Sweep up your sawdust

One thing I find myself thinking about regularly is sawdust.

Yes, sawdust.

Not in the "stuff that collects when you cut a piece of wood" sense.

Sawdust in the sense that Jason Fried wrote about over a decade ago.

That's where your business is creating by-products or waste through its regular operations and you find a way to package that up and give it away or sell it. A lumber yard starting to sell it's sawdust and wood chips for uses other than building supplies (e.g. pet litter).

These emails are a good example.

I write these emails every workday and send them out.

I could stop there but then there would be a large amount of waste. If you weren't subscribed on October 11th, 2017 then you'd never see that tip, unless you broke into my house and got onto my computer and if you did... hey, get out of here.

That's why each of these emails end up on my website as an article. It might take a few weeks or even months before it's published, but they'll all end up there eventually.

That's just one example of taking the waste and turning it into something useful.

But there's nothing stopping me from taking a collection of articles and creating an ebook or a print book or using them as the foundation of a speech or video training or or or or...

The important thing to remember is to keep your eyes open for these sorts of things.

Content is an easy one to reuse, but every business creates some by-product that can be repurposed.

You just have to be aware.

Keep an eye out for your sawdust and start collecting it.

One of the best ways to build a sustainable business starts by getting your customers to come back. Mastering that simple process can be difficult, but builds a lifelong business.

Repeat Customer Insights can help you understand your customer's behavior. With its collection of behavior reports, you can see what they're actually doing instead of throwing darts at the wall.

Eric Davis