Fun vs Must Do
I think most people are guilty of this, I certainly am. We all have areas of our business that we love, whether you’re a marketer, you’re an out-and-out salesperson, you’re a coder, you’re an innovator, whatever it may be, there is a part of the business that you have created. You created this business because there was something you wanted to offer to the market. It could be PR, it could be event management, it could be creating the latest widget. That’s all well and good but unfortunately, and we see this a lot with our clients and entrepreneurs, we get people who come to us with a great idea and say, “We want to do this and it’s going to be amazing, the market is going to love it!” and we go, “Excellent, once you build it how is everyone going to know about it?”
Now this takes his back to sales. If you’ve got a great innovation, you’ve still got to find a way of telling your target demographic about it. You have to go back and do the jobs which normally people don’t like. In marketing, there are marketeers which actually like marketing but actually, for a lot of people that just like engineering, or design, or renovation, they don’t want to be doing marketing. They certainly don’t want to be going networking and giving presentations to other companies and having to go and knock on doors and get told to sod off. That’s not fun, it’s actually quite a lot for your self-confidence to go and take your wonderful product you’ve spent a year developing to someone to a company and they go “No, I don’t like it.” It must be the equivalent of a director directing some big Hollywood movie with £100 million budget sitting at the back of a cinema and he can hear people leave afterwards saying “Well that was shit!” It was not what you thought and you’re not getting the reaction from the market that you thought it would be.
Now this normally comes from people not doing the right thing. When you start a business, you must make sure that every aspect of your business is getting the appropriate amount of time and effort. So for instance, your marketing strategy, your team, the efficiency in your business; whether that be the way you do things or software that you can implement, whether you’ve got personal goals for yourself, whether you’ve got a series of growth milestones that you’re going to tackle. You can’t just go, “Ok, here’s a strategy. We’re going to do this over the next 6 months.” and then come back to us in 6 months time. You can’t say, “Right we’re going to do a month’s worth of really hard selling.” and then the sales start coming in and you start dropping the sales effort off and concentrating on the people that are buying from you because then you’ll find that when those sales start dwindling, you’ve then got to go back out for another big sales and marketing effort and you’ll keep peaking and troughing and not actually growing the business. So every aspect of the company needs a good quality amount of time dedicated to it regularly and I’m not talking about every month, not even every week, but I’m talking every day.
A lot of people come to us and think our job is about knowledge and experience and yes of course that is a big part of it. We get to see behind the scenes of lots of different businesses in lots of different industries which gives us a vast range of experiences that we can draw information out of and use it as examples for other people’s businesses. That’s not where the value comes from, it’s the implementation. If you want to get a child to stop eating with their mouth open you say, “Stop eating with your mouth open. Stop eating with your mouth open. Stop eating with your mouth open.” Eventually the kid is so sick of hearing it, that they stop eating with their mouth open. Well the principle is kind of the same. If you want to get somebody to do the thing but they’re not comfortable with stepping out of their comfort zone. I’m saying that you are going to go and do this a sales activity. We’ve agreed that when you went to an event and you met someone who liked your product. When you stop going to events, you stop meeting those people. Then we will make you go to the events. That is our job. It’s not just about knowledge, it’s about implementation. It’s making clients do the things they have to do to see the business get to the next level that we’ve agreed their going to work towards through a series of support milestones.