Monthly Archives: September 2016

2 Wealth and Riches? What’s the Difference?

Last Friday, I explored the implications of Pareto for the local economy.  This principle suggests inequalities between neighbourhoods are inevitable.  What are the implications for a thriving marketplace in every neighbourhood?  In this post, I want to question this from a different angle by exploring differences between wealth and riches.

[amazon_link asins=’1612680194′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’markettogether’ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’3c36efca-0035-11e8-8854-ab6da33d912b’]To do this I shall review the book “Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the rich teach their kids about money – that the poor and middle class do not!” by Robert T Kiyosaki.  This week I shall explore some positive insights from the book.  Next week I’ll explain where I disagree with it.

The author tells the story of what he learned about wealth from his own father and the father of a friend. The story is well-told and I have found since reading it, I hear what the wealthy say in a different way.  This worldview is new to me although not entirely unfamiliar.

Here are two important insights from the book; I encourage you to read it because there are many more.

The Importance of Learning

One welcome and not unfamiliar insight is learning is important.  The author suggests working to learn is far more important than working to earn.  The wealthy understand learning about how the world actually operates is important.  The more they know, the more likely they are to recognise financial opportunities when they encounter them.  And of course they know what to do to invest in them.

This immediately resonates with the observation marketing is essentially educational.  Most business people seek investment in their businesses, most often through their customers.  This may be particularly true for B2B customers, although I can think of non-business transactions that are also investments.

The point is most of us do not learn how money works at school or in our families.  Even accountants don’t understand it the same way as the wealthy do.  Once you understand the strategies wealthy people use, you can hear them talking about them in radio and TV interviews.

They see themselves as free spirits who do not subscribe to the rules the poor and middle classes follow.  There is a lot in this and I can empathise because I made a similar decision to abandon the rat race 30 years ago when I left my work as a research scientist for community development.

The problem for people who make similar decisions to mine is we do not usually buy into building our wealth.  Most are altruistic and then find later they have to abandon community development and opt back into the mainstream to fund their family.

There is a good deal of common ground between the radicals who opt for alternative employment and the wealthy who opt to build financial independence.  I’ll highlight where we part company in my next post.

Wealth or Riches?

We all know stories of people who win the lottery and in a few years have nothing left.  They were rich but not wealthy.  The wealthy person may not have a lot of money in their current account but can pay their bills.  The rich pay their bills but every time they do so, make themselves poorer.

Of course, the wealthy do this by building their investment portfolio.  They understand and trade in things like shares, real estate or intellectual property.  The wealthy spend time building and maintaining that portfolio.  They may not have a lot of ready cash but once their income from investments pays their bills, they are financially independent and therefore wealthy.

This is an important insight because it gives the lie to those who promise massive riches through some marketing scheme.  It is not the volume of income you receive from work so much as what you do with it.  The people who make large sums of money from their business may be rich but are they wealthy?  What would happen if their business failed?

But note it also means wise investment of funds means you actually don’t need to turn over vast sums of money.

This is what I meant last week when I suggested perhaps we’re asking the wrong question when we discuss inequality between neighbourhoods.  Of course some neighbourhoods will do very well and others less well.  But investment in our neighbourhoods is also important.

Wealth in the Local Economy

But how do we build investments for our neighbourhoods?  Do we rely on wealthy people to increase their own wealth and use it to invest locally?  Or do we create organisations that build assets, they can invest in their neighbourhood?

The last was the original purpose of development trusts, now often called social enterprises.  Their problem is they are not usually run by entrepreneurs and so fall back on what they know, namely dependence on grants.  When they own assets, it is usually a building in which they’re based.  Usually that building is a liability.

This suggests business people are crucial to local regeneration.  It is a pity they have been and continue to be marginalised.  Next time I’ll explain why I think that is, when I look at where I part company from Kiyosaki.

So, this is my question: is it possible to build an asset base in support of our neighbourhoods and the local economy?  If so, how?

