Behind The Scenes Of The Location Independent Business Strategy

If you’ve been following any of my online shenanigans of late, you might have noticed that the whole “location independent” concept – the thing that has been my baby for the past couple of years – has been experiencing somewhat of a boom.

Whilst this may seem like a random occurrence, it is not.

It’s the result of a strategic plan, sparked by a genius idea and implemented with military-like precision (ha – that last one is *so* not true)…

You may know that at the beginning of this year, I made the decision to take the Location Independent project to “the next level”. In my mind, that meant treating it more like a business rather than a hobby and making it pay its way.

The Strategy

Outreach Teams

There are a number of parts to the strategy in doing this – but one of the core ones that I’ve been implementing to date is the concept of the Community Outreach Teams (inspired by Skellie’s idea of street teams to help promote a blog).

The goal of this strategy is to spread the word about the concept of location independence by harnessing the passion and interest of people already part of the community and creating “brand advocates” – or Team Leaders – whose role is to help us spread the concept and help promote the site/products/services we’re building.

Whilst the income from this business is not yet at a level which means we can afford to permanently hire people and pay them to do this, we do currently offer incentives such as free access to all our Location Independent products and free business coaching every month.

At the same time, we also hope that by aligning themselves to a growing ‘movement’ and community there are numerous non-monetary benefits to their own brands, reputations and businesses – which certainly seems to be the case so far.

Community Services

In tandem with the above, we’ve been working really hard in the background to provide a greater range of services and forums for the community by opening up the blog with various new features, starting up a Ning-based forum and adding to the range of resources we offer – both free and paid-for.

The Benefits

Brand Awareness

The obvious benefit the Location Independent business gains is brand awareness. A growing number of people are becoming ever more aware of the concept, our website and the services/products we offer – and at the same time, we’re spreading more than just a brand – we’re helping people to create the lifestyles they want.

Increasing Sales

One of the core goals of any business is usually to increase sales of the products/services on offer – by increasing the number of people aware of location independence, driving more traffic to our site, promoting the products & services on offer and partnering with people who can help us do this, we’re obviously seeing an increase in sales of all our products.

The Challenges

Brand Management

Whilst “location independent” is the brand for the business we’re building and is a term we coined, created a visual identity for and own the domain name for – it is also a phrase to describe a concept which anyone can use.

In having more people associated with the term, using it and promoting it, we’re opening up the brand in a way that at times, makes me uncomfortable (control freak that I am) and that could become hard to manage in the future.

It’s a balance between letting it grow organically and ensuring that it is not compromised nor damaged by anyone closely associated with it – hard to do in a community that’s as open as this and for a term that has essentially become popular to describe a lifestyle concept.

Managing Time & Effort

I can honestly say that the effort I was previously putting into the location independent project is nothing compared with what I’m doing now! The combination of strategising, planning, implementing, co-ordinating, organising and supporting is almost a full-time job – which I’m pretty much managing to cram into about 2-3 hours a day at the moment, given my energy levels.

It’s been fantastic working with the Team Leaders and other members of the community but boy, is it hard work responding to requests, answering questions and all the other admin-type stuff which I haven’t yet managed to outsource!

Measuring ROI

Again I have to be honest and say that whilst sales of our products have increased, it has not yet increased *enough* to compensate for the additional time & effort I feel I’m putting into the business.

Whilst increasing brand awareness is great, it’s one of those things that is hard to define & quantify – unless you obsess about blog subscriber stats, website traffic, twitter followers etc. which we do measure but tracking conversions and where exactly these have come from remains a challenge.

Of course, the bottom line for any business measurement of success has to be profit. But aside from a couple of successful joint ventures and promotions which had been organised prior to much of the above, many of the other activities haven’t yet generated a noticeable increase in sales.

Fortunately, in monetary terms, it’s not costing us any more financially but the cost of my time is currently more than I’d like it to be – and measuring (and maximising) the return on investment of the time I’m spending doing community building, enablement and support is something I’ve still got to figure out.

In Conclusion…

I’m really, really pleased that the concept of location independence as a lifestyle is having its time – and that we’re really focusing on our mission to help others create this lifestyle – but at the end of the day, we’re also running a business.

Which means that I need this to be commercially viable if this is what I’m going to spend the majority of my time doing – and the bottom line for me, means that the increased effort I’m putting in must result in a comparable increase in the income generated from this business.

Whilst I suspect (and hope) that the location independent community itself will continue to grow organically, as a business it’s vital that we review our strategy and activities – and measure the ROI from these on an ongoing basis and then adjust our course if necessary.

If you’re not doing this yet in your business, maybe it’s something you need to do too?

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