Starting a business
Twenty years ago I did something foolish. I quit my job to start my own business. At the time I had a young family to support, but worse—no clue what I was going to do or how. As a young primary school vice-principal in a regional city, I was no longer enjoying the job.

With hindsight, I must have seemed crazy!

Quitting my job
Before quitting I saw a career counsellor. We identified a passion in which I had some practical experience— fitness and wellbeing. The explosion of the fitness and wellness movement came much later. At the time I started there were some early hints that it was emerging, so it was the best shot I had.

Learning
invested some time and money in learning about fitness and adult learning, hoping to build up more expertise. I also blew a bit of money on logos, business cards, stationery, equipment, phones and memberships. None of it was sufficient to start and sustain a business.

Networking
Networking was big in those days. Events were opportunities to meet people that might lead to work, and I travelled just about everywhere in the hope of making a sale.

Money
Unfortunately, in not being able to sell, and not even sure what I was selling, led to me chasing any new idea or trend, hoping to cash in. The more desperate I got, the more I kept changing direction—desperately seeking the holy grail.

It’s not how you start and grow a business.

Mentors
This lack of direction changed when attending one of those events I met someone who became my mentor. He took me under his wing and changed the way I thought about business.

It was not a smooth transition. My mentor identified quite early on that I had neither direction nor focus. Nor any real understanding of business and how it worked. In a sense, I was all puff and no substance.

He helped me identify a business need where I lived. Then he worked with me to find clients and work on their projects. He provided marketing consulting, and my job was to provide the marketing implementation for the client.

His mentoring was a mixture of advice, reading, asking me difficult questions to reflect on and through working together on over 50 projects. That’s what has increased my depth of marketing and business know-how over the last twenty years.

Without his direction and help, I would of continued floundering like a fish out of water.

Moreover, now I’m in a position to help others.

What do you need to know when you are thinking about starting a business?

A business solves a customer’s problem.

It provides the skill or know-how to solve the problem, one where the customer is willing to pay more than what it cost to produce that solution.

That means a business has to do three things:

• It must have a product (that solves a problem),
• that it can sell and
• deliver.

Remembering, that once you’ve solved the customer’s problem, the most important thing is to get paid.

Without this, there is no business.

If you are lucky, you already have skills and know-how built up over several years solving expert problems.
Learning how to market and sell your product comes next.
Help to develop your business idea, along with a range of practical advice, can be found from state and local government departments, often online.

Seeking help and advice will save you time, heartache and money. I learned this the hard way. If you can find a knowledgeable mentor, even better.

My finding a mentor was serendipitous. I was lucky finding one who was patient, caring and was, and still is, prepared to put in the time to help me. I am very thankful to him and hope that my writing will do him justice, and help others to survive, grow and thrive in their businesses.

Marketing and Sales

Marketing, and your process for selling your products or services, grows out of your strategy with the focus on how your products or services solve a customer’s problems.

Solving customer’s problems are the benefits a product offers, such as saving time, providing a scarce resource, pain relief etc.

Once you know what your products or services are, you will need to be able to sell them and deliver them profitably ie. for more than it cost you to make or buy.

Then there’s the question of value.

You’ll want customers who are prepared to pay you more than it cost you to make or buy.

Think premium prices.

Too cheap and you compete with everyone else selling on price.

Hence you need to increase the value of the offering.

Marketing strategy is about how you communicate this to your preferred customers or clients.

Furthermore, it is critical for the three stages every business has to go through survival, growth or thriving.

photo by Jenna Day on unsplash.com

Marketing Basics

Marketing’s job is to create an awareness of your brand or products (often referring to the product or business name eg. Nike etc ).

This is enacted through promotional activities. Building up that awareness to the point where your product or service is front of mind, can create a preference to buy from you in the minds of your customers.

A very simple idea about creating awareness is to consider the almost invisible, promotion of tomato sauce (ketchup), a $70 million market in Australia.

Which one do you buy?

How do you know about that particular brand?

It has a lot to do with advertising, but there’s a good chance you weren’t really aware of any you saw over a long period of time.

That is what I mean by wanting to you to dominate your market and create a monopoly through focusing on a niche. Limiting what you offer and targeting a narrower set of customers; creating a business that it is difficult for others to copy.

Marketing and Capacity

To illustrate what I mean here, if you make hand-made shoes, how many can you make in a week?

That’s how many you can sell and comfortably deliver.

If you run a cafe how many meals can you deliver over lunch? How many good coffees can you make in a day?

If a hairdresser – how many cut and colours can you do in a week?

Your promotional activities seek to fill spare capacity, those hours or slots not already booked up. But, if you are in competition with many other similar businesses, that gets difficult. Hence concentrating on what you do best.

Promotion and Advertising – push or pull

In the good old days promotion was through mass advertising and seeking to interrupt your attention: local papers, national or state newspapers, junk mail, radio advertising, direct mail, TV advertising,  giveaways and coupons, public relations, Yellow Pages and so much more. It is often referred to as a push or outbound marketing.

Much of this is still relevant today, provided you take a strategic approach over time and that it compliments your other activities.

Today’s digital age means there are a whole lot more ways to promote your business at a reasonable price in comparison to the traditional ones: websites, social media such as Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Twitter and Pinterest and smartphone apps, PPC ( pay per click advertising on Google or Bing or other online media including social media ).

This is known as pull or inbound marketing. In 2018 this has become a tough call. Google is dominating the market for search traffic, so maybe the best bet is to focus on your website and build it up over time as an authoritative site for your niche.

