yourself in that position, focus on the highest priority items i.e. what’s in this blog, and put one piece together at a time. 

Forward motion is better than none at all.

I hope you took away something useful from these reflections. If you’re looking for additional support in building your business thoughtfully, please don’t hesitate to reach out at alex@alexcartmill.com. If I’m not the best fit for you, I’ll do my best to point you in a better direction.

You can also learn more about Nick and his phenomenal marketing work, here.