News Leadership 3.0

February 08, 2010

Entrepreneurship 101: Setting priorities

Are you an entrepreneur with limited resources? So is Julia Scott. Scott don’t have a lot of dollars to invest in her everyday finance blog BargainBabe.com, but she does have time to spend. Given these assets, one of her biggest challenges is prioritizing the site’s growth. How often to you find yourself in the same boat? In a guest post, Scott explores the options.

By Julia Scott

I launched BargainBabe.com in January 2009 and have been fortunate to come across so many opportunities that I don’t know which one to focus on. My site gets more than 84,000 hits and 30,000 unique visitors a month. I have more than 3,400 email subscribers and my site has been featured in the Washington Post, LA Times, Reader’s Digest, Chicago Tribune, and on Good Morning America.

But spreading my time pursuing multiple opportunities means little gets done. To focus myself, I created a list of six major growth opportunities for BargainBabe.com. I’m guessing many of these opportunities apply to your new media site, too. The pros and cons for each are listed below.
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1. Hire employees. Pro: expand what we can accomplish. Con: drains income

2. Go legal. Pro: file for LLC status, apply for relevant trademarks to increase company’s value. Con: not affect traffic or revenue
3. Syndicate content. Pro: increased revenue and exposure. Con: growth is slow and long-term prospects bleak because of print industry woes

4. Merge. Pro: quick payoff. Con: lose ownership

5. Focus on revenue. Pro: seek out advertisers for cash flow boost. Con: major time suck
6. Get published. Pro: added credibility as published author. Con: major time suck for little revenue.

To help evaluate growth opportunities, I asked myself what my goal is for BargainBabe.com. Do I want to make a living wage? Do I want to become a household brand? Do I want to eventually sell? Knowing the answer is the key to prioritizing opportunities.

For instance, I’m reluctant to completely shelve any of the above growth opportunities because I know I must reach most of them in order to achieve my overarching goal - to sell my site within four years.

But I also have time on my side. I can pick one primary goal and one secondary goal, sets time frames for achieving each goal, and work backwards to make a task list of what I need to do to reach success. The sooner I accomplish each goal, the sooner I can move onto another goal, making my company even more profitable and attractive to potential buyers.

The great thing about being an entrepreneur is that you get to decide what to do - and everything you put into your company you get back.

[Julia was one of 15 news entrepreneurs who participated in KDMC’s first News Entrepreneur Boot Camp in 2009. Applications are now being taken for the Boot Camp 2010 to be held this May. Click here for more info and application.]

By Michele McLellan, 02/08/10 at 2:40 am
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