Business Tune-Up Checklist: How to Refresh, Refocus, and Reignite Mid-Year

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noir Podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of Building Better Businesses, but we are actually the Building Better Developers Podcast, also known as Developer Noir. I am just known as Rob, I guess also known as one of the founders of Developer Noir and a founder of RB Consulting, where we go out there and help people use technology better. We sit down with you. We help you really work to understand your business, help you craft a recipe for success that is customized to your business, your goals, where you are at now, where you're going to be in six months, where you want to be in years from now. And it's basically called a technology roadmap. We start with an assessment, basically figure out where you're at, build a roadmap, and then we can help you either do it yourself to go off and implement your roadmap, or if you want us to guide or help along the ways, we do that as well. All of this we do, we help you wrangle your technology and reduce your technology sprawl through simplification, automation, integration, and even innovation. Just use all the tools that are out there to help you have a better technology footprint and ROI on that, which happens to be one of your biggest, if not your biggest, investment in your business. Good things, bad things. I'm going to go with a good thing was Mother's Day. Just recently around the time we did this is had Mother's Day. It was a, we had a, everybody got together. We managed to, even though we weren't sure, we managed to get everybody into one place for food. It was a lot of it. It was a long, brunchy type of thing, but it was a very good one. So great times all around. It's those kinds of things that sometimes you get to appreciate life and all of that and not be just stuck with work. Bad thing is that happened to be, Mother's Day happened to be on a Sunday, which you guys may already know that, which was the end of a weekend, and it was a very long weekend. So by the time we got done with the Mother's Day festivities and things like that, I went to take a nap and the nap ended up being essentially a full night and a half of sleep or something like that, because just, I guess everything just caught up. So got a little worn out because of all of that. Hopefully you're not too worn out after my introduction so that you are wide awake from Michael's. Go for it. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Molloch. I'm one of the co-founders of DeveloprNUR, Building Better Developers. I'm also the founder of a company called Envision QA, where we help businesses really look at their software, make sure that their tools are working for them and they're not working for their software. We help you with custom solutions. We help you implement the right solution for your needs, be it something, cookie cutter off the shelf we can buy and implement for you, something custom, or if you are a software shop and need help, kind of spinning up additional developers or getting your product across the line, we also help you with that. Good thing and bad thing. Good thing. We are definitely over the allergy season. So I'm finally, finally feeling better. It has been a long slog. Usually it's like February or March, April is really the worst, but this has really dragged into me something fierce. So that's the good thing. Also good slash bad. So for the last two weeks, my wife has been away. So I've kind of had the house responsibilities to take care of, kind of detracted from work a little bit and kept things going, but she is back. So that is also kind of a good bad. It's kind of on the tail end of that. Well, in the world of good and bad things, I guess we're going to talk about business. We'll call it like a business tune up this time around. And it's really this kind of thing that we usually talk about at the end of the year, maybe even in the middle of the year, which we are actually at this point getting close to a mid year kind of thing. You may even do it quarterly, but I would say at least twice a year. You want to go back and essentially review where are you at? What do you have? Where are you going? And now with this particular focus, we want to do is really on your, your products, your messaging, your offerings, things like that. It's a little bit your brand, but it's probably taken a level deeper. And it's really like, what are your pitches? What are your, what are you selling? How are you selling it? How was that going? Now you may be very attuned to these kinds of things. You may have metrics that you look at every day. How are my sales going? How am I adjusting all this stuff? But this is really bigger on a bigger picture. So it's not really that tactical. It's more the strategic kind of look. And it's the things like, how am I doing towards my vision, my mission statement, how, you know, maybe the numbers are going very well, but am I happy? Is the business growing at the right speed? Am I positioned so that if these numbers continue, I will continue to be able to provide my customers with the experience, you know, the support, all that kinds of stuff that they've come to expect. And so this is a, is almost a, it really is truly a holistic kind of approach. So it's things like looking at some, you know, sort of give yourself a laundry list, looking at your, your