Why would a successful business owner who already has a great customer base decide to listen to 22 year old entrepreneur Ken Conklin on how they should be running their business? According to the young entrepreneur himself, he’s mastered the process of leveraging today’s digital tools to quickly grow businesses online. His company, Gravel to Castle Accelerator, has now served hundreds of clients in helping them use the internet to create predictable and scalable selling machines.
Most businesses that end up making it past the million dollar mark tend to be quite clear on who their exact target market is, they have a proven offer that customers are hopefully enjoying, and word about that brand has finally been getting around. But what if there was a faster and more effective way to create predictability in the areas of both marketing, sales, and even delivery? Ken says there is.
“Business, in it’s simplest form, comes down to the process of exchanging value. When someone pays a business for the value that they offer, it becomes that business’ obligation to deliver whatever was sold. I’ve noticed that even though many of the businesses who are succeeding have gotten pretty good at acquiring customers and keeping them happy, most of them don’t actually have a repeatable step-by-step process that they go through every single time that smoothly takes potential customers from the first initial interaction to the stage where they are happy customers, ready to buy again. That’s where I come in, for my job is to make sure that I’m creating more predictability in each business I work with, and I do that using a few particular strategies,” Ken explained.
Ken says that every business has a value chain, which is essentially the set of activities that a business performs in order to deliver it’s products or services to the market. When that value chain is written out and completely broken down to the smallest details possible, you then create a visual representation of the exact blueprint for how you are currently running your business. You’re able to see the exact process that your business operates in for every step of that value chain. Breaking this down alone can sometimes be one of the most impactful exercises out there, for it clearly informs you on the areas that you are truly unclear on or are failing at, which then indicates the need for some proper restructuring. But this also begins to lay out a system that can be stuck to once it’s completely dialed in.
“Guessing or simply winging it can be very dangerous in business, especially when it comes to marketing. You want to be able to be certain that the money you put into your business, say your advertising dollars for example, will be multiplied at some scale. One way that we ensure that happens is by making sure that each business we work with is communicating the fullest extent of their value possible. We make sure they have a strong list of reviews they are showcasing on every digital touchpoint for their brand, they are contributing their expertise on highly respected publications and media outlets, and that they are serving at least a few high-value customers that are endorsing that business’ products or services. Once that ‘pillar’ of credibility is quite strong, all one has to do is know how to turn on the ‘attention lever’ and funnel them to wherever sales conversation starts. That’s at least the plan for increasing revenue, the operations for delivery and fulfillment is another game you need to master,” Ken added.
It may sound like quite the difficult task at hand for some, but Ken says it is not as hard as many business owners may think it is. A bit time consuming and challenging in some capacity, yes, but also completely worth it in the end. His company, Gravel to Castle Accelerator, is dedicated to serving business owners by helping them map out their value chain, create immense credibility in the marketplace, and take instrumental steps towards building a predictable and scalable selling machine.
Not many entrepreneurs, let alone 22 year olds, really know that they are doing in business. But it seems that in this digital age, more and more exceptions are being created. If someone wants to begin growing their business online by following a proven process, Ken sure has a few strategies up his sleeve that they can begin executing.