Every business, every owner, every employee has lots of great ideas. Now the crucial part is how one should nitpick and prioritize their tasks. "Experience" is not getting what you wanted. You can hire seasoned mentors to avoid making mistakes, period. Hiring trained professionals saves you time, avoids costly errors and gives you an edge. If you think that doesn’t make a huge difference, well, think again. 

At Align2Compete, you have access to industry experts who could drive you to your fullest potential. Today, we invited Dave Hiebeler and Mike Higgins, co-founders of the organization, to give you a run-through and a clear picture of what they do.

 
---

Listen to the podcast here:

A How-to Guide for Expanding Small Businesses with Dave Hiebeler and Mike Higgins
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. My guests today are Dave Hiebeler and Mike Higgins who co-founded an organization called Align2Compete. Now, what Align2Compete does, I will let them describe this more in their own words than in mine, but the basic gist of it is marketing for small businesses and solopreneurs or entrepreneurs so they’re the ones that are actually trying to help a lot of you that are out there listening trying to get some traction, get your business going, getting noticed, and getting noticed is something that I think a lot of people oftentimes don’t think of. I know I haven’t thought of it nearly as much as I should have even though that’s a huge part of the battle. It’s very common to think a lot about the specifics of your product, what you want to build and even why, the why is definitely important, but, oftentimes, this goes, for lack of a better way to put it, on notice.

 
---
Dave, Mike, welcome to the program.

 

Thanks. 

 

Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

 

So let’s start with talking about Align2Compete. I introduced the topic but, of course, you know your business better than me translating a couple conversations we’ve had and what’s on your website. So what is Align2Compete about? What are you doing with your mission?

 

I guess I’ll lead off with that, Mike. In essence, we turn strangers into customers for small businesses. That sounds as a simplistic benefit but it definitely is the essence of what we do and makes our feet hit the floor in the morning. Now, no question, it’s more complicated to pull that off and probably the best question that we could ever have anybody asked us in return, “How do you do that?” And so we are a marketing agency and mainly a service agency that helps emerging small businesses get the word out and boost their familiarity and I think you had touched on that, Stephen, that that’s the biggest challenge, like I go to meetup groups, that’s what we do is, yeah, if you’re going to build a deck in your house, for example, and you could go to Lowe’s or Home Depot and buy all the wood and buy all the tools and, yeah, you’ll build something that’s a deck but it’s nice to have a contractor, if you will, or maybe a financial adviser that knows how to use the tools and what tools to use.

 

Mike and I talk about it a lot about we don’t lead with product, push product. We worked at organizations that were publicly traded on Wall Street, for example, that what’s the product of the month that they want us to push and I just don’t like to work with clients that way and I know Mike doesn’t either and so we really want to focus on what is that business trying to do and one of the questions that we’ll always ask is, “Stephen, one’s the lowest, ten’s the highest, how would you rate from a 1 to 10 the familiarity of your business?” and it’s always an interesting answer we get. Somebody will say, “Well, we’re a 3,” or, “We’re a 5,” and then we’ll say, “Okay, where do you want to be a year or two years from now?” Because we know a lot can change in even those timeframes. “Oh, I wanna get to a seven.” Okay, cool,