2008 – Did you achieve your objectives?

So as another year draws to a rather chilly end, it’s a good time to check back and see if the 2008 business strategy really did come to fruition. As a marketing strategist I’m fervent about focusing my clients on their short and medium term objectives, ensuring that they always have clear but challenging financial goals to get them out of bed each day.

This year has been a year of change for Corve Consultancy. As from January 1st, the focus of the business finally moved away from North East Wales and a new strategy was implemented to reposition providing business support in Manchester, Cheshire and the North West of England. It was a natural progression. A long standing contract with the Welsh Assembly Government had run its course which meant that Corve Consultancy no longer had to be domiciled in the Principality.

Reluctantly we vacated the offices in Rhosllanerchrugog’s beautiful STIWT Theatre and finally took possession of the new office built into the garden of the house in Cheshire and affectionately nicknamed by the children as The Hut. Then it was down to the serious stuff. With one exception, all the Welsh work was terminated and so Corve Consultancy had an almost clean slate to develop new contacts and a new client base - almost like starting again from scratch!

So time to employ the advice that I give to so many other SMEs, about doing a few simple things well, to get the new business ball rolling. I scoured the Cheshire area for a business club to join. I’m not a big fan of the BNI set up, just my opinion, it’s very popular and obviously does a good job for many, but its format is not for me.

So I was delighted to discover the County Business Club based at Edgeley Park, the home of Stockport County – a ground where I’ve never seen my team (Wolves) lose! This is a good club with around 40 members who turn up regularly every Thursday morning to network, refer business and have a bit of fun. As I’ve said before, networking is about the people you can meet through the people you meet.

And while some of the members at CBC have referred business to me directly and have also used my services themselves, it is the people I have met as a result of introductions from them that have been the real contributors to establishing Corve Consultancy as a North West facing business.

Whenever I’ve been involved in networking clubs, I’ve always tried to discover early on who the prodigious networkers are and unashamedly try and leverage the extra work they do at the array of other clubs and meetings they attend. Anyway as a result of my involvement at CBC I’ve now replaced the Welsh Assembly Government work with my involvement in the delivery of a high growth programme for SMEs under the ultimate aegis of the North West Development Agency.

As a Chartered Marketer, I’m listed in the Consultants Database on the CIM website. It took a while for the CIM to get up to speed in terms of offering this service – they were a long way behind the Chartered Institutes that represent accountants and solicitors. But two years or so on, the database has been another excellent source of new business for Corve Consultancy.

It’s a nice payback, because as the CIM’s SME Ambassador for Greater Manchester, I do considerable unpaid work to promote the institute and further the cause of making high level marketing strategy and marketing communications available to SMEs. This involves providing marketing clinics at business fairs and shows across the North West and Cheshire as well as undertaking one off evening events for groups of SMEs who just want more information about business strategy in these difficult times.

So why do these times seem more difficult than the other recessions I’ve experienced in my working lifetime and what does that mean for the profile of marketing and business strategy?

Well in the recessions of the early 1990’s, the 80’s and the seventies there was still an ocean of lending around to help businesses weather the storm. I was working in business finance during each of those eras and we prospered as there was a greater demand for borrowing from home and abroad.

Today, as we all know, after laying waste the last generation of proper lenders and replacing them with children who do some form of credit scoring and call it analysis, the banking chickens have well and truly come home to roost. Hardly surprising really – lending is an art not a science and machines programmed by the inexperienced will never get right.

So today business finance is at a premium and while it is available in small pockets, here and there, if you know where to look and how to apply, the well has almost run dry and businesses are having to face up to the fact that using additional working capital to paper over the cracks of a poor business strategy is no longer and option.

What I’m seeing, is more and more owner managers turning to Chartered Marketers to take advice on marketing strategy because this is the way to reorganize and secure the right future for a business rather than hiding the inadequacies under a carpet of additional business finance.

But how has that helped my 2008 strategy to reposition Corve Consultancy as a North West facing business. Well it wouldn’t have done, if I had become more visible in the area where I put most of my promotional resources – online.