0 Self-Employment as Lifestyle or Business

There are two reasons people choose to become self-employed; lifestyle or business.  People are complex and the reasons they make decisions can be ambiguous.  But let’s pull apart these two approaches and see what they offer.

Lifestyle

The lifestyle option is perhaps surprising and yet it appeals to many self-employed people.  Many people no longer want to work for someone else and so choose their own business.

There is something attractive being in charge of your own time, able to fit your business around your life.  This might appeal to parents of young children who have a few hours a day of spare time. Also to people who have their own hobbies or pursuits and want to schedule their business around them.

Now, you would be right in thinking this is not necessarily a wise decision.  Unless you have some other source of income or savings to live upon, this can be a long road with little financial reward.  I know this because it is the road I have taken.

My Experience

After I became redundant, I attended talks about self-employment and found the business lifestyle attractive.  It allowed me to find time to walk every day, which is something I value.  I have a rhythm to each day that I enjoy and would never be able to maintain in employment.

However, even a brilliant business idea can take years to develop. Starting with my community development experience, it has taken me several years to identify viable offers.  I’ve invested lots in time and financial investment in training and coaching to get to where I am.

However, there are advantages.  It has pushed me into thinking very carefully about my market and the problems they have.  If I had a sure-fire business solution from day one, perhaps I would not have taken it so far.  Patience and persistence are the key to this and if you can make it financially, it is a viable approach.

The point is life should be enjoyable and the lifestyle approach potentially places life before work.

Business

But most people take up self-employment to make money.  If they have a good idea and they can plan it and market it, it is possible to make a living.

There are alternatives and these are government schemes and zero hour contracts.  The government wants to get people off benefits and so schemes that provide some financial support during the early months is one way they do this.  These grants are not massive and soon run out, long before the average business is up and running.  This is why so many self-employed businesses do not work out.

Zero hours contracts use self-employment to support the fiction that working as a taxi driver or deliverer of hot dinners is self-employment.  Often these fictions pay less than or equal to the minimum wage and allow business owners an escape clause to the demand they take on responsibility for their employees.

But if you have an idea, the time and the insight to make it work, self-employment can lead to a successful business.  Each self-employed person has their own unique tool box and has something to offer.  They need to package it and build a reputation.  They need to be able to show they have the unique insights required to make something of their business idea.

The reality is, someone with a good business idea may have an initial advantage over the person who chooses self-employment for lifestyle reasons but in a couple of years that advantage may disappear.

Investing in Lifestyle or Business

The power of self-employment comes not from having a good first idea so much as a person’s ability to market their idea, understand how their market responds to the opportunities out there.  To be self-employed means you are uniquely placed to respond to market demand and it is this that develops opportunities that can develop into viable businesses.

It is important to consider how you invest money to build an asset base to support you and your business over the long haul.  A good idea that brings in money is rare as it is; rarer still is the business person who knows how to invest their income so they and their business survive.  The incentive to do this is lifestyle.  You can fund your lifestyle if you work consistently towards it but this is difficult if you don’t know what you want!

So, whether you make the first decision for lifestyle or business reasons, the chances are you will soon need to develop strategies to keep going.  I’ll make a start on those next time.

0 Problems that Cause Pain

Problems that cause pain can be acute or chronic, frequent or persistent.  Indeed it is likely that some problems you encounter will cause some sort of pain.  Pain may be an incentive for a prospect to approach you but be aware they may need specialist attention.

The question suggests three types of pain: physical, psychological and emotional.  The first point to note is some problems can involve all three!  Physical pain will have an emotional and psychological impact.  Psychological and emotional pain can lead to physical pain in various ways.  So, let’s have a go at distinguishing them.

Physical Pain

This is perhaps the easiest to identify.  We all know what it is and what it feels like.  Physical pain may have an immediate and obvious cause or it may not be immediately clear what is causing it.

