How to do Business

I’m based in England and have been running small businesses since 1981.

My experience covers Engineering, IT, Training, business services and more recently Horticulture so I have experience of both business to business and business to consumer marketing.

I know a lot about the issues of promoting small businesses with not much money but have been doing some more strategic work with larger companies to help them work through some of their issues – particularly those of internal branding, judgement and decision making.

The truth is we make a bit of a meal about marketing – actually it’s quite simple

Step 0 – decide in broad terms what you think you can offer to the world profitably and develop a story that connects you emotionally to the people who you want to buy from you and who will work with you to make your vision come true

Step 1 – work out how much money you want to make

Step 2 – work out what this means in terms of transactions in whatever business model is appropriate to what you want to do

Step 3 – work out how many leads you need to generate

Step 4 – work out where you need to tell the story using which media to generate the number of leads that you estimated in step 3

Step 5 – do it

Step 6 – measure your results.

Tweak your story

Revisit your business model

Review your marketing activities

Do some more

Measure again

Step 7 Repeat until you have the processes optimised

er…. that’s it.

The remainder of this blog will unpack, amplify, share good examples and otherwise play riffs on this basic theme

Thanks for visiting

Alan