Episode 15: Give Every Dollar in Your Business a Job: ROI Basics for Service-Based Businesses

I am a little embarrassed about this, as usual.

I'm always sharing the things that I'm embarrassed about.

I will share the wins, too, but there's probably more things I'm doing, like, you know, making the mistakes, things that I learned from that I wanna share with you, um, than doing the bragging about all the things I'm good at.

But, so last year I spent $5,000 on something that I feel like produced close to zero return on my investment, and I didn't really realize it until the money was already gone, and I wasn't even really the one that stopped the spending.

So, I am talking about spending $1,000 a month for five months paying a social media manager.

And when I originally created the job description, there was a lot included in that job description that I wanted this person to really own the responsibility of marketing for the business, and create reports, and think strategically about marketing the things that were coming up in the business.

But the reality was that it ended up being kind of minimal social media posting, and I think this person did do a good job checking in and saying like, "Hey, what should I be promoting this week?" But as far as like it really being a strategic role, I think that was missing.

And if I'm spending $1,000 a month on something, I want that person to be strategic, right? So, I didn't really have the ROI to show for it.

We did have an increase in people looking at our Instagram account, but when I looked at the metrics that we track for actual applications and where people found out about us, like 1% of them came from Instagram.

Maybe 5%, but it was such a low number.

I don't remember the exact number as I'm sharing this story right now.

But we really could see from the data that we were gathering that the increase in spend on marketing on social media did not actually result in more customers coming in our door and an increase in revenue.

So, I'm not blaming the, the person who I hired to do this.

The real problem was that I probably didn't supervise very well, and I never really directly tied their role to an increase in revenue.

In retrospect, I feel like what probably would've been much better to do was to spend that $5,000 on, dollars on Google Ads or something like that, that has a way that I can actually track the return on investment of that money.