Every owner starts their business for different reasons.
Maybe you’re passionate about solving a particular problem, so you’ve developed a product or service that fixes that problem for clients.
Maybe it’s those clients themselves you care about. You want to solve their problems, whatever they are, and started your business to do exactly that.
Maybe you just chose something you’re really good at or went to school for, and you simply like doing what you do—you love the process itself.
Maybe along the way you realized that the people you work with actually mean a lot more to you than the money you make or the work you do.
Or maybe you’re just there to make some money so that you can focus on those things in your life that matter the most to you, like your family and friends—nothing wrong with that.
Over the years that we’ve been in the world of marketing, we’ve found that these are the 4 major categories that most owners find drive them to do what they do—the value they find in what they do, the value that drives them to keep at it, even when it’s not fun or easy.
We call this your PiPP: People, Impact, Process, Profit, and it’s an integral part of our Vision Value Model™.
PiPP: The People, Impact, Process, or Profit That Matters Most to You, the Business Owner
When we develop marketing strategies for our clients, they’re understandably focused on how their marketing will increase revenue for them.
That’s what marketing is for, right? Helping you make more money?
While that’s true to a degree, marketing can do much more than just make you money—that’s only one of those Ps up there.
Marketing, when used the way it’s meant to be used, is all about helping you reach your goals, whatever they happen to be. Sure, your goal might be to maximize profits, but that’s not everyone’s goal.
Your goal might be to support your people while making sure your marketing at least pays for itself (and at least some more on top of that). You might want to see those people grow in their positions, to reach new heights so that they can, in turn, take the business further than you ever could alone.
Or maybe you want your marketing to help you make the maximum impact on the world or for your clients that you possibly can. Maybe you just want it to optimize your processes so that you’re not spending 60 hours a week working, or 40, or heck, even 20.
All of these are legitimate things to care about. That’s what PiPP is about. The idea is that you pick the thing that matters the most about these 4 basic building blocks of a business and let that drive your marketing.
We’ve found it’s best if people rank these, giving them an order that lets them prioritize their marketing dollars and optimize their marketing tactics.
Over the years, our clients have found this idea so revolutionary that it literally changed everything about how they approached their marketing (and even the way they did business).
It’s why we speak on this topic all the time: for us, the impact this can have on the world of business is incredibly valuable, something that drives us forward in our own business.
Case Study: That Bank That Didn’t Realize It Loved Its People More Than Its Profits
When most people think of banks, they have a stereotype in their heads of greedy executives and a hyperfocus on money, but for most small regional banks, money is just something everyone at the bank happens to be good at managing—they care a lot more about a lot of other things.
However, when you work with money all day, it’s easy to get focused on it, especially your own, or even to think to yourself, “We own a bank—of course we’re supposed to be focused on profits!”
That’s exactly the trap our client had fallen into, a regional bank that only thought it was focused on profits, that its whole goal was to grow and then sell to someone else to make the board a huge return on their investment.
But when we sat down with them and walked them through the Vision Value Model™, we discovered something completely different.
People Mattered More Than Profits—A Lot More
As we worked through the Value portion of our process, as we questioned the leaders of the bank about what really mattered to them. We asked them to rank their PiPP to discover what meant the most to them.
It turned out that it was their people.
As the board’s exit from the business approached, they started to have sleepless nights, fearing for all the people they worked with, the friends they’d made over the years, people who weren’t just coworkers to them anymore.
They were able to see that maximizing their profits wasn’t as important to them as making sure they chose a buyer who would take care of their people when they walked away.
We changed their marketing strategy as a result of this, helping them shift their branding to be built on the people they employed. The new strategy tied their employees so closely to the community that they became integral to the bank’s future success. They were eventually able to find a buyer who did exactly what they wanted: not a single person at the bank lost their job when the new buyer took over.
It’s hard to imagine a better outcome than that.
What Matters Most to You? Let’s Find Out
Self-appraisal is hard, and most business owners aren’t just going to be able to do this naturally (if they even have time to sit down and try it). Figuring out your PiPP is unlikely to happen on its own, and even when you do, what do you do next?
That’s how we help our clients. We’ll walk you through the Vision Value Model™, help you identify what matters most when it comes to PiPP (people, impact, process, profits), and then develop a clear, detailed marketing strategy to make that happen.Learn more about the entire marketing strategy process we take you through here.