No Sale = No Revenue

Getting customers to buy, order or subscribe is how a business creates revenue. While your website and social media presence may take up a lot of your time, you still need to focus on the business. And every business needs revenue.

Business  Models

There is a range of skills required to run a business.

You need to know what to do, be able to do it and take some risk. It may not work, or you may need to spend a bit of money to make it work.

For our older entrepreneurs, that means looking to exploit the commercial value of your skills and reaching out to your network, before the network falls away.

The business model I use has 5 components, shared by all businesses, large and small and that is to:

• Sell products and services to earn revenue
• Make or buy the products ( or it could be to research and deliver expert knowledge )
• Market and sell the products, including advertising
• Run the business ( HR, Admin, Accounts etc )
• Make a profit

You can only be profitable if you can sell, and deliver enough product for more than it costs you to make or buy it, sell it and run the business.

If for example your revenue is $100 000 in a year and your cost to make or buy your product or service is $50 000 or 50% of your revenue, it leaves $50 000 or 50%. While it might be nice to take that money and have a holiday, it really needs to be spent on marketing and selling, running the business and the balance becoming profit.

Profitability

How profitable your business depends on how you spend the money.

Spend too little on marketing and sales and revenue falls.

Spend too much on running the business and it eats into profit.

Plus, there is no easy figure to suggest to spend on your marketing, promotional and sales budget. To start with it may actually cost you quite a bit.

Managing the business

This is where the work gets done, where the rubber meets the road and decisions are made. The business model above gives you a clue to all the specific work that needs to be undertaken in running a business. And many small business owners are incredibly busy working in their business doing all five.

Marketing and selling your products or service, making the product or providing the service and administering the business.

Over a typical month, a single business operator is busy carrying out a full range of tasks.

Selling products or services

Making the products, outsourcing them or delivering them, invoicing, collecting cash or payments, or chasing payments, making appointments, doing the accounts and so on.

All are important.

Marketing, Selling and Promotion In the digital world this means your website is an important platform to attract your potential customers.

Good, helpful, relevant copy on your website helps bring free (organic ) website traffic. We call this digital publishing and it is becoming more and more relevant to every business.

By publishing blog articles to your website, just like this article, also adds content to your site and helps focus Google on your products or services. On a regular basis, it also brings Google back to your website.

Promoting your business through social media, putting together advertising copy, placing ads or paying for ads on Google, Bing or Facebook all take time, can be costly and may no longer work unless you have a large budget. There may be better ways than spending hard-earned money this way.

Measuring your results takes time

It takes about 18 months, or more, of constant work to build up a viable business, more so for start-ups, to make it survivable. Growth takes a bit longer. For an already established business, it might be a lot quicker.

Putting together quotes, proposals, meeting potential customers or clients, running the business, keeping up to date with your financials, the accounting and administration can take quite a toll on your time. It’s often hard to see how your business is going.

You can measure your business through revenue, sales, profitability and through your website or social media statistics. All provide useful information about your business and how it is going. The 3 stages that every business goes through survival, growth and to thrive, these can wax and wain too, and move around due to the economy and business confidence.

Profitability and tax

Profit is what is left after all the expenses are paid for out of revenue, not including taxes. In Australia, we only pay tax on the profit after all expenses are paid.

So your profit can consist of dividends, some funds for growth and a bit for the Taxation Office (approximately 30% of profit).

All this requires organisation, focusing on what is important such as marketing and delivering your product.

Neglect one and things go wrong.

Technology – using the right tools

One thing that makes it so much easier to do business today for the mature entrepreneur is technology.

Smartphones and apps, tablets, laptops, portable wireless devices, scanners, printers, wireless internet, cloud software such as Google for emails, calendars, documents and spreadsheets, using Dropbox to share large files, using Xero for accounting where your accountant and bookkeeper can log in to check your accounts, online CRM programs, social media such as LinkedIn.

Strategy, freelancing or scaling up your business

Now let’s refer back to the strategy—what activities you undertake to make your business different. The choices you make at the start, understanding that you must market your business, that you must run the business using a business model and do all the things required.

You can do this all by yourself, and be very busy. This is known as freelancing. You pay yourself to do the work.

Or you can be an entrepreneur where you manage the projects and outsource the work. The idea is to build a business model and run it, scale it up as you grow and allow others to manage it. It all takes work.

If there are no hard parts then it is not likely to succeed.

Most mature entrepreneurs have had a lifetime of experience, and have a reasonably good network of friends and colleagues. Having worked in a larger organisation they may be unfamiliar when it comes to the entrepreneurial skills required to help their business succeed. But they tend to be more successful than their younger counterparts.

Don’t neglect your network.

But don’t just trade in a 9-5 job for another one of the same.

Make sure you choose something you want to do and plan for it and to enjoy it.

Positioning your specialist business

You may be working, or want to work, as a consultant, coach, trainer or in some other capacity applying your specialist skills to a task, project or client group.

Photo by Kai Oberhauser on upwork.com

What’s a business?
All businesses solve a problem.
Whether you need a good feed, fix your teeth, build or fix something, learn something new and more.

A niche business is positioned by creating products or services that target a specific market. Preferably with some competitors, otherwise there may not be a market to serve.

Learning
Your future depends on keeping your skills and know-how valuable and up to date. Knowledge in your field and the digital tools that will augment your expertise. Carol Dweck writes about having a growth mindset – where you excel by putting in the effort and hard-yards to continuing to develop your talent. Age or gender is no barrier.

Your real value is in the creativity and problem-solving you bring to your clients, not always in the doing.