It is tempting to say leave it to medical practitioners.  If there is pain, get it treated by someone who knows what they’re doing.

However, there are circumstances where employers for example need to be concerned about physical pain.  Repetitive actions and posture are examples of workplace practices that can have a direct impact on the human body.  People will put up with discomfort without complaining for years!

How many managers try sitting in their secretaries’ chairs?  I once sat in my PA’s chair and could not believe how uncomfortable it was.  She was used to it and never complained.  This is not a medical issue, although it may become a medical issue if the problem is not identified and resolved.

Removing the cause of physical pain is not always a medical process.

Psychological Pain

This is about stress and anxiety; it is about how we perceive the world and respond to it.

Everyone benefits from some stress but if the stress never resolves and builds, it can become morbid.  Managers who support their staff by praising their work, through supportive meetings and so on can reduce stress in the workplace.

If psychological pain becomes a serious problem it is likely to be seen through a loss of higher faculties.  The person suffering psychological pain may not feel pain in any way they can articulate.  They will make mistakes, often trivial or frequent or their behaviour will become more abrasive or controlling.

In some ways this is the hardest of the three types of pain to identify, let alone resolve.  The problem can become embedded in the person.  Any change in their environment could be interpreted in a negative way.

Emotional Pain

It may be hard to disentangle emotional from psychological pain but usually with emotional pain there is a reason.  A bereavement, loss of a partner, serious illness are all examples of things that  cause emotional pain.

The problem here is often it is not possible to remove the cause.  For a bereaved person, for example, their grieving needs to take its course.  At least, it is easy to understand the reason and make allowances, provide support, etc.

Where the emotion exhibited arises from psychological pain, there may be no obvious reason for it.  An abrasive member of staff may be in psychological pain and it manifests as anger.  But even they may not work out the reason for it.

Conclusions

If your customers’ problem can be described as physical, psychological or emotional pain, it helps if you can describe it in your marketing material.  That way those who experience pain themselves or in close associates, will see you understand their problem.

It is worth finding out how people with the problem describe the pain themselves.  You may know the technical term for the problem you solve but some people with the problem will not recognise it.  If you can find out how they describe it and use their language in your marketing, this may be an advantage.

Whilst pain motivates many people, it is not always important.  Someone who is anxious about the problems they may encounter in a demanding role, may be motivated by fear of possible future pain.  Or are they?  They want to be at their best and maybe that is a better offer than alleviation of pain.

How important is pain to your customers?

0 Pareto in the Local Economy

Last Friday, I introduced the Pareto Principle and today here are some problems it throws up.  I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the principle that 20% of inputs result in 80% of outputs. However, Pareto raises issues for regeneration of communities.  So, what can we learn from Pareto in the Local Economy?

Inequality is Inevitable

First, consider the Pareto curve.  If we accept the Pareto principle, we do not need to measure everything to make predictions about the economy.  If we took every self-employed person, ranked them from the lowest income to the highest, we know we would get the Pareto curve.

Twenty percent of the self-employed (the same would apply to other groups in the local economy, eg traders or businesses) would make 80% of the money generated by their businesses.  Remember the curve is fractal and so 4% of the original number will make 64% of the available money.  This is statistical and so the real figures will not be exactly the same but the principle will hold.

We can see there will be a long tail of low paid self-employed and most of these will sooner or later go out of business.

What Pareto tells us is inequality is a statistical inevitability.  We all know most businesses do not survive and a few do very well indeed.

One feature of the modern business world is the guru, who has found success and shares their advice, often with generosity and usually offering support at a price.  They have a winning formula, it works for them and they can point to others who have learned the trade at their feet.

But if everyone learns their methods and applies them we will still have the Pareto curve.  Some people will do much better than everyone else.

Neighbourhood Inequality

Now, let’s consider neighbourhoods.  There is a problem here because it is hard to define a neighbourhood; where does this one end and the next begin?  Also, do we define neighbourhoods by area or number of businesses?  By money in circulation or the wealth of the businesses based there?

