Don’t Wish Growing Pains Away

Is it too late to wish you a Happy New Year? Probably. It’s definitely too late to wish you Happy Holidays, Happy Thanksgiving, or Happy Halloween - all holidays that came and went in the space between my last blog post and today. As much as I would love to ignore the months-long silence, and dive right back into the world of digital marketing and website strategy, it seems disingenuous. Spring Insight experienced some growing pains in 2018, underwent some changes, and entered 2019 ready to hit the ground running. And while the ride was bumpy at times, I’m pretty proud of where we stand today, and I’m excited to share some of the lessons we learned along the way.

Ignoring a problem isn’t a solution.

Growing pains are sneaky. They seem like isolated incidents - at first. You’ll experience some communication issues with a client here, or a dropped ball there. You’ll explain them away by attributing them to a busy week or a moment of forgetfulness. You’ll resolve to do better in the future and consider the matter closed.

Spoiler Alert: the matter isn’t closed.

You’ll see issues continue to pop up. They probably won’t be the same issues, but if you look closely, you’ll notice that they have the same root cause: your organization outgrew the way you do things. While it might not seem that way, this is good news. Outgrowing your past processes might be messy, but it means you grew. Your business is succeeding! Growing isn’t all upside though. The stress from increased workload has a way of exposing the cracks in your organization’s current status quo. Spring Insight experienced exactly that journey towards the end of 2018. We spent far too much time putting out fires that we could have avoided if only we’d recognized the real problem earlier.

What we did: Well, first we abandoned the blog. Don’t do that, by the way; it’s not nearly the time-saver you think it is. Then, we examined the way we do things - from internal communications, to managing deadlines, to meeting with clients. We identified some critical issues (for example a significant increase in the number of team meetings) and addressed them (shout out to No-Meeting-Wednesday). Not every issue had such an easy fix, but dealing with the easy ones first gave us the motivational push we needed to tackle some of the more complicated tasks.

The State of the Blog

As part of evaluating our internal processes, we discussed content quite a bit - both what makes good content and the creation process itself - and came up with a plan that will get valuable content to our readers on a regular basis. Here’s what you can expect: a valuable blog post with actionable tips delivered to our readers once every month. Is that a simple promise? It sure reads that way. But, it’s a promise rooted in a retooled process and a commitment to sharing value.

Define Value: The world of digital marketing and web strategy is an exciting, ever-changing landscape. My team and I spend considerable time learning about emerging changes and implementing new techniques for managing a digital presence. I’ll use this space to bring you into our conversations. I’ll introduce you to the topics that matter and leave you with actionable tips to keep you moving in the right direction.

The end of 2018 was chaotic and occasionally frustrating. In retrospect, it was also extraordinarily productive. While we certainly identified problems, we went on to solve them. We’re a better organization today than we were in October and I’m thrilled to be tending to this blog again. If you’re experiencing some growing pains of your own, and are wondering what your next steps should be, reach out. I’m happy to discuss my experiences with handling growing pains and share how outsourcing your marketing operations might free up just the time you need to navigate your business through some choppy waters.