Lessons Learnt in the year just Ended: What We Did Right

It’s been a little past 11 years since we launched our consulting firm, Afribusiness. Since then, we’ve worked with close to 200 clients, if not more, to help them grow and transition their businesses.

In short, throughout the years, we got it together.

But 2020 brought back memories of when we started. Not the nostalgia you get looking back at your achievement, more like being thrust back to uncharted waters.

Despite our growth, networks and years of experience, we were back at the lower rung of the drawing board where there is no guarantee of clients, even those who had stuck by us in the past.

So, how did we fair in the year just ended? Here are three things we have done right, so far.

Relying on Experience, Not Trial and Error

This current pandemic has changed the rules for all of us.

Our automatic client-consulting system that had little room for innovating needed a fresh approach. Luckily, our traditional experience has helped us gain a foothold in a new market on the internet.

We started with:

• Offering free online workshops;

• Leveraging online software and apps to automate part of our sales strategy;

• Collaborating with other consultants and our associates to create digital solutions for the current situation.

Which brings me to the second point:

We Are Now Visible

While the internet is a vast well of opportunity for anyone and everyone, it’s also the wild-west.

What this means for consulting businesses like ours is, our previous track record is not enough. We needed to replicate our off the internet authority online.

We are doing this through:

• Providing consistent, useful information or solutions in our newsletter and blog;

• Consistency and quality of content we have put out;

• Using our already existing online tools to provide holistic solutions for businesses.

Finally:

Revise Our Client Profile

Our client persona needed a rebut.

Initial phone calls to former clients saying ‘maybe’ quickly turned to crickets, no answers. Luckily, in the midst of all this, the first opportunity opened up.

Just like our first qualified client years back came accidentally, so did this one. No thanks to our historic client persona.

Our outreach with the online workshops and webinars managed to open access to prospects who were not part of our client persona, but they found us.

How we did it:

• Sending surveys to those who attended our workshops and webinars;

• Using feedback from the surveys to know the current problems people were experiencing in business;

• Revising our services to offer solutions needed for the current business situation.

Suffice to say, we have since revised our prospects profile, which has given us a lot more positive reactions.

Although still not yet smooth sailing as the pandemic has changed the ecosystem. We keep revising our blueprint to our approach, reaching out to new markets and building our online authority.

That has been our journey so far.

We are still learning to navigate remote work and we will probably fumble a bit more. However, although stressed, we are currently grateful that it has thrust us out of our comfort zone and enabled us to see the vast potential of what we can achieve with some innovation.

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