How Pumpkin Planning Saved My Business

13 Sep How Pumpkin Planning Saved My Business

Posted at 17:38h in Business Strategy by Angie Noll

Here’s the truth: I first decided to become a Pumpkin Plan coach because I already am certified in the other Mike Michalowicz brilliant small business methods. Therefore, I “shoulded” all over myself that I needed to be certified in all 3 methods. Sorry, Mike! I was not immediately struck by the power of The Pumpkin Plan; not like I was by Mike’s other methods, Profit First and Fix This Next. Frankly, I didn’t really want pumpkin graphics filling up the pages of my website…pumpkins don’t exactly sound smart or cool or sexy, after all.

I was not immediately drawn to becoming a Pumpkin Planner, but I’ve had a realization. Looking back at 2023, it was Pumpkin Planning that got me through the toughest year in business.

I was riding high in the fourth quarter of 2022. We were finishing up our year with a higher gross revenue and net income than I had seen in my previous 16 years in business. I was living the good life, feeling like I had things figured out! At home, my family and I were gearing up to kickoff 2023 in a grand way. We would be delivering my oldest daughter to Valencia, Spain for her study abroad program, by way of Morrocco and The Canary Islands. It was a big step for me personally. January is the single busiest month of the year for a bookkeeping firm, and I was planning on being gone for half of it.

Why my business needed the Pumpkin Plan

Life was good, business was booming, but it’s true that all that glitters is not gold and there were some serious issues lurking beneath the surface of the business. We grew so fast that we began struggling to keep up with the work. In hindsight, I see that we should have turned down some potential clients because they were not a great fit for us. My staff was feeling over-worked because we couldn’t find qualified people to hire fast enough. Suddenly, I found my business was in disarray, and I wasn’t quite sure where I went wrong.

After I finished wallowing in my failures, I got back to work (I am a firm believer that wallowing in that misery helps me get over it and move on faster. Try it and let me know if you agree). What saved me is the decision to amp up the time I spent Pumpkin Planning my business.

How Pumpkin Planning changed our business for the better

The basic concept of Pumpkin Planning your business is this: figure out what your company does best by identifying its Sweet Spot.

Your Sweet Spot is where your unique offering can be systemized and sold solely to your top clients. This allows you to keep your focus narrow, only working with clients who are in alignment with what your company does best. You can then replicate the process over and over and over again, until your pumpkin patch is full of giant pumpkins.

Want to apply these principles to your own business? Here are some of my favorite tools, straight out of the Pumpkin Plan. These are the exercises that helped us turn the corner this year.

We put together a set of Immutable Laws

Immutable Laws are the core values that we live by. They set the tone for everything we do in our business. They ensure that we walk our talk. First, I identified the things that make me happy and those that don’t. I pinpointed the things that I feel are acceptable, and what I don’t feel are acceptable.

I realized these values are often at the core of whether we grow with a client. Many of the clients that were unhappy with our work were clients that we were also unhappy working with. This led to conscious and subconscious choices that ultimately hurt both me and the business. In the end, we had to weed out the seeds that were not strong enough to grow into strong pumpkins. We could then focus fully on the clients we felt most strongly about supporting, and whom we could support to our best ability.

We assessed our current clients

Next, we dug into our client list. We noted their industries and sorted them by revenue contribution and gross profit. Then, we measured their cringe factor (you know, the one where your caller ID announces it is them and you quickly hit “Decline” because you don’t want to talk with them). We also measured any payment issues, whether they buy from us consistently, and if they share our values.

We recognized very quickly that some of our biggest clients were not actually ideal for us. They either did not share our values, or we were spending a boatload of time following up with them. The Top Client Assessment helped us identify which pumpkins were not ideal for us and were contributing to our team rotting on the vine due to the unhappiness that came from dealing with them.

We set up Red Rope Policies

First, we identified the types of clients we wanted more of and set up Red Rope Policies for incoming leads. We limited our leads based on the criteria including industry, size and stage of the business, readiness to make change, and willingness to try new methods.

I am excited to say that these policies reduced our incoming leads by half. Even though we had half the leads compared to the year before, those leads were better suited to us. As a result, we were able to close more of them because our offering was in alignment with their needs. That meant less work for the internal team and a more streamlined approach to their work requirements. In turn, we were able to serve our clients better!

We are conducting Wish List Interviews

We’re currently interviewing our clients to find out, in their own words, what impresses them most when working with a business like ours. We’re asking them to share what elements of the support we offer have been most impactful. We also want to find out what their biggest complaints are, about us and the industry as a whole. It’s also an opportunity to learn more about their business and where they are headed in the next 5, 10, 15 years.

This information helps us identify trends and tailor our products to best support our customers. It revolves around understanding our Sweet Spot and digging into the Sweet Spots of our top clients. This knowledge will help us scale with ease. Maybe growing a massive pumpkin patch full of ideal clients isn’t so hard after all. Thank you, Pumpkin Plan!

Want to know more about The Pumpkin Plan?

This proven program teaches business owners to fill their businesses with ideal clients, receive high value for their product or service, and leverage their time for greater income and freedom.

The Pumpkin Plan is made for business owners who are ready to stop struggling and start growing. Do you have a great offering, but nobody seems to care? Is your business attracting interest, but you find yourself getting caught in an endless cycle of discounts and special offers to get and keep clients? Or maybe you are working so many hours that other parts of your life are suffering, but you can’t see a way to grow without working even more. If any of these sound familiar, Pumpkin Plan can help. It offers a strategy to break out of the survival trap and start thriving again.