5 (Fast!) Workouts to Help You Get in Shape for skucamp
When we originally envisioned skucamp, we thought of it as a boot camp. Boot camp is intense. It’s where you re-imagine your company, rethink your strategy. Tear everything down (in your mind) that doesn’t work and improve what does.
And this boot camp is intense, but also fun, and the perfect place to reboot your business. So we encourage you: don’t drop into skucamp as you would any ordinary conference. Do some prework to get the most out of your experience. You’ll hear entrepreneurs from all walks of life and not only will the sessions inspire you and challenge you to rethink your business, but the interaction with fellow entrepreneurs who are in the trenches with you will reactivate your passion and ignite your energy.
It’s six weeks until skucamp. To help you get the most out of your experience, we’ve come up with five exercises, one you can do each week (if there are a few of you from your organization, do these exercises together!)
It’s not where you’re at - it’s where you’re going that counts. But it’s critical to know your baseline so you can improve!
5 Prep Exercises to Get in Shape!
Week 1: Love/Hate Exercise (30 min) - Grab a beer. Coffee. Maybe gather 2-3 trusted colleagues. Make a list of your loves and hates. Yep, you heard me. What do you love about your brand? Your messaging? Your infrastructure? Create a list, loves on one side, hates on the other. Make it extreme. No waffling. You’ll need that list when you hear keynote speaker Jay Acunzo encourage you to Break the Wheel and Escape Conventional Thinking to Overcome the Ordinary and Build the Extraordinary, plus, Steve McBee’s and Carson Roncketto’s session will help you define and determine what you need to disrupt in your own business.
Week 2: Top 10 Exercise (30 min) - Make a list of your top 10 most important customers. Write down the names of your buyers (not just companies). Also, create a top 10 target list of your dream clients. Prospects who are either in the pipeline that you want to land or even just a wishlist of the clients you want to work with, aim high! Johanna Gottlieb will share some ideas on how to stay hungry despite success.
Week 3: Financials (30 min) - Review your financial statements (balance sheet and profit and loss statement). Review your gross sales, gross profit, and net profit YTD. If you are on commonsku, run your Sales Rep Report to review margin YTD, your Sales Dashboard to review rep sales orders, and your Invoicing report for a YTD comparison to last year, review both dollar volume and number of transactions. You’ll need these numbers over the few days, but they might really come in handy when you hear Jamie Mair talk about how he sold his distributorship to BDA. Also, review your sales compensation structure. Are you paying salary+commissions? Is it moving the needle on sales? Do you have the right mix of profit for both the house and sales reps? Reviewing your current compensation structure will help you as Jamie Watson talks about alternatives in her session on how to create a compensation plan where everybody wins.
Week 4: Eval your “systems” (30 min) - Write down your tech stack: all of the technology systems that run your business, including e-commerce, your email marketing tool, your company store platform: any “system” that you use. Also, evaluate your daily business habits. What’s your daily structure like? Your daily system, not just software, what’s your daily process to get shit done? Your habits? Why do you need to review this? Craig Dunlap is going to help us maximize our day, get the most out of -not just our operations- but our daily productivity!
Week 5: Eval your merch selection process (15 min) - How do you source items inside and outside of industry channels? Are you stretching yourself to source the most unique solutions for your clients? Are you complimenting sales with packaging, kitting, etc.? Thinking about it will help you prep for Jason Lucash’s Principles for Wickedly Creative Product Development and also John Vo’s highly creative Custom Swag That Can’t Be Copied!
That’s it! Five exercises, one each week.
We can’t wait to help you get so damn biz-fit that you’ll leave skucamp Pittsburgh, recharged and ready to crush it in 2020!