Whether this is research that would be worth doing and possible to do is a matter for conjecture but we can say if it were possible to rank neighbourhoods according to their wealth, we would expect the Pareto curve.

This is intuitively true, we would expect some neighbourhoods to be far wealthier than others.  City centres for example will have much more footfall than out-of-town estates.

I think we can be fairly confident this is true and inequality is inevitable between communities.  Some will always do better than others.  There are many complicating factors and reasons why some places fare better than others but statistically we would expect that to happen.

So, does this mean my vision of a thriving marketplace in every neighbourhood is an impossible dream?  Well, it was never going to be easy.  But Pareto suggests it is impossible.

But to leave it like that is to allow injustice to continue and for many that is intolerable and increasingly unsustainable for society.  The evidence suggests our world is becoming more unequal and the Pareto curve tells us why, because more wealth is accumulating in fewer hands.

It may be statistically inevitable but if it is, it means so is bloody revolution.  The rise of populist movements worldwide is clear evidence of malcontent, unlikely to be mollified by stories of the statistical inevitability of their misfortune.

I suspect the problem is we’re asking the wrong question.  I’ll return to this issue over the next few weeks.

What alternative questions would you ask?

0 Business Networks and Support

Last time, I discussed how self-employed people bring new ideas and financial gains to the local economy.  Another way self-employed people contribute to their local economy is through business networks and employment.

Types of Collaboration

Not all self-employed people have a collaborative mindset.  Some believe in competition and so frame themselves as hard-headed business people.  They find others in similar fields threatening and do not consider collaboration.

This is a pity because few businesses work without collaboration.  The business that collaborates is likely to do better.  There are several types of collaboration:

Networks

Most of those bullets describe networks and mapping local economies builds a picture of a network of businesses.  In addition there are intentional networks of businesses, which open up opportunities for referral marketing.

Networks are a marketing concept; they rely on your ability to describe your business and to refer other businesses to potential clients.  There is a lot to doing this well and many business owners don’t get it.

The people in the room are not usually potential clients but they may know people who are.  There is an art to making a good referral and it is worth learning the art.

Support

Many business owners are generous with their time and willing to support other businesses.  Traders do this through local traders associations.  Local associations work because collaborating local businesses, are likely to increase footfall and other opportunities to do business.

Mentoring is one example of such support and can be informal or formal.  Other businesses may share skills, products or services.  Informal exchanges of goods or services can help businesses in a local area with what they need for survival.

A great deal of this is informal and takes place under the radar.

Are you aware of example of local informal collaboration?

0 Frequent and Persistent Problems

So, we have had a look at chronic and acute problems.  The next two questions in the Circuit Questionnaire ask similar questions about frequent and persistent problems.

Is the Problem Frequent?

A frequent problem recurs.  It may be worth asking why it recurs.  Is it something in:

It can of course be any combination.  Your customer may have identified they have a recurring problem.  They may have a good idea what the reason is and approach you because they think you can solve the problem.  Depending on what you sell, you may be happy to hand your solution over or concerned to probe a little deeper.

Or they may not have clue what the cause of the problem is.  They cannot see a pattern and turn to you for a fresh pair of eyes.

Is the Problem Persistent?

A persistent problem may have been there for a long time.  It is possible the client may have no idea when or why the problem started.  They may have noticed it and over time realised it is a problem and needs to be resolved in some way.

It may be worth asking whether it is a constant presence, like mould growing on an internal wall or a high density of frequent problems.  A fire alarm that often trips out could be seen as a persistent problem, especially if it doesn’t trip out often enough to call for doing something about it!

So, a member of staff whose behaviour triggers problems could be seen as a frequent problem.  The problem may be persistent where several members of staff adopt the same behaviour.

Frequent or Persistent?

