This is Local Legends — a deep dive into the craft of building enduring small businesses. 🏆

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We’ve got a lot to cover today so I’m going to dive right in.

IN TODAY’S POST:

SMBash 2024 Recap

Last week was the SMBash conference. It marked my third appearance on stage, but this time was more special — it was held right here in Salt Lake City.

This meant our team at Decada was able to open our doors to host an afternoon happy hour during the conference at Tailor Cooperative and share our craft. It was a privilege to introduce so many great people to Utah and connect with other acquisition entrepreneurs.

This year my presentation was titled: How to Drive Growth Post-Acquisition

My presentation opened the kimono on Decada’s playbook for driving growth and broke down several tactics that can be implemented immediately into any small business.

In our 2023 annual letter, I shared why driving growth post-acquisition is fundamental to Decada’s strategy and how it’s helps us mitigate risks of scale and redundancy, climbing out of what I term the small business "Death Zone."

In that letter, I shared a stat my team and I are proud of:

Our growth playbook has been a significant driver of our success at Decada.

Today’s email breaks it all down. I share 10 growth principles that are jam-packed with actionable ideas, recommendations, and tactics you can implement today.

Presentation Resources

At SMBash I promised to share my full presentation — all 118 slides of it. Many also expressed interest in our Marketing Close Spreadsheet, which I turned into a blank template so you can use as inspiration for your own:

SMBash Presentation - How to Drive Growth

Decada Group’s Marketing Close Template

Navigating growth is a challenge for any business owner. Growing your business demands time — time to test, break, and move quickly. These activities often compromise stability and earnings.

Most small businesses my team and I look at are not in control of their growth. They either don’t know how to grow or they’re growing and they don’t know why.

This lack of control creates risk. If a key client leaves, a salesperson quits, a new competitor emerges, or a recession hits, your business’s fate could hang in the balance.

Mastering growth puts you in command of your business's destiny. Your goal is to create repeatable and sustainable ways to acquire customers, ensuring controlled growth.

The SMB Growth Playbook consists of 10 principles. Let’s dive into principle #1.

Principle #1: Know the Exact Pain Point You’re Solving

Before thinking about growth, ensure you deeply understand your customer’s pain point — why they hire you, and the problem you are solving for them.

The best businesses are pain killers, not vitamins. The bigger the pain, the bigger your opportunity.

Knowing the exact pain point you’re solving allows you to communicate your solution clearly and effectively. Sounds simple, but it’s not — drill deeply into this. Engage in customer interviews and ask probing questions:

• Where did you hear about us first?

• How did you decided to come to us versus another provider?

• What mattered most to you in making your selection?

• What else mattered to you?

• Why did you come to us now versus another time?

• What would they have done if you didn’t exist?

Ensure you’re solving the right pain point. And try to solve the largest pain point possible.

When you know the exact pain point you’re solving and can communicate your solution clearly…it’s much easier to grow.

Principle #2: Create Your Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are detailed profiles of your target customers. They guide you in understanding who you’re selling to and why they’re buying — which sharpens your marketing and sales strategies.

What does good look like? Documenting a handful of detailed, semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers, built by gathering data through surveys, interviews, and observing customer behavior.

Look for common traits—like demographics, challenges, and goals—that stand out. A strong persona includes specifics such as age, job, and lifestyle, plus deeper insights like their decision-making triggers.

What does great look like? Memorable persona names and behavior that everyone in your company—from marketing, to sales, to customer service—know and use regularly when talking about your customer base. Your messaging is tailored around the unique pain points that drive your personas to your solution.

Personas make your approach to the market laser-focused. You tailor your messaging and service to meet specific needs, making growth efforts efficient and effective.

This targeted approach is a cornerstone of sustainable business growth — it’s Principle #2 in our Growth Playbook.

Principle #3: Document Your Sales Process

Documenting your sales process means creating a clear, step-by-step guide that outlines each phase of your sales funnel — from initial contact to closed won or credit card swipe.

Why is this valuable? Mapping out your funnel provides a bird’s eye view, revealing potential kinks and failure points where customers might drop off. Keeping these prospects in your funnel is the most cost effective way to drive growth.

Draft your sales process with anyone on your team involved in the funnel. This aligns everyone to the goal and drives clarity around how important your conversion rate is.

Tools to use: I love Utah company Lucidchart’s product and have used Microsoft Visio. But don’t overthink it. Butcher paper is better than nothing.

What to look for: Your documented sales process should be clear, concise, and accessible to your team. It needs to be detailed enough to cover all necessary steps but flexible enough to adapt to unique customer interactions. Look for bottlenecks, redundancies, or stages that consistently result in lost sales.

How this helps unlock growth: The goal is to patch holes in your funnel and boost your conversion rate. Even small improvements in a few areas of your funnel can lead to significant gains.

When your sales process is simple and optimized to reduce friction, you can drive growth with no incremental investment. Create a process where your company is easy to buy from.

