Annual Business Purge: What I’m Killing and What I’m Doubling Down On

Covid has hurt a lot of businesses. Mine are no different – our agency took a big hit.

But one thing I love about the whole SaaS world is that we’re super-adaptable. We run up against challenges, we learn from them quickly, and we change our game to keep moving forward and growing.

That’s really important, because we’re not just here to make up the numbers. We’re working toward our very own BHAG: achieving a $100 million exit value by 2025 for Ramp Ventures.

I’ve realized if I’m going to achieve that, I need to double down on what works, and kill anything that just isn’t delivering. So here’s what that’s going to look like:

1. Creating a Lot Less Content

You know I love content. I’ve got 16 pages of articles on Entrepreneur.com, let alone all the stuff I post for my own sites.

But if, like my mom, you look forward to reading brand new, in-depth content from me every couple days, I’ve got some bad news for you.

Going forward, I’m going to be doing a lot less – fewer videos, fewer blog posts, fewer playbooks.

Instead, I’ll be focusing on creating better-quality blog posts that are really derived a lot more from my own experiences in owning, running, and growing SaaS businesses. The kind of stuff that I’ve been living and breathing for the last five to seven years. Things that I think people can really learn from.

Why am I doing this? Have I lost the passion for content creation?

Not at all. But I’m making it my goal to really minimize the volume of crap that already exists on the internet. So my requirement is that I’m going to completely avoid saying anything that’s already been said. 

It’ll be tough, and it’s necessarily going to limit my production. But it means everything I create is going to be 100% unique, based on stuff that no one else is saying.

In this case, less is definitely more.

2. Focusing on Our Strengths

We have eight companies under the Ramp Ventures umbrella.

But, in that same spirit of “less is more,” going forward we’ll really be focusing our efforts on four of them: Mailshake, Right Inbox, Voila Norbert and ZoomShift.

Here’s my thinking behind this:

• With Mailshake, it’s very clear from the numbers – year over year and month over month – that it has the potential to be a big business. In this space, some of our large competitors are getting billion-dollar-plus valuations.
• For Voila Norbert, our biggest competitor is ZoomInfo, who just raised $935 million in their IPO. So the market is there, we know it’s just a matter of whether we can capture it.
• And then with ZoomShift, our larger competitors are turning over $30-50 million in revenue annually. So again, we know the opportunity is there.

Those three businesses alone are fairly large. 

If you look at some of the other companies we have – I don’t want to call them out – but some of them have been turned into features rather than full-fledged businesses. It’s not that they’ve performed poorly – it’s just that the performance of the winners far trumps that of the others. It makes the other ones look like pocket change.

So what I’ve learned is: let’s double down on the successes. With that in mind, we’ve been cleaning house in terms of either selling, automating, or shutting down businesses that just don’t work effectively. 

3. Being Driven by Intent

I’ve just come back from two months of paternity leave, spending time with my amazing twins.

Obviously, it wasn’t exactly a vacation, what with all the 3am wake-ups and diaper changes, but it still gave me time to do a lot of reflecting.

One of the things I learned from minimizing my workload for two months is that I was working really hard. I worked on a lot of different projects and I’d get excited about a lot of different things. But I’m going to be very intentional going forward.

I’ve already put this into practice in my home life. My wife and I put together a family vision using EOS, which means we’re using business practices to operate our family. That’s really interesting to me.

As part of that, we did what’s called the Vision/Traction Organizer, where we put together a five-year goal for our family. It encompasses what we want, our goals, and then what we can do to get there.

That’s the same approach I want to take with my businesses from now on.

What habits or practices are you going to be cutting down on or focusing on over the next few months? Let me know in the comments below!