With the right web and online strategy partner, SMEs can achieve solid visibility through natural ranking, without paying some cowboy a small fortune to ‘unnaturally’ boost your position. Online strategy has always played a big part in my work with SMEs and without the right technical support I’d be nowhere near as confident in the results as I am.

So it was nightmare when Dewi, my erstwhile all things online associate packed it all in and got a proper job last autumn. But as one door closes another opens and as Dewi had been North Wales based, it presented an opportunity to strike up a new and if possible even stronger partnership in Greater Manchester.

Enter Darren at RedStar in Manchester, who came highly recommended through Business Link and who has worked wonders on some of my clients sites not to mention galvanising me into sustaining the kind of online presence we can all achieve by doing a few important things very well and regularly.

So as 2008 draws to a close I’m delighted that Corve Consultancy is now firmly repositioned as I planned. It was April when the last Welsh based client ran its course and much I loved my work with them in Neath, you can’t get much further away from Bramhall! Now we have 2009 to look forward to and a new series of objectives to achieve.

Self Employed Marketing

One day this week I got an email from Karen, my next door neighbour. She’s a director of a marketing agency in Greater Manchester that had high hopes of being taken over by a larger competitor with all the resultant benefits for her and her fellow shareholders. The email said ‘well this wasn’t in the plans – the other directors have decided to close down and we’re all going to be redundant!”

It brought back all the memories of my last employer deciding, seven or so years ago, to retreat to Tokyo and close its UK Investment Banking Division. So I was delighted when my friend told me that she was going to start her own business and doubtless over the next few days we’ll sit down and talk about it.

It made me reflect on what you learn when you go out on your own and step away from the comfort of a corporate environment. I’d been fortunate to work for some well know international financial institutions and often wondered whether I got through prospects’ doors because I was competent and capable, or because the business card said “Representative of Billy Big Bank”?

I suspect that the Billy Big Bank name probably opened the door, either out of courtesy or curiosity. How far the door stayed open and what kind of relationship flowed out, was probably due in some part to me, but more likely based on my skill to pass information to even Bigger people within Billy Big Bank, who were able to make really BIG decisions.

All this changes for the self employed consultant who lives (according to management guru Charles Handy) like a flea on the back of big corporate elephants. Do you remember the old saying about women in business – something like they have be twice as good to be thought of as almost the equal of a man (rubbish incidentally – we all know its three times!!!!) well that’s the same for the self employed, doors don’t open for you as readily as they used too and you are the offering – so you’d better have it planned out and make it add value to your target market or you’re buggered!

Took me four years to achieve the two year plan!

It teaches you real attention to detail because no one covers your back; though if you’re fortunate enough you have friends like Andy the Claret (that’s the football team not drink by the way). They will look at the stuff you do without really knowing what it’s about but still be able to ask you questions that hit the target with rapier like precision!! (More than Burnley FC did last season!)

Self employment keeps your feet on the ground. You lick all the stamps and soon realise that Petty Cash is an oxymoron. But you know that when the job is complete and the client’s cheque is safely tucked away, you alone were responsible for the satisfied customer’s experience.

There’s no calling on IT to support your technological issues, no asking a colleague to do one of the tasks in parallel to speed things along, no sending someone else to the tricky meeting and certainly no saying “he’s in conference now” when you don’t want to take the call!

We’ll be helping Karen and husband Mark start to create an upstairs office space and look forward to welcoming her to the world of SOHO (small office home office). In the early days I used to love working at home, so much so that I’ve just built an office tucked away in the garden of our family house in Cheshire, so I don’t have to drive to the North Wales Office every day if I don’t feel like it.

Working at home is great if you have the self discipline. If you don’t, apparently it’s even better! For some it’s a real throwback to university life when day time TV ruled, afternoons were for sleep and if you had to work, well hey there’s nothing else going on at 2.00am is there?