website. That is one of your main pieces. That's one of your, you know, sort of the face of your company these days. So is your website up to date? Is it running? That's, you should know if it's not, but some places, especially a smaller business, especially a side hustle, it could be down for a while if you don't check it on a regular basis. But beyond that, looking at your content, looking at the message, looking at, like, go through your site, like you're a regular, just random visitor. Is it, is the journey what you want it to be? Or is it something that you maybe need to adjust a little bit? Is it dated? Are there, for example, let's say you've got a blog, you've got blogs on your site. Are those blogs starting to get a little dated? Are they a little old? Do you need to do a little, you know, little painting and, and freshening up of those things? Do you need to take maybe even your evergreen content? Do you need to just go back and just brush some dust off of it? Or is it something a little bigger where the evergreen content was leading people in a different direction than you really want to go right now? And this could be, it could be seasonal. It could be one of these things where maybe you're just in a, you know, you're having a bad year or a different year and you need to adjust a little bit. Maybe you're not speaking to the same sort of customers. For example, back in the day when there was a housing crisis, you had all these companies that initially before the crisis came in, were talking to everybody about, hey, let's, you know, get a second loan and do all this kind of stuff and rates are good and blah, blah, blah. And then suddenly the market changes. And so those positive messages are not what you want to be selling on because people are going to say, that's not how it's going right now. There's things like that. And you want to just, you know, hit your website. Also look at whatever your primary marketing pamphlets of material are, whether that is, you know, maybe it's as, maybe it's as core as what are your email signatures? Are those things good? Are your brands up to date as far as maybe some of your logos and some of your images that you're using? If you have some sort of, if you've got business header letters that are going out or reports that you're sending out, particularly if you're doing, if you're, if you're somebody like us where you do maybe, you know, daily or, you know, maybe weekly or monthly reports, are those up to date? Do those maybe need a little bit of a freshening up? If you're doing a, maybe you're doing sprints. So maybe at the end of each sprint, are there certain reports that you're delivering that you need to take a look at them and maybe tweak those a little. Now, sometimes it's not a matter of the content being bad. It's just a matter of changing it up a little bit. It's just like, if you watch a, you know, if you watch a TV show from series, you know, season to season to season, it's nice to have a different intro and maybe intro and outro to each season. A classic one I remember back in the day was Home Improvement. It was an old, you know, old show that went on many, many years, but then they would each year, they would have a different intro. And then even when they got to some of the later ones, they actually showed the progression of some of the kids that as they aged through the years and, you know, as part of their intro. So things like that is just a little bit of changing it up. Sometimes it's enough to get maybe some more traffic, maybe get people to look at your company a little differently. And so that's where a tune up is, it's going to be great. You know, you're sort of like, think of your car where now you don't, maybe it's not all dusty dashboard anymore. Maybe you don't have a lot of bird poop out on your, on the trunk of your car. You're actually, you know, get all that kind of stuff cleaned up. It's the same kind of thing we want to do with our business is just take a look at it and with a little bit of a, you know, you don't need a lot of time. Maybe it's just 15 minutes, half an hour, something like that. Just going through your stuff. Is there something you can do to touch it up a little bit to just freshen it up? Those are some of the thoughts I have on, you know, doing a tune up and it doesn't have to be that great or that big or that's, you know, but it could be very small. So I think I'll toss you away. What are some of the things that maybe you've done with your, your tune ups and your adjustments? So I do all those, but I do some additional ones. So for me, I do these kind of quarterly, but more or not it we're too busy and it's like twice a year, but I typically look at my, and I'm bad because, you know, you and I are, we're fairly small shops. So we wear many hats. So one of the biggest problems I have is keeping up with the books. Like I do weekly, like bounce checkbook, things like that, get everything good. But I try to do at least a quarterly review of all of my expenditures for my company. What are the services I'm paying for? Are they still valid? Or have I added some services for projects that are no longer needed? Do I need to cut those? So I kind of look at a expense review as my tune up kind of on a regular basis, kind of like on a quarterly semi-annual basis. And typically if you don't do this, you could find out like those rocket money or whatever, a rocket app or whatever it