Networked & known
Your aim is to be seen as a leader in your field.

You do this two ways: Through getting out and about and through your website. For your website that means producing good quality advice to attract the attention of those who need and can afford your help.

This also means keeping in contact with your industry peers and leaders and attending the right conferences and events so that people know who you are and what you do.

Don’t compete on price
If you match price with your competitors or copy them, even benchmark against them, stop it. That defines your products or services as a commodity.

Stand out for your chosen clients or customers
Narrow your focus by choosing the client group you want to serve and how you can help them. What you do is not for everybody.You make this very clear in all your communication, especially on your website. Just like I have with wisepreneurs being for professional women over 50. Knowing their problems and the way you can help them. The more you work with them the better practitioner or specialist you become.

Suggested Resources

Books
Different, escaping the competitive herd by Youngme Moon
Originals, how non-conformists change the world by Adam Grant
Linchpin, Are you indispensable by Seth Godin

Video
Watch Seth Godin in the Art of Marketing

Photo by Anders Jilden on Unsplash

New Beginnings

There was no mention of more sex or bungee jumping, says Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse talking about the regrets of the dying over the last 12 weeks of their lives.

The majority regretted not having had the courage to live a life that was true to themselves, rather than having lived a life to satisfy what others had expected of them.

Men wished they hadn’t worked so hard; missing out on spending more time with their children or partners.

At this point, ask yourself — are you happy with how your life is right now?

If you are wondering what has become of your life, and the above comments resonate with you, then it’s not too late to change course.
You will need to be brave.
Changing the course of your life can be difficult.

Healthy foundations
Recently I flew to Queensland for my mother’s 85th birthday. I’d planned to spend a few days on the Gold Coast with my wife before seeing mum. On the second day, she called to tell me she was in an ambulance and heading to a nearby hospital. We caught up with her in the emergency ward.

After x-rays and a cat-scan, the doctor told us he could see something in her bowel and that he would refer her to a surgeon. By chance, a gastrointestinal surgeon was operating in the hospital that day, he finished early and came to see my mother. He looked at her medical records, then told us that as his surgical team was standing by it would be best that he take a look at what was happening. We agreed.

Later that night he rang to tell me that he had removed a tumour from her intestine. Now, several weeks later, she is recovering. For a while, it was touch and go, and I thought I was going to lose her.

While mum is still mentally bright and cheery, at 85, her body had let her down. A hip operation, degeneration of her spine and now bowel cancer. Spending her 85th birthday in the hospital feeling unwell with a tube down her nose was no fun for her or us.

Those of us in our 50’s are probably in much better health than her generation but may suffer from other health-related issues, often self-inflicted and difficult to change such as:

• Smoking
• Drinking too much alcohol
• Overeating
• Eating unhealthy foods
• Lack of exercise, and
• Suffering from stress

Diet
A couple of them may be out of your control due to the complexity of the world today. With diet, there’s a broad diversity of opinion about what is healthy. Vegan, vegetarian, high-fat or low-fat and more. However, all agree on one thing—that sugar is now a serious health problem.

Stress, work and relationships
The stress caused from working in a job you hate, feeling disengaged or discouraged. Especially if female in a senior role.
Or from being a toxic or meaningless relationship, being unemployed, money problems, health issues, children issues, divorce and a whole range of other issues that affect us today.

What can you do?

Start with what your 80-year-old-self would want you to know
Can you imagine an alternate future as an 80-year-old?
Different to the one if you keep going as is?
Where will you be living?
What will you be doing with your time?
What would you feel?
How will you look?
Who will be there with you?

If different to now, what steps can you take to make the change happen?

It may involve improvements in a couple of things, such as your health – wanting to be fit, energised and as healthy as possible. To live long, but well.

It may mean changing the way you work, learning new skills or changing jobs.

It might also mean exploring a shift to self-employment. To create self-supporting work for yourself doing something you would love. Using the valuable skills and know-how you have built up over your career.

Change is a process – making the shift
Any long-term change takes time. Much longer than anticipated.
Start by taking stock of what is going on in your life.
Try and stop some of the things that are causing you pain.
Explore alternatives, new ideas, possibilities, or experiences.
Taking action opens up new patterns of thinking.

Some suggestions that may help
It’s never too late to do something, no matter your age.
Read more
Turn off the phone or TV
Stop watching or listening to the news
Try some new things and see what happens
Take a class and learn something new
Seek out supportive people, who can cheer you on and encourage you
Avoid negative people who demean you or disrespect you
Talk to someone about your life and direction

Final thoughts
It’s not too late to do something, no matter what your age. This has not been easy for me to write as I have made so many of my own mistakes. After all, how can I possibly imagine what it is like to be in your shoes? Our culture appears to be one where we feel we have to be an ‘optimized version’ of ourselves. That to me places too many expectations on us, to be perfect, to look youthful, be mindful, always be mentally alert. Especially as we age. It’s way easier to just let things happen. Except when you get to 80 or 90 and look back with regret that you didn’t give it a go.
Don’t let that happen to you.