There’s a trendy trend developing for blokes to go to work in suits and shirts but not to wear ties. You see them around the city thinking they look cool; they don’t know Jack. Home based self employed blokes have been going to work with no trousers for years – how cool is that!! Wonder if Karen will adopt the morning shuffle across the landing in pyjamas at 5.00am to do that thing you haven’t been able to get out of your head since 3.27am when it woke you up!

I wonder if she will find a replacement for the drive to and from work, the familiar tones of Wogan, or Humphries and Naughtie or Allen and Garvey. Will she make Monty the cat a fully fledged partner, and will she stop, religiously, for a daily lunch break and play computer backgammon or Sudoku, just to give her brain a change?

You don’t always consider these weighty issues in Corporateland, nor do you necessarily have to make a commitment to yourself that every week, no matter how you feel, you WILL engage in some form of marketing communication aimed at your target market to keep your businesses head above the parapet.

Here’s a big lesson for the elephants from the fleas. Elephants spend fortunes on all manner of exotic marketing communications (not recommended by this flea incidentally!!). On the other hand, fleas tend to get nearly all of their business by word of mouth and recommendation, at next to no cost, other than a job really well done.

I’ll talk at length with Karen about this, as after 20 years working in marketing agencies in the north-west, she’ll know more than enough business contacts to ring up telling them the story of her start up.

Good luck to her!

Ten top tips for SME marketing

The Chartered Institute of Marketing asked me to knock something up which could be a hand out or expanded into a presentation (or even a rant :-):-)!!)Hope these are of help to someone if only as a reminder there is marketing communications and there is business and marketing strategy. The two are complimentary branches of marketing but need to work together and not in isolation.

1. Each time you are thinking of undertaking a piece of marketing communications, don’t allow your self to do it until you have identified two subsequent communication activities to under take. The main reason most marketing communications issued by SMEs generate disappointing results is that they are one off tactical exercises, not part of a sustained campaign, where core messages are delivered over a period of time through a selection of different media.

2. Understand the type of business you are trying to win when you spend money on marketing communications and be clear about the profits that winning one order will generate. Directly relate this figure to your cost of communications to measure the success rate you need and the ultimate return on investment.

3. How dull is your website? When it has been visited once, what is the motivation for visitors to return? Make your website an interactive communications tool.

4. It’s easy to sit in our offices and factories staring at the four walls. Spend some time drawing up a list of people you know or people you ought to know who could and should be referrers to, and advocates for, your business. Set a target to meet up with at least two of these people a month.

5. Because you are a great butcher, baker or candlestick maker and you know your sector and your organisation inside out, does not mean that you are the best person to write about it. It’s astounding how many good looking pieces of marketing communication are ruined by inadequate copywriting! Use a professional.

6. Following on from this, particularly if you are sceptical about someone else writing your copy, review all your current literature to see how much it talks about you and your company and how little it talks to customers about themselves. Consider changing your messages to make them about customers and not about you.

7. Have a staff meeting. Sit down informally with all your employees and ask them what they would like and dislike about the business if they were a customer. What they perceive today, your customers will perceive tomorrow. Let them pretend to be the owner for an hour. What are the first three things they would do to make the business better for customers? Internal marketing is undervalued in SMEs; the feedback may just surprise you!

8. Review your customer sales for the last 12 months to see which have been your biggest customers, but evaluate their spending with you against their total spend on the type of products and services you can provide. Use the findings to target customers where it is entirely reasonable for you to challenge for a much greater share of their spending over the next 12 moths.

9. Review your business plan. A plan doesn’t have to be a forty page document full of spreadsheets and strategy; it may just be a list of key objectives with a series of simple tasks and milestones. But whatever form it takes, you should have one to drive the day to day activity of your business, which can so often be driven by whatever ‘crisis’ arises first on any particular day!.

10. Go to a trade or industry exhibition with relevance to your sector. Remind yourself what a great sector it is to work in and meet many of the other good people, just like your self, who work in it. Listen to some seminars or workshops and hear other people’s perspective on the issues that you are facing every day. It’s an uplifting and useful business exercise particularly for those of us within SMEs who can end up working in a confined bubble. If it doesn't motivate you seriously consider changing direction!