is that you have subscribed to things that you're still paying for, that you're not using for your business anymore. Time to cut those out. You know, you have to keep on top of those or you're going to be wasting money on things that would be better off maybe hiring another employee. So as you're going through this process, look at some of the services you have, some of the expenses and income, you know, do you have more income coming in than expenses? That's a good thing. But if you have more expenses going out than income coming in, all right, where can you pivot? Is there something you need to do to change course? Or do you just need to spin up or try to find some more customers because maybe you just wrapped up a project and you're in between projects. So it's like, okay, you're in a little low. So that's one of those things you kind of look at. And that's also a good point too, is when you're in those lulls, how is your marketing material? You know, Rob mentioned website, but how is your marketing strategy? Do you have marketing campaigns on Google? Are you doing email blasts? You know, are you keeping up with those and actually following up with customers that respond or are you neglecting those and potentially losing customers? So you need to make sure you follow up on that. The other thing that comes to mind as we're talking about this business tune up is bandwidth. So throughout the course of a year, it could be month, could be quarter, could be half a year. You could find yourself, hey, I've taken in a lot more business than I've had six months ago. Maybe you're on a growth trend. Is it time for you to look at maybe a virtual assistant or hiring someone else to help you extract yourself from some of your projects and continue to look for new opportunities to continue to grow your business? So these are some of the things that you might not think of because you're too busy. It's like, I'm so working in the business, not on the business. And those are kind of really critical. The other thing too, which is interesting, and we don't really think about it with a business tune up, but when was the last time you went out and network? When was the last time you maybe went to a trade show or maybe read some training documentation on what it is that your industry is? You know, if you're in healthcare, have you kept up with the latest medical laws that are out there? Are you still compliant? Are you, you know, are you doing what your business needs to be doing to stay in business? Or are you potentially falling into those gray areas where you're not in compliance with the law? You're not in compliance with new government regulations, which could potentially get you fined or shut down. So those are things that you do need to stay on top of, but as small business owners or business owners, sometimes we forget about those because we're too busy just doing our job. And that's what this whole business tune up is about. It's, hey, take a pause, take a step back, work on your business, and kind of look at it from all points, you know, like Rob said, so you have like your website review, you have your marketing materials review, you have your social media review. Hey, was there a new social media tool that rolled out? You know, are you on TikTok? Is TikTok really for your brand? You know, are your marketing funnels really working for your business? Because those could have changed. So you may need to pivot, add some new social media accounts, remove some social media accounts. So a review of that is highly recommended, you know, review those marketing materials. And another thing is if your business is growing, are you also keeping up with your infrastructure? So Rob talks about agile a lot, and sometimes our agile practices start out small, we do the bare minimum we need to do to keep the projects going because we're more interested in getting things done than completely following the agile model because we're small, we got quickly deployed, you know, get things out, turn things around, make some money so we can grow. But if you're on that growth pattern, are you putting the steps in place to ensure that you are doing things in the right manner and at the right time? Or are you skipping that and missing out on critical things to make sure that your projects are streamlined, that they're moving forward the way they need to move forward? And the last thing I'll touch on is if you do have websites, if you do have software or technology, are you keeping up with all your system and software updates? Or are you neglecting those? Are you potentially letting zero day or bug or potential security problems cause your site to be hacked, cause you to get ransomware, you know, are you keeping up on those things? Those are very critical, we don't think about them. Most systems we put in place typically are pretty good about reminding us, hey, you need to do this, but if you are a software developer, are you keeping up with that? You know, you got OWASP, which will go out and check for vulnerabilities, it's gotten a lot better since COVID. And there's some other tools in that that you can put out there to monitor your site and keep things, to let you know when things need to be updated and keep in track. What are your thoughts on that, Ro? So there's a couple of things there that I think to add to, one would be just check out for, take a look for like maybe licenses that have