This is not just semantics because frequent and persistent problems may need to be approached differently.  If a staffing problem is one person, the chances are they are the cause of the problem.  They need more training or they have a grudge or they are stressed.

If it is a persistent problem, affecting several staff the chances are the problem is elsewhere.  It may be not so much that staff need more training as an issue with the training itself.  If one person has a grudge it could be their problem; if several display similar behaviour maybe they have a point?  One stressed person may have a problem at home, if it is several people maybe the problem is in the work they are doing or how it is organised.

If you sell mouse traps and someone has mice, it is perhaps a simple sale.  If they keep coming back, is it a frequent problem or persistent?  At what point does anyone ask, where are these mice coming from and is there any way we can address the source of the problem?  If you sell mouse traps, that’s fine, you know the problem and you have plenty of customers.  A specialist in rodent extermination may have a more challenging approach.

3 Introducing the Pareto Principle

Most people will be familiar with the Pareto Principle.  It states that 80% of what you get out depends on 20% of what you put in.  If you omit 80% of what you do, you still get back 80% from your business.  The problem is knowing which 20% of your activities are the key ones.

A book that offers a helpful explanation of how the Pareto Principles applies to business is “80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More”.  Its author, Perry Marshall is a successful American marketing guru.  The book explains the basics and offers links to the author’s website for some helpful marketing tools.

If this topic interests you, I recommend the book as a thorough introduction to the topic.  Like many of these topics, you learn more by paying attention and experimenting in the real world.  Here are a couple of insights based on the book.

Your Offer Portfolio

Let’s say you have several customers who are willing to purchase a product or service from you for £100.  A few of these customers would be willing to spend more on your offers, perhaps £1000 or even £10000!

The Pareto Principle suggests that 20% may be willing to pay more, perhaps up to £1000.  Maybe 20% of those customers (4% of the original) would pay £10000 for the right offer.  The idea is you still make offers at £100 but add the more expensive offers to your portfolio.

If you can find customers who are willing to pay more, the chances are you will have less work to do to break even or make a profit.

Let’s say 100 people have bought your £100 package.  Now you could argue that the figures imply 500 people would be willing to pay £10.  These would give you an income of £5000, equivalent to 5 people accepting the £1000 offer.

But note, it may actually be easier to find the 5 willing to pay £1000 (or the maths suggest 20!) than the 500 willing to spend £10.  Note the Pareto principle is statistical and so all figures are illustrative and real figures may be different but will support the principle.

You may need to have some low-end products to build a customer base but once you are established then the chances are with the right offers, a few people will pay higher prices.

Personal Development

If you have your own business the chances are you are trying to market something you are good at.  Your most valuable work may be delivering some product or service.  The Pareto Principle suggests you will be spending 20% of your time doing the thing you’re good at and the rest of the time doing all the other things that are necessary for your business.

Just imagine if you could spend 80% or more of your time doing the stuff you are good at.  You would be able to focus on what sells and so focus on the 20% of your market that generates 80% of your income.

This is why businesses employ staff, people who can do the 80% of the necessary work, to allow the business owners to do what they do best.  This 80% covers a range of activities.  It isn’t just admin but may be things like financial management, marketing, etc.  But it could also be housework.

One objection to this may be that it is exploiting others.  So, long as you pay a fair wage, what you are doing is opening up opportunities for other people, which is what businesses exist to do.

As soon as you have consistent income, it is worth considering what can be delegated to others to free up time to do what you do best.

Pareto and the Local Economy

Pareto is not necessarily all good news and its implications for the local economy, are at first glance, bleak.  Next Friday, I’ll explore the implications of Pareto for the local economy.

Have you used the Pareto Principle in your business and to what effect?

0 Self-Employment in the Local Economy

Following my overview of the parts that make up the local economy, what is the role of self-employment in the local economy? What is the potential of the self-employed for local regeneration?

