Things you can't avoid when you're starting out

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When I first went self employed a lot of things went wrong and for all sort of reasons, most of which were mistakes I’d made.

They’re painful and costly experiences but I learned far more from them than I had done at any other point in my working life.

You can’t avoid the mistakes, so make them as they will make you more effective.

I’d had a pretty good career and not had many problems and earned some good money but my last employed role in corporate life was becoming an absolute nightmare, full of aggression, politics and just darn right bad strategy, while at the same time I could see things changing in the outside world, on the streets if you like, and I wanted to be a part of it.

I needed a way out but didn’t know what to do or how I could truly serve others.

An opportunity came along which looked pretty good from the outset but things soon went wrong and I paid dearly for it.

Follow what’s right for you not because it glitters.

This last move into a self employed position was money motivated and was an investment into another business, not really my own, I had a funny feeling that things were not right after being there for a while but I refused to listen to myself as I thought that other people more experienced in this sector knew better.

It wasn’t long before I realised that I had been turned into a commodity. We were in a market full of incumbent suppliers with a story that sounded pretty good, but didn’t really fit with the customers at that time and there was a mass of alternative sources of supply coming from more than one supply chain.

We were doing all the same old things that everybody else was doing and there was just no way that we were going to cut through the market clutter doing that. It died.

Don’t stop doing what works for you.

When I look back over my earlier career at the most effective parts I realised that I hadn’t been like everybody else. I had been able to stand out and stand up for something I believed in and found ways to get that across. It was a natural thing which I had done instinctively but wasn’t conscious of what I was doing and how I did it at the time.

It’s what also makes me a difficult employee for companies that just want people to do as they are told, or are not open and flexible or have similar beliefs and attitudes.

In fact so effective was it I actually got my first boss moved out of the way as my customer raved on about me to the MD, after I rescued a deal that was collapsing, and gave my boss such a bad rap for trying to sabotage it, that they moved him to one side (a job for the boys) and later offered me a loftier position, which I declined.

Anyway back to the world of self employment. So now I’m starting to panic as this opportunity has gone stale on me and I’m in a bit of a mess. I got myself some work on the side and tried to figure out what to do next.

I decided to pick up where I’d left off with some of the things I had been doing over my earlier career which involved sales and marketing and specifically the web and decided that it was a cool place to try and find out what I wanted to do.

Sales and marketing is probably at its most confused point in history right now as there are just so many beliefs, channels and techniques and “general” sales and marketing continues to prevail and its ideas are being spread across these expanding communication channels causing more confusion.

Stop procrastinating and get involved.

Various things started to happen as I played around with a few ideas and ran a ton of tests and experiments to confirm my own beliefs and what I had been studying.

What had shocked me the most about sales over my career was the lack of information, strategy and help to find the customer the right solution.

The same was true about marketing and I was convinced and had demonstrated on a few occasions that sales and marketing were one and the same beast and that it was so different to general beliefs, but I needed to understand just how to make it work more effectively.

While employed you forget how much is done by others because of the resources and skills in place which you can call on at any time to solve a problem or work on a project. It’s easy to take that kind of thing for granted.

Realising how little I actually knew, because I had learned so much and could see what I needed to do to complete the picture I was faced with yet another hurdle.

Due to limited resources and funds I had to do everything myself and on shoestring budget.

I panicked in the face of all this stuff I was being forced to learn and started to find all sorts of excuses or problems and was getting a lot of stick from people around me.

This just slowed everything down and when your brain starts swimming about like this it’s very difficult to focus on anything. Procrastination kicks in and things become a hard slog.

But I stuck at it.

Don’t be scared of the complexity, it gets less complex with experience.

I took over a small website that had only sold a few hundred pounds worth of products and decided to do things a little differently. It wasn’t long before it brought in over £70K worth of sales but it was messy and was not where I wanted to be, but it did prove some of the basic principles.

This was a mistake in one sense as I had jumped into a market that I had no real passion about, just a desire to serve and learn how to turn what were ideas about selling and marketing into a reality that I could build on and scale up.

As an engineer I loved taking things apart, understanding how they worked and putting them back together again even if it wasn’t always in one piece, much to my mother and farther disgust.

This drove me to understand that technology was a fundamental building block of a sales and marketing system not just a business tool and that you could automate, test and engage your audience in a unique way.

I was testing it from a technical and systematic approach, however there were very important parts of selling and marketing that I had not yet introduced into the system as I was focused on the technical and systematic nuts and bolts behind the scenes.

Have confidence in what you are doing.

While all this was going on I had also been doing some consulting work but in the beginning I hadn’t really got my act together so found myself being used as an expendable employee.

I always ended up doing the same old general sales and marketing stuff which I knew wasn’t the right approach, yet I needed the money so put up and shut up and did what my customers asked of me.

This was my own fault as I had only just about got the top level part of my own system sorted and was still working on the nuts and bolts, so I was probably not confident enough about taking a position on it just yet.

Bouncing from job to job the nuts and bolts started to coming together. Finally I got a project with a customer which didn’t require a lot of technology but did require me to apply my now developed sales and marketing skills.

Never assume, test and evolve.

This company had spent a ton of money on a refit and was losing custom. It had alienated itself from its market and needed to reconnected but thought that fancy products and services were enough. I had just the approach that was systematic and measurable so I confidently took on the job.

The results were great and we packed out the place for quite a few nights running using a series of campaigns and activities which I had formulated around some research I had done.

I felt the business needed changing but they were reluctant in making too many changes but made enough to make an impact.

Where things went wrong was because I’d assumed my customer understood what I was doing. We finished the initial campaigns and they asked what they should do so I suggested that they do more of the marketing that I had done and keep the changes we had made.

They kept the changes, however their marketing became just general marketing once again which failed to make any real connection with their customers. It was just a stack of offers and deals and the results were poor.

I hadn’t realised how far I’d come and made the mistake of assuming my customer had. I needed to do more.

The problem was this customers wanted marketing that was quick and dirty or value for money which was based on general marketing ideas and when we looked at the past and what that had brought them it was very little return indeed.

Maybe what I should have done was more for the money to prove the point and drive it home, but at the same time I realised that they were reluctant to change things.

What I needed was a way to impart the knowledge and these methods that didn’t always need me to be there and was more cost effective for smaller budgets.

Embrace new frontiers.

This leads me into a whole new chapter. All this was going on during a recession and made both finding what actually worked and what I wanted to do even tougher, but I didn’t give up, just went down a few twists and turns that way laid things. The system and formulaic approach worked. I had also learned how to research markets and balance supply and demand. It’s time to scale it up and apply it.