Begin with the End (In Mind)
In my last email, I talked about building for scale. I also talked about that “scale” means different things to different people.
In our case, I set a goal to be crafting 20 books per month for clients by February 2020. And as you read in the last email, I walked through some of the considerations the team and I made.
But what if I want to do 100 books per month?
Or 200 books?
Or 1000 books per month?
That’s a fair bit of volume! And there’s one thing I know: the systems that function at 20 books per month pretty much all fail at 1000 books!
But let’s temper the goal a tad. Let’s focus on 100 books per month. Some of the things that I know include:
- One good full time writer can craft 40,000 words per month
- I need about one editor per 8-10 writers
- It takes a professional proofer about a week to final proof read a book a 30,000 word book
So…
If I begin with the end in mind, what do I know? On an operational level, to pump out 100 high quality books per month I’d need:
- 40 to 60 full-time writers.
- 4-6 editors
- 25 final proofers
And so on.
Plus, since I know only about 1 out of 20 writers pass muster, that means I’d need an interview and recruitment system that handles 800 to 1200 writer interviews.
See what I mean?
This is what scale looks like for “us”.
What does “scale” look like for you?
On the sales side of things…
100 new book sales per month probably means about 200 qualified conversations per month i.e a 50% conversion rate.
Which is about what we get now.
And if a full time sales person can meet with 6 qualified people per day… all I need are an extra two sales people on the team.
In “our” case I don’t want the conversion rate any lower than that. I’m happy with about 50% because our content machine can set up the conversations quite nicely.
As you know, given you’re on our Fubbi email list – we’re pretty consistent with the ongoing content emails and podcasts.
And there’s one thing I KNOW by looking at our numbers…
People who have been on our list for a while, are very happy to buy from us. They are the easiest and most pleasant conversations to have!
Why? Because we’ve earned their trust.
And it’s just the way I like it. And it’s why building and deploying a content machine is so darn powerful.