Suggested Readings

Barking up the wrong tree by Eric Barker

Designing your life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

Eat Rich live long by Ivor Cummins and Jeffry Gerber, MD

Grit by Angela Duckworth

Mindset by Dr Carol S Dweck

How to change things by Chip and Dan Heath

The life-changing magic of tidying: A simple, effective way to banish clutter forever by Marie Kondo

Mindfulness by Ellen J Langer

Hype: A Doctor’s Guide to Medical Myths, Exaggerated Claims, and Bad Advice – How to Tell What’s Real and What’s Not, Dr Nina Shapiro

The Big Fat Surprise Nina Teicholz

Websites & Articles
Ivor Cummins http://www.thefatemperor.com/

Nina Teicholz https://ninateicholz.com/

Toxic Relationships https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/towards-recovery/201709/toxic-relationships

YouTube

Dr Ken Berry https://www.youtube.com/kendberrymd

The school of life https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7IcJI8PUf5Z3zKxnZvTBog

Or a selection of useful videos: https://www.youtube.com/wisepreneursaustralia

Podcasts

An insiders view of medicine: A recent Conversation of Sam Harris with Dr Nina Shapiro
https://samharris.org/podcasts/129-insiders-view-medicine/

On Being by Krista Tippet

Waking Up by Sam Harris

Women at Work – HBR

Tim Ferris is THE optimized- self-guru and many of his podcasts are very good. This interview with Dr Gabor Mate is one I think you may find out a little more about your inner-self. While the topic is about addiction, it is not just about drugs, it is about us.
https://tim.blog/2018/02/20/gabor-mate/

Apps

Headspace for meditation

Habitify – for mapping habits

Runkeeper – for tracking your walking etc

The advantages and disadvantages of outsourcing

Starting a business when you are 50 or more is a hassle in terms of your time. You’ve got stuff to do and less time than someone in their 20’s. Most of us use an accountant to do our taxes, some of us have cleaners or gardeners.  If you are starting a business or running one, then outsourcing is a sensible practice. You need to quickly realise that time is precious and that outsourcing can get you to where you want to go faster than getting stuck trying to do everything yourself.

Where you might not have sufficient expertise or time outsourcing to a specialist enhances your work.

What do you do best?
What don’t you do well?
I don’t know about you, the more I try to do myself, the more I neglect in my business. The more I outsource, jobs someone can do faster and better than me, frees up my time for deep research, writing and the things only I can do well. If you are over 50 and trying to do everything you will never make it. Sorry, but you don’t have that much time.

If you haven’t the money to do this, then you need to learn everything you can. And honestly, if you can’t afford help, then be really honest about how your business is travelling.

image by Naletu from unsplash.com

Outsourcing has to be a part of your business

The simple fact is that there are many benefits to outsourcing.
The big one is your time.

But not your strategy.

Seth Godin tells entrepreneurs that their job is to build a business bigger than themselves through creating a business model that is scalable and repeatable. And then to only do work you can’t hire other people to do.

Your focus, as a business owner is on the marketing strategy:

• the customers you want
• the activities your firm will do and won’t do
• how you plan to differentiate yourself so as to avoid pricing competition
• revenue targets & more

Then decide how best to do this.

It’s at this point you have to decide if you want those skills in-house or to outsource.

Advantages of outsourcing

• your time
• access to expertise and capability not currently available to you
• choosing the experts who have the right fit for your business
• just for the time you require
• no overheads or on-costs
• the ability to focus on what you are good at
• saves time not having to learn everything you need

Disadvantages of outsourcing

• • non-delivery – time or quality not as expected
  • hidden or unexpected costs, more so with freelance sites where the bidder may not have the expertise
  • inconsistency, again this can happen with freelance sites, depending on how busy the freelancer is
  • lack of contact, lax reporting
  • not as passionate about your customers as you are
  • expertise stays outside your firm
  • outsourcing to overseas can have language barriers & misunderstandings

What might you want to outsource?

Web management – updates, monitoring, maintaining your website and social media sites
Content management & creation – blogging & posting, ebooks, white papers, editorial, video, podcasting, photography, articles, how to’s, illustrations etc
Social media management – content creation, posting
Email list management – segmenting your list, publishing newsleters
Campaign management – inbound and outbound
Website and social media reporting – interpreting the analytics data and reporting
Online advertising – Adwords campaigns and social media advertising
Bookkeeping
Transcripts
Everyday assistance
Graphic design
Technical assistance

Remember that the person or company you outsource to may not be able to do everything, they in turn may need to hire further experts to assist them, so factor in the extra costs.

photo by Antii Pajari on unsplash.com

Outsourcing or not?

There is a range of outsourcing options, especially with the freelancer sites such as freelancer, upwork and others.

There’s a good chance there are locals near you providing a range of services, for east of Melbourne see http://manderey.com.au/

While there are some excellent freelancers available, the trick is being able to brief them properly to get what you want.

Again, believe me, done wrong this can drive you mad.

Freelance sites can save you money if you don’t have the funds and know what you are doing.

Rates vary per task, from as little as USD$5-50 , just be warned though, you will get what you pay for.

Go too cheap, or go for the lowest bidder you may be throwing your money away.
I prefer to pay better rates as I get much better service that way.

I have tried many times and found the results can be inconsistent, even based on feedback provided about the freelancer. Sometimes you find a gem, but they won’t always be available if they are any good to start with.

What do you think?

5% of what?

Google by definition is supposed to deliver the best answers for your question, but none so far are very helpful in guiding your decision on how much to spend on marketing.

You will need a simple system to work this out, and make a decision yourself, rather than just using an arbitrary percentage as recommended in many of the articles on this topic.

If you’re already running a business, or starting one up and have no revenue, reading an article that recommends you spend 5%, or any other percentage, of your revenue on marketing is not going to be helpful.

Google is obviously not infallible when it comes to helping you make good decisions about your business. You need a better way to figure out the most appropriate numbers for yourself.

When I last ran the search on the question of ‘how much should I spend on marketing’, the results gave me a range of estimates and rules of thumb.