Principle #4: Be Where Buyer Personas Congregate to Drive Demand

With discrete buyer personas established and your sales process documented, the next step is determine where they spend their time. Finding out where your personas congregate allows you to strategically position your sales and marketing efforts.

Don't know where to start? A practical first step is to analyze how your current customers found you — this tells you what’s already working and may simply require more fuel and investment. Also look at your competitors, particularly larger ones. They often have tried-and-tested methods for getting in front of prospects and driving demand.

Sales vs Marketing: Both sales and marketing play crucial roles in reaching your personas. Marketing might use broader strategies to create awareness and draw in leads, while sales can take a more direct approach, engaging potential customers on platforms where they have already shown interest.

Platforms: Consider the various platforms your target audience uses. This could range from social media platforms, niche industry conferences, online forums and websites, or inside the orbit of a potential partner.

Goal: Create interest and attract prospects to the top of your funnel. This means not just finding where your personas are, but also determining the most effective messaging and tactics to engage them.

Whether it’s through compelling content, targeted ads, or direct outreach, ensure your strategies are tailored to the platforms where your personas are most active.

By understanding where your buyer personas can be found and effectively engaging them, you’re setting the stage for a funnel that converts interest into sales.

The top of your funnel is critical — it’s where it all begins.

Principle #5: Fuel Your Business — Invest to Grow

Now it’s time to fuel the funnel.

Investment is Key: You have to spend money to make money. Many businesses we evaluate for acquisition haven’t invested in growth and are often proud to share their business has thrived without having to invest in growth.

While that means there’s opportunity, it also means the business does not have a proven way to grow. It lacks a refined, reliable method for customer acquisition.

Getting to Cost Efficiency: Initial investments will not perform well out of the gate. In a marketing-led funnel, you will fine tune your advertising message, your content, your website and landing pages, your lead follow up process. In a sales-led funnel, you will acquire better lists, refine your outbound strategy, train your reps better, and find more ways to enable them for success.

All of this will reduce your cost to acquire your customers over time. Getting started is the only way forward.

Don’t have the margin to invest in growth? It’s often the right move to raise your prices. If you lose 20% of your customer base as a result of the price increase, but gain 10% new customers as a result of having budget to get in front of them…that’s a significant net positive for your company.

Proceed carefully, but do not hesitate to build a model that allows you to invest in growth.

The Virtuous Cycle of SMB: At Decada, we advocate for what we call the virtuous cycle of SMB.

It’s a cycle that starts with delivering a great product or service so you can charge a price premium. This price premium generates strong margins, allowing you to invest in growth and hire great people, who in turn help elevate your product and service. Rinse and repeat.

Fuel the Flame: Across our companies, we allocate between 5-20% of revenue for sales and marketing investment. This varies by industry and margin profile and includes spend across advertising, marketing and sales technology, and a sales team.

Create a Vending Machine: Your ultimate goal is to build a system where every dollar invested yields multiple in return. This is the proverbial vending machine where you put $1 in and get $10 out.

Achieving this takes time and continual refinement, which we will explore in the next installment of Local Legends.

Conclusion

This installment of Local Legends began to unfold the essential strategies for driving growth. From understanding and addressing the exact pain points of your customers to knowing where your buyer personas gather, each principle is designed to build a foundation for repeatable and sustainable growth.

This is part one of The SMB Growth Playbook. The next installment of Local Legends unveils additional strategies for driving sustainable and repeatable growth:

• Know your unit economics

• Use your unit economics to quantify your funnel

• Diversify your customer acquisition channels

• Explore new lines of business

• The Holy Grail: Sustainable & Repeatable

In the meantime, here’s how you can put Part I into action:

1. Pain Point Identification: Conduct at least three customer interviews this week. Aim to uncover deeper insights into the challenges they face and why they selected you over a competitor.

2. Buyer Personas: Review your existing customer data and start drafting one to two buyer personas. Focus on the most frequent or profitable customer types.

3. Sales Process Documentation: Map out your current sales process. Identify at least one bottleneck and plan a strategy meeting to address it.

4. Engage Buyer Personas: Evaluate where your current customers are coming from and plan one new tactic to reach them more effectively.

5. Investment for Growth: Review your current spending on sales and marketing. Decide if it’s time to adjust and identify one area to invest in next month.

🚨 Put one of these actions into practice and email me about it. I’ll spotlight your story in the next issue.

🗓 ETA Utah Happy Hour: May 7

Local to Utah? Decada is hosting its next ETA Utah Happy Hour in a few weeks — open to all who want to join us.

Date & Time: Tuesday, May 7th from 6 - 8 PM

Location: Fisher Brewing — 320 W 800 S, Salt Lake City, UT 84101

To join the recurring event calendar invite, sign up here. These events are free, designed to bring our niche community together. I hope to see you there.

⏰ In Case You Missed It

That’s a wrap.

That’s it for this week — thanks for following along. I enjoy receiving reader feedback + ideas on what to write about next. Just hit reply.

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Have a great week ahead ✊ 

Chase Murdock