expired, sort of as long as you said, maybe you're not using this, you can clean some of that up. Some is just to make sure that there are going to be those things where it's like, oh yeah, this is coming up, I need to make sure I do that. It's similar to touching base with people, maybe you're, you know, want to reach out to your group or certain customers every so often, maybe it's time to make sure you've done that, is there somebody that you were going to reach out to and now time has moved very quickly and you haven't, so that you're like, hey, now it's time to catch up with them. I'll actually go with something, this is an opportunity to do the things that I talk about every episode. So automation, is there something that you're burning a lot of time on? Is there maybe something that now it's like, it's time to automate it. It's a little bit like Michael mentioned in infrastructure, same thing, is there something that's like, we now can simplify, maybe it's something where we've grown to a certain point and we've grown or we've grown very fast and we have that sprawl that I talk about and that we maybe need to simplify some of these things down. Sometimes because you've grown a certain point where now all those little things you did, you've grown to a point where like, no, now we can find, we can afford a tool that combines those things together. Not going to worry about innovation, that's something you may, you know, that's more of a green sky kind of thing that you may want to do too, but between the automation and simplification, even integration, maybe now you've got a couple tools that you realize it's like, I'm spending too much time with this or I've grown to a point and I've got a couple different departments, they're sort of going their different ways and now I need to pull those things back together. Another thing that you may want to take a look at is just making sure if you're one of those, it's, you know, it's certifications, licenses, continuing education hours, depending on what your job is and what your focus is, there's certain things that you may have to do every, you know, annually, every other year or something like that to keep current and make sure that you're doing that. So, you know, it's some of these are things that are maybe a general checklist, but it doesn't hurt to take a look at those, particularly from a business point of view, because you may be a business where you need to do certain things to be able to operate in certain states or certain municipalities or things like that. Depending on your business, this is one of those that we do tend to get a little bit caught up in whatever's going on, our customers and things like that. And the next thing you know, you've flown through it. That's part of what this is, is just to like, you know, put on the brakes, let's take a look around and make sure that we are set up for whatever our next push is going to be. And that's the challenge that we're going to throw out to you this time is hopefully, you know, maybe you've done this recently and so you don't have to, but if you have not in the last, you know, month or two done a business tune up, take 15, 30 minutes, something like that, run through the key facets, the key properties, the key attributes of your business, the, you know, between marketing and sales and HR and, you know, accounting and all that kind of stuff is just take a look. Are you current? Are you up to date? Are there some things that maybe you could like, you know, do a little, spend a little bit of time on and freshen them up and use it as a way to maybe get some customers back, have a couple extra visitors to your site, things of that nature. For example, you could ask people to send you an email like we are right now, shoot us an email at info at developmentordered.com. If you have any questions, comments, actually, even if you don't, if you could just make something up, we would love to hear it because we love hearing from you. We love feedback. We are getting near the end of another season. And so this is the time that feedback becomes even more valuable because you could actually impact something that's going to occur within a few episodes from now when we start our next season. I remember what it is. I think this is now 25 is coming up, something like that. Anyways, it's a lot of seasons, a lot of episodes, but we would love to hear from you because we're more than happy to move in a direction that helps you guys out more often, more so. You can also reach us on X. We are at Developineur. We have the Developineur channel out on YouTube. If you're watching this, then you already know what it is. But if you're listening to this, we do have a, it's not a simulcast, but we have a video version of the audio, the podcast. So we also have it. And we always have bonus material as well. So it's worth an extra, you know, it's a little extra time. You can always block us out if you don't want to see us, but at least you can get the audio version and that will help out quite a bit. That being said, I am going to wrap this one up, give you some of your time back. As always, we do appreciate you being out there. Get out there and have yourself a great day, great week, and we will talk to you. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developineur podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember, just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.