The recommendations depended on the type of business, whether small, B2B, startup, highly contested consumer goods, current revenue and whether your business is in maintenance mode or growth mode.

Estimates included 2-3%, 10% of gross profit, 12-15 – 25% of top line revenue (gross profit), some suggest net profit, some the word resources.

All hedged their bets.

Some of the articles were about the advertising spend; confusing publicity and advertising with marketing.

Marketing to me includes the planning and decision making, the staff involved or time spent on this work including all marketing, sales staff and marketing support.

Publicity and advertising being the promotional component of the marketing plans to bring in leads or sales.
This includes the tactics and implementation of the marketing decisions. Selling involves sales staff, or in the start-up, the owner and associated costs.

Together they make up your marketing spend, and counted properly takes up a good,
but critically important proportion of your revenue.

The terms marketing, publicity or promotion, nowadays seem to be used interchangeably. Sales are seen as a separate entity, but are part and parcel of marketing. Further muddying the idea of how much to spend.

And yes, some of those articles suggest a 5% spend.

I really think someone plucked that number out of the air and others have just parroted it.

It provides no basis for making a decision on your marketing spend.

Terminology is also mixed up and made confusing by using revenue figures such as gross profit, net profit, above the line, or total resources.

Confused?

You and me too.

5% of what?

That depends.

Let’s agree to start with total revenue before any other expenses, including taxes, are deducted.

If you are a start up business you may have no revenue. Suggesting you spend a percentage, even 5%, on your marketing is meaningless.

Basically it means 5% of nothing.

And that’s where it is not helpful.

How much to spend depends on your business and how well you are going

Startups

Unless you have some sort of funding to start up, and cover your operational expenses, your total business spend comes out of your own pocket, credit card or a bank loan.

This is bootstrapping.

How much you spend on your marketing and promotion needs to be aligned to your revenue targets, and what your product, or product mix is.

Naturally with no funds, or a low budget, a lot of the work is going to be sweat equity = your time and using whatever resources you have at your disposal to build up your sales revenue.

Lets rough out a bit of a business model to give us some way or working things out.

A simple model might suggest guessing (and that’s what most projections are-best guesses) a revenue target, something like:

1. Revenue pa = $100 000 ($100k)

2. The total cost pa to make or buy the products you sell, say $50 000 ($50k)
( this could involve purchasing a product to resell, making it yourself from scratch, your labour and any other resources used to create the product, a digital product will change these numbers too )

The money left after your cost to make or buy is your margin.
In this case $50 000 or 50% of revenue.
But that doesn’t mean you can crack out the champagne if you get there.

You need to spend some money to make that revenue, and that’s where your marketing, sales and promotional spend becomes important and can’t just be a percentage plucked out of the air.

Calculating your margin

Let’s assume it costs you to make or buy your product $500, and you can sell it for $1000.

Your margin is $500 = $1000-$500.

Sell 100 products for $1000 each and you get $100k.

On these numbers you only have to sell 2 products on average a week over 50 weeks.

2 x $1000 x 50 weeks = $100k

This leaves the business with a balance of $50 000 to spend on running the business, including the costs of:

Marketing and selling (marketing staff, costs, publicity, sales calls, shop front, website etc)

Administering the business, and hopefully leaving a

profit after all expenses are paid for.

However a startup, having no revenue, will need to come up with a best estimate of how much they might need to spend initially to earn revenue ie. sell stuff.

Estimate this from the margin. If it is a real 50% margin, and you expect to turn over $100 000, and are very careful with your spending, you might spend 25% or more, of your revenue on your marketing, publicity and sales ie. $25 000. Or you might choose to spend  a lot more to get things moving faster, forgoing any profit and wages in the first year or so.

If we followed the 5% rule it would mean, using our $100k guess, spending only $5000 pa or $100 pw.

That’s clearly nonsense and wouldn’t even pay for a good website, content marketing, digital marketing or the even the time involved.

Established Businesses Marketing Spend

For established businesses, the spending has to come from revenue, retained earnings or borrowings, depending again on margins and the size of the business.

A larger business may already have a marketing manager and sales staff. Or it may just have a manager or owner, sales staff, a shop, or an online store along with digital marketing platforms. These are already drawing on marketing funds.
With a new product the established business is in the same boat as a startup. Although they may have the advantage of already having staff, systems in place and a customer base providing a significant cost advantage.

Conclusion

Obviously every business is different.
If you are starting up you will need to make some decisions about how much to spend on your marketing.

Simple percentage recommendations aren’t helpful as far as I am concerned.

However, it is important to know what you are spending as a percentage of total revenue on all your marketing costs, including promotions and advertising. This will give you some idea, a best guess, about how much you might spend on your marketing.

Better than just some arbitrary percentage figure.

Knowing these numbers will tell you the correlation between your marketing and revenue.

For without marketing and sales, there is no revenue.
Spending little or nothing on marketing and sales just might be a recipe for disaster.

I recently watched a wonderful, honest and down to earth 2012 A TEDX talk by Ernesto Sirolli on entrepreneurship.

He talked about helping entrepreneurs realise the opportunity they had identified, find the resources they needed and then working with them to transform their passion into a way of making a living.

The bottom line is that this does not happen if the ‘expert’ takes a paternalistic or patronizing attitude towards the entrepreneurs. And to really help the entrepreneur, the advisor, coach, mentor or whatever we call them, has to shut up and listen first.

