A startup business only grows when there’s an investment in the business, but as a founder, how do you invest when cashflow is still unpredictable? This is the catch 22 that many business owners face. The obvious answer is to grow sales and then use the additional cash to build the business, but interestingly, this is often not the best option. More sales equal more operational challenges, especially on the back of existing capacity constraints in growing businesses. Simply boosting sales can kill the company. So what’s the answer? How do you invest in the business when money is scarce and additional sales unwanted? The answer lies in betting on market demand, rather than sales. There is a comfort to be found in knowing that your services are in demand, even if there are no sales. Demand is what makes the phone ring and therein lies the confidence that you can invest in your company. Never mind sales; healthy demand allows you to live in the future. But how do you raise

The holy grail of doing business is building a brand. No matter the industry or the type of business you are running, ultimately, every entrepreneur wants a brand. This is a universal desire whatever the personality of the owner. From the most analytical engineering types to the exact number or creative types - all entrepreneurs want a brand. This desire is especially interesting if you consider the constant debate around sales versus marketing. Strong opinions persist in favour of each, yet everyone seems in agreement about one thing: the power of owning a brand. But brand-building is not easy. It requires counter-intuitive thinking that does not come easy to the business owner pressed for cash and looking for the shortest route to selling the company. It is this combination of difficultness and desirability that makes building a brand, in my opinion, the top challenge for entrepreneurs in the coming year. Building a brand requires a disciplined approach to design, messaging,

Aggressive, clean-cut business objectives. That's what the CEO of a successful medium-sized company recently shared with me about the business he leads. It's impressive when someone makes deliberate bets on the future based on a strong sense of where things are and where it's heading. Statements such as: "This is where we are now. This is where the world is going. This is our customer. This is our competitor. This is our key advantage. This is what needs to happen over the coming months to get from here, to here." This leader had strong views on these topics and clearly articulated them, not in a boastful way, but in a monotone, calm way. It was impressive. Probably the most exciting thing is just how determined they were to compete internationally, but basing themselves in South Africa because they see it as part of their competitive edge. It was a refreshing change from the typical negativity. The experience made me realise the opportunity for South Africa

It's taken me five years to get to a point where I can confidently tell people what I sell: I am a marketing consultant. I sell marketing plans. Five years. Why so long to figure out something seemingly so basic? Because at first, I wanted to be fancy. I couldn't imagine that merely being a marketing consultant, selling marketing plans, could be anywhere near good enough. Admittedly, I wanted to dress it up in fancy language. The funny thing is that despite not having a clear name for it, I had an elevator pitch that beautifully described the value I added. Strange how it is somehow easier to spin a 30-second story than give it a concise name! I find many business owners have a similar problem. After tweeting my initial thoughts around this topic in the past week, someone responded saying it took one of their clients two years to figure out how to name what they sell! The challenge is clear, in two seconds (not thirty), answer me this: What do you sell? It is

It's fascinating to think about how you can sell one thing, yet meet many needs. As a kid, I enjoyed kicking a ball in the park, and that one ball did many things for me, depending on the day. I got rid of frustration, energy, cleared my head, managed boredom or played with friends. One ball; many needs. As businesses, we typically sell only a handful of stuff, yet the number of potentially different needs we meet for our customers are many times more. It is this idea of "what need do you meet for your customer" that sits at the heart of marketing and sales. Only by getting to the real problem; the genuine desire that they have can you successfully sell your offering at the optimal price and grow the business. The challenge many businesses experience is they don't know how to get to the heart of the customers' needs. You certainly can't get there through "sales mode". Instead, you need to listen to customers, talk with them to understand thei

Business owners rightfully expect marketing activities to lead to sales, but how should this work? The question is even more urgent when the focus is on selling to other businesses instead of individuals (so-called business to business, or B2B sales). How can marketing activity supporting industrial equipment and professional services sales? The only way marketing communication will positively impact topline growth, otherwise known as “sales in the income statement,'' is through a tight interconnection between “marketing” and “sales”. A valuable exercise is to visualise this interconnection, otherwise known as the purchase funnel. Take a piece of paper and list all your marketing and sales activities and draw a line that connects it to your prospective customer and a potential sale. This line represents the purchase funnel of your business. It's seldom straight, meaning it may start with someone seeing a post on LinkedIn, then taking a detour to your website before g

It is the dream of every business owner to have a single agency that can make all their marketing pain disappear. This agency will come in, understand the business, do all the marketing activity that needs doing and, importantly, do it precisely the way the business owner wants it done. My view? Such an agency doesn't exist, and if it does, please comment on this post with your secret. From my experience, the one-stop agency hardly ever delivers one-stop service. They always drop the ball somewhere, have a weakness they don't know of, or don't admit too, and more often than not fail to offer a real holistic solution. But one cannot blame the agencies. They need all the business they can get and will hardly ever say no. They know of the need for "full-service" agencies and often market themselves as such, despite it not being the full story. The reality is that marketing is much too broad, too complicated and too fast-moving for a single agency to be able t