Plug The Holes in Your Bucket

As difficult as the past few months have been for families everywhere, I honestly feel like as a people, community and nation, we have never been more entrepreneurial. People have been more daring and risk-taking than I have ever seen before. Whether this nature was born out of a necessity or boredom, it's undeniable that people have been launching their own things. That's all cool. However, my warning word consistently over the past months has been that starting something is relatively the easy part in comparison to maintaining it. Now, that's the hard part. I touched on this a little yesterday, but I feel like this needs much more reinforcement.

Imagine that your venture is a bucket. Now this bucket is filled to the brim with all the value that your product or service has to offer. The thing about buckets though, like anything, they can break or they can be punctured. I don't know if you've ever tried carrying water in a broken bucket before- but it's a damn good waste of time and energy I promise you. As time goes on, you'll start to notice holes- some obvious and some not so obvious. The reason you need to plug those holes is because no amount of content, marketing, ads or PR can solve them, but if you leave them to grow, your whole brand will completely give way.

Here's a small checklist of holes you need to plug right away:

👉🏾 Poor understanding of your target market

👉🏾 Inability to communicate properly what you have to offer

👉🏾 Lack of clarity or vision

👉🏾 Lack of proper brand positioning

👉🏾 Poor customer service (online and offline)

👉🏾 Lack of basic social media management skills

👉🏾 No proper email management process

👉🏾 Website / Portfolio that needs urgent updating

👉🏾 Incorrect links or information on your profiles

👉🏾 Lack of brand cohesion (online and offline)

👉🏾 Failure to invest into yourself and the brand

Be here for a good time and a long time. Plug those holes.