Learning Through Failure

His experience of working with entrepreneurs comes from his time working for an NGO in Africa and absolutely failing with every project. The more his group tried to help the local community, the more damage they did.

Entrepreneurs

The entrepreneur has a passion, a dream to become something better. The way Ernesto now approaches the task of helping them ,is to take the position of a friendly, interested ‘doctor of enterprise or business.’

To sit down with them in their favourite spaces, work with them on the opportunity they have identified and find the resources to help them make it happen, so that they can make a living.

What Ernesto does through listening to them, is to help them find the knowledge and help they are looking for. Not what he thinks they need because he is the expert, or know-it-all.

He doesn’t believe the environmental problems the world is facing is going to be solved through governments, research labs or universities. But through the work of entrepreneurs.

Working with Entrepreneurs

His secret for working with entrepreneurs consists of three parts:

1. Confidentiality
2. Dedicated passionate service
3. Telling the truth about entrepreneurship including:

It’s difficult to do it all on your own

The essence of what he says is that the entrepreneur has to have a fantastic product, have fantastic marketing and be a brilliant financial manager of the money. 

This is the hardest lesson to learn for the lonely entrepreneur working away, trying to make it.

He is yet to meet the entrepreneur who has been able to do all three: make a product, sell it and look after the money successfully.

In fact no successful company was ever started by one person on their own.

Please enjoy watching him for yourself…

Necessity or late-career, starting up a business when over 50

If you’re a mature professional, over 50, and want to start a business; you’re considered an entrepreneur, and known as a start-up. The words don’t matter, but what matters is that you want to create something meaningful to you.
The over 50 entrepreneur is often more successful at starting up a business than their younger counterparts. And in Australia more and more businesses are being started by this age group every year.

Recent research found that older entrepreneurs are more capable of starting a business than their younger peers.

There are many reasons for this. When you are over 50, you don’t always feel that your working life is over; you’re healthier than earlier generations and may have things you want to accomplish. Or give back, influence the world, or help your local community.

Self-employment is often a viable, more interesting, late-career option that could generate income for many years into your future.

Your know-how, skills and experience developed over many years along with sufficient capital to invest makes it easier.

What will you do and how will you go about doing it?
Knowing how a business works can help you clarify what might be possible for you to do.

If you have a professional qualification or specialist knowledge, it makes it a bit easier to decide where to start. It could be as simple as setting up a private practice with some sub-contracting back into your industry.

No-What to Know-What

No-what means not knowing what you can do.

You may need some help exploring what might work for you.

In doing this, you move towards a position of Know-What.

That is, having a better idea of what you would like to do, and can do, in a business that suits your interests and abilities and one that customers or clients will pay you for.

But that is not sufficient in itself.

The know-what is knowing what product or service will work.

How to find a customer, sell to them, deliver your product or service so that you get paid is the next part to master. Doing this profitably is the key ie. to make more than it costs you to produce. Gaining Know-How to do this helps.

No-How to Know-How

No-how means recognising that you’re not really sure about how it all works. That you need a better understanding of how a business works. How to develop products that sell. How to sell them in a digital world—turning your skill or idea into a product that makes you money.

To make this shift to know-how there are a number of steps:

Practical Strategy
We are talking simple here, not huge plans, almost back of the napkin stuff. We want to create a picture of what is possible, to get a clearer picture of what you want to do and how to get there. That also means what you don’t want to do. There is an element of guesswork involved, and you will need to be comfortable with this.

How to sell your products or services
This is how you connect your products or services with customers or clients who want to pay for them.

This is your most important task once you start a business. It’s also where you will need some money to spend. It’s called marketing. Without marketing and spending time or money on it = no revenue, so you need to be smart here and get the best bang for your buck.

The idea is to become an influencer and pull people to you, your tribe. They are looking for you. Stand up!

Business Basics
Strategy and marketing are all critical steps, but there’s more. You still need to get your head around how it all works together; what it takes to run a business if you haven’t run one before.

You will need to gain a better grounding of how all the parts fit together.
While at the same time you’ve got a whole lot of other things happening in your life.

There are 5 things involved in running a business:

• Generating revenue (by selling your products/services)
• Making or buying your product/service (to sell or deliver)
• Selling your product or services (marketing and sales)
• Administration of the business ( finances/banking etc)
• Trading Profitably

All are important components of running your business and all work together.

And more: Structures, tools, systems
I started out 20 years ago when it was much more expensive and harder to start a business. I had to wear a tie, needed an office, equipment and more. It was expensive.

Nowadays there are co-working spaces where you can get a desk and access to a range of services and facilities at a low cost. They really are a hive of activity and energy. With the internet and web, there are far more resources available.

I am often in Melbourne and work out of the Hub, just close to the Southern Cross Station. Alternatively, if you have a business account with the National Australia Bank you can freely access their NAB Village in Melbourne.
This keeps you in contact with other small business owners as it can get lonely working for yourself.

Many of the tools and systems that can streamline your work and business are free, reasonably priced and easy to use.

Summing Up
Be positive about what motivates you. It really is about the art of the possible and deciding the sort of future you want. It can be a portfolio mix of paid work, your own business or volunteer work. You have a choice. It’s your future and don’t let it get away. You’re never too old!

What do you think?

Getting Attention

Look around.

People everywhere are looking at their phones.

Some of them may be potential customers, or clients. How are they going to find you?

Or buy from you?

Any business not online and actively working to reach out to their potential customers, is invisible and potentially losing money.

In space no one can hear you scream

That’s the tagline from the movie Alien released in 1979.

In Cyberspace, no one knows you’re there.

That’s the big reality of any business today.

If you’re in business, or starting a business, you will need to attract the people who need you and who you might want to work with. It works both ways. That means doing the work to attract their attention, and keep it.

Unless you have already have lots of contacts, a good network, are well known in your field or you can get work from previous employers; your website needs to do the heavy lifting; over time, to get the attention of those customers or clients you want to work with.

And it is getting harder, and harder to get that attention.

Most self-employed professional women get their work through word-of-mouth.

But, if they are that busy, why would they need a website?

The benefit for a busy professional is to re-assure clients or potential clients that they are legitimate and it can prove their expertise. This can re-assure potential clients that this is the right person to talk to. It can also be used deliberately to attract or deter the clients you want to work with or not. This can be done through setting a minimum price for services – in sales terms this means ‘qualifying’ potential clients, or ‘disqualifying’.

The main use today of a business website is to publish articles and documents to extend influence. By using a website as a publishing platform it pushes out their articles through Google, or social media, to demonstrates expertise. Not just locally.

Without a website your reach and influence is limited to your local network ie. the people you know.

Who’s looking for you?

Google generates billions of searches daily with nearly 50% and growing on a smart phone or tablet.

Think about it, when you want to know something what do you do? Chances are you Google it.

What you have to offer, needs to be found.

No website

Google’s one job is to match a search query with the best answers.

This allows searchers to seek out ideas,  solutions or fixes to the problems they’re trying to solve.

They may just be looking for what you have.

Bricks and mortar business might do ok if they’re in a busy location from passing traffic, or have the funds to spend on large, ongoing advertising campaigns.

The reality is that many more businesses are tucked away or working from home, hubs, local cafes or the library.

Hence the need to be found for what you can help others with.

When and how to start?

Hasten, but don’t. But don’t take months to get started. You don’t have the time. Like all good projects, you needed to have started more than 6 months ago. Prior to starting you need to think some things through.

Think

The decisions you need to make will determine the future of your business. So rushing out and getting any old website won’t work.

You need to think about how you are going to attract the customers you want to your business and then how to get them to take some action.

The most important way to do this, for professional women, is to write about what you know. You already know stuff; stuff that will help others. This builds up your expertise, and naturally can attract Google searches. You will need to develop research and writing skills and write on a regular basis to create and build up your content. This is critical if you wish to build up a position of authority through your website.

Then you will need a budget.

Case Study

A couple of years ago I worked with a couple who owned a bed and breakfast on the start Great Ocean Road near Torquay, just out of Geelong. They had an old website that rarely had a visitor and even rarer a booking. The first thing we did was had a look at what they wanted to achieve and did some basic research about what tourists were searching for.

It wasn’t hard to see how they could tap into mainstream search terms to attract visitors to their site. We built a neat but easy to update website where bookings could be made online. Within the first few weeks they had $1000 worth a bookings via smart phones, many of those bookings from overseas.

However there was quite a bit of work involved in getting this all to work and keep it going.

Eventually, after several years, they decided that they needed something that was easier to manage, so we shifted them to a site that looked after most of the updates and hosting in one package. See the wix or squarespace links below.

This was an example for a simple website for a bed and breakfast and the sort of work I no longer do.

Professional Women

I now work with mature professional women who want to build up their authority and influence within their industry. They do this through writing (blogging), providing downloadable ebooks, white papers, checklists, interviewing interesting people in their field to create podcasts and more. It’s not hard, and they really don’t need to attract hundreds of visitors to their website, just the right few.

1. Answer the big question first

What need or want can you help your potential customer or client with?
Maybe it was something that you solved for yourself, or you have deep know-how.

Then answer:
How can you provide evidence of this and what can you offer on your site that helps Google link you to the searcher looking for your answers.

The idea is to be an influencer, and prove it with the content on your site.

2. Know your customer or client

• Who are they?
• What do you have that they want?
• Are they using social media?
• What are they interested in?
• Are there customer segments – ie. Geographic areas, age groups, male or female, education level etc.
• What are they searching for, looking for online?

3. Research the search patterns and keywords

What are they searching for online?

• What words or phrases do they use when they search Google?
• Are there many searches for those words or phrases now?
• What are the trends – is there a buzz on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterist, etc?
• Who are your competitors, if any, and where are they online?

4. Plan forwards by going backwards

• What would you expect your website to look like in 12 months time?
• What do you expect to be happening on your website?
• How would you define success at the end of 12 months?
• Do you want to offer digital products for download, capture leads, or provide training online?

 5. Gather your marketing assets

Have good clear images of products, offerings or services

• Get a good quality logo and colour scheme to brand your site
• Register domain names and claim your social media names
• Map out some information about your business, ones your ideal customers might like to read about, or help them solve a problem, include your word or phrase search words, known as keywords
• Start writing content targeted at your ideal customers – these are articles, known as blog articles
• Consider how you could attract subscribers by setting up an email newsletter to capture leads or keep in touch with them
• Put together some descriptions of the products you offer

6. Build an easy to update website

This will depend on your budget

• Will you make or buy your website? ie. make it yourself or pay for help, the latter can save heaps of time
• Don’t call web designers and ask for a quote, give them a brief description of what you want to achieve first, then ask how they can help you
• Build a website that you can update by yourself, such as WordPress, this site is a WordPress site using a Thrive Theme
• Budget for ongoing costs and maintenance and website hosting – websites such as WordPress need the backend software updated regularly- the WordPress core software, the theme (design template) you choose and any plugins. This helps keep your site safe and secure from hackers and malware
• Budget for marketing your website over several months, once launched, to attract prospective customers

WordPress is used in over 25% of the websites built in the world. It gives you the ability to add functionality by using specialist plugins for online training, member sites, digital downloads, lead capture for email campaigns and more. You may have to pay for some of these by subscripition, monthly or yearly, others are free.

Make or buy?

Buy

If you have the budget, pay to get good advice and have someone to build your website. You’ll save a lot of time by engaging a web developer or digital marketing agency. This may help you jump ahead of the pack. Do your homework first and make sure they understand what you are trying to achieve.

A cheaper alternative might be to checkout themeforest (affiliate link) for attractive themes.  You will even find cost effective hosting and website set-up packages for many of their top selling themes. This can save you money. Another one is to Google outsourcing or freelancer websites and go from there.

Make

If your budget is low, consider subscribing to a managed platforms that allows you to build your own site using their templates. These can be customised it by using drag and drop features. These services look after the hosting and maintenance of your site. Your site stays live as long as you keep paying.

See:

http://www.wix.com/

https://www.squarespace.com

https://www.weebly.com/

Ecommerce Sites

I would strongly recommend using the managed platforms for ecommerce sites. While I have built over 50 sites with WordPress, I think the better solution for a small business selling products online is to use these, rather than suffer the headaches involved in adding products, setting up payment systems and running the shop.

Mind you if you are selling just a few products, then a WordPress can work well.

For the ecommerce platforms, see:

https://www.bigcommerce.com

https://www.shopify.com

When I work with my clients, mature professional women, I help them with the shift to self-employment. We work together over 12 months or more to create an authority site that promote their expertise.

This involves developing a simple strategy of what they might like to achieve; mapping out a simple marketing plan to go about this; building up marketing assets and social media profiles; then getting to work to develop the content while building an attractive WordPress site.

This takes time, patience and discipline. It requires an academic approach to create the content, do the research, drafting, editing and publishing to the site on a regular, scheduled basis. The point is not to create content for contents sake, but to create something useful. To start getting the right people searching for your content, and reading what you have to offer.

A professional, well designed website will help you to reach out and influence your industry and attract clients. It takes work and will not be an overnight task. It is part and parcel of your ongoing marketing.

The other day one of my clients told me he didn’t want to do any more marketing.

He had too much work.

Lucky him.

But is that a wise idea?

Marketing activities need to be consistent and continuous; due to pressures of work they can easily get ignored. It’s when things go quiet that the mistake is realised; and believe me, when things go quiet there goes the cash. It will cost a whole lot more to try and regain new customers; especially if you have neglected the ones you had. Think about it, when is the best time to market your business? While you have cash, or when your reserves, if you have any, are dwindling?

Strategy and Marketing?

Let’s start with Strategy.

These are decisions we make about our business. What we’re going to do, or not do, where we want to work and how. Whether we are going to be a freelancer, working for ourselves, or build a business that can work without us, an entrepreneur.

Look at it as a rough map of where you want to head.

Basically it is a guess, a hypothesis of what you might like to have happen or the direction you want your business to head, that point in the map. It gets modified as you go along, knowing that there are many ways to get to a destination.

What is Marketing?

Marketing is the thinking that goes into all the activities we do to promote our products or services. Again it is strategic in the sense that we plan and make decisions: what products, prices, where we promote them and how. Marketing is the how you get to the destination chosen on your strategic map.

With maps though, there can be several routes to your destination – road closures, traffic jams and more. Welcome to business.

Stories, Know, Like and Trust

Seth Godin’s take on marketing is telling a story. Your story. Then seeking to attract people to you who trust you and want to buy from you.

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing makes a similar point. That it is: getting people to Know, Like and Trust you, so that they buy from you.

Both definitions refer to reaching out to potential customers initially through raising awareness.

And gaining attention through an ongoing, continuous process.

The trust factor comes from creating a preference, over time, to buy from you.

It’s not immediate. Like anything, it takes time to grow.

How you tell your story, through and reach out to your preferred customers or clients is tactical. The promotional or implementation side of your marketing. This might involve setting up a website, using social media, knocking on doors, advertising in newspapers etc.

Let’s come back to my client telling me that he had too much work and wanted to back off on the marketing.

Front of Mind

If you allow junk mail into your mailbox you may notice something. Some companies advertise every week, others fortnightly. Others advertise in newspapers or magazine, radio, TV social media etc on a regular basis.

Why?

To keep their products at the front of your mind.

They know that you might not be ready to buy something. But they do know that when you are, that they want you to be aware of their products and to choose them. Think about fast food restaurants. Which ones advertise all the time?

Think about fast food restaurants. Which ones advertise all the time?

While my client had plenty of work, and lined up for the next several months, what about several months from now? What if some of the jobs fall through? Maybe there would be projects he would prefer to work on?

Choose your Customers and Dominate your Niche

The idea of dominating your niche and choosing your customers is about not having to compete on price. It’s about doing the things that you are highly capable of doing and want to work on.

Building awareness is to get known for your expertise, then being hired to work on projects you want to or choose to work on. This is preference.

Continuous vs Discrete

While my client was busy, there will be future projects he may like to work on, or reject.

Continuous marketing is how you tell your story, build up the trust and attract the clients or customers you want over time, just like the weekly advertisers mentioned above.

Continuity of effort helps attract the attention of potential customers.

The alternative is to try and manage the peaks and troughs that do occur in any business if you have neglected your promotional activities. This is the discrete approach with the peaks and trough outcome.

What do you think? Should you ever stop marketing?