Innovation

What do the self-employed contribute to the local economy?  Last time, I suggested innovation, so let’s start with that:

Role

OK you have an idea and somehow you’ve got it to work.  What are you likely to contribute to the local economy?  Note these are possible contributions a successful business may make to the local economy.  Many businesses are not successful enough to make these contributions.  This is the nature of the risk self-employed people make.

However, this is where things get a bit slippery.  There are a number of scams which call certain activities self-employment that are not.  If you become self-employed to receive work from others, whether it is driving taxis, cleaning, delivering dinners; you may be exploited.  This is a way certain unscrupulous business people wriggle out of employment regulation.  Such employment may suit some people but it is not what I am writing about here.

What do genuine self-employed people contribute to their local economy?

The Adverse Economy

Potentially, the self-employed contribute significantly to the local economy.  In practice, many self-employed experiments do not result in a level of activity that will result in these roles.  The economic environment is extremely adverse, perhaps more so than it should be.  If too little money is in circulation, then many businesses will fail simply because there is not enough money in circulation to support them.

Our economy is in serious disrepair and it is for local businesses to seriously address how to repair it.  We know from decades of experience, politicians are interested solely in the big players, corporations or unions and don’t support small businesses.  The result is the self-employed must keep going on their own reserves, a wing and a prayer!

In your experience, what contribution do self-employed make to the local economy?

1 How to Identify Preventable Problems

So, the problem you address is a problem experienced by your market.  It helps if you have experienced the problem too because that shows you understand it.  However, the problem must be owned by your market.  In today’s post I shall discuss some early questions about preventable problems in the Circuit Questionnaire.

Is this a problem that occurs at a specific point in time?

This question asks whether the problem is acute or chronic.

Acute problems happen at a specific time and usually have a clear cause.  Everything was going well until something happened that triggered the current problem.  Sometimes, removing the cause will help solve the problem.  However, it is not always possible to remove the cause and the challenge is to make changes in response to it.

A chronic problem has been around for some time with no clear cause.  There may have been a cause a long time ago but the problem has become a state a being.  Here the reason for the problem may be internal; the person experiencing it will need to make changes to tackle it.

Acute and chronic problems are not all that different.  Most problems have characteristics of both.  So, an acute problem triggered by an event may be no problem at all for one person and an insurmountable obstacle for another.  You can point to the cause and know the day and hour when the problem kicked in but the issue is really how the person responded to it.

Sometimes the cause is a presenting problem, there is another deeper issue.  If someone comes to you seeking removal of a presenting problem, is it your job to do as they ask or probe a bit deeper?

Some businesses deal with the immediate problem.  They are not offering to diagnose deeper problems; they specialise, it’s what they do.  So, a pest exterminator exterminates pests.  If someone approaches citizens’ advice and asks for help with mice infestation, is their job to help them find a suitable contractor, probe a bit deeper or both?

Or is it something that it is worth preventing before it happens?

This question implies potential customers may not be aware of the problem.  This is a problem health services face all the time.  How do you persuade people to make changes to their lifestyles on the grounds that such changes will prevent problems in the future?

What is the problem here?  The problem you are going to prevent in the future, may well be your problem.  A health service faced with increasing numbers of patients with diabetes may seek to persuade patients to change their lifestyles to reduce the numbers requiring treatment in the future.  Whose problem is that?

If I have an unhealthy lifestyle, it is a problem for me but I won’t necessarily see it that way.  The challenge is how to market the message “your lifestyle is unhealthy and it is in your best interests to do something about it”.

My unhealthy lifestyle is a chronic problem and the challenge is to do something about it before it becomes acute.  Once it becomes acute, I may have an incentive but it may also be too late.  The task is an educational campaign that shows me the immediate value of doing something about my unhealthy lifestyle.

Is your problem preventable?

Even if the problem is worth preventing before it happens, there is still a question whether it is preventable.  The consequences of an unhealthy lifestyle may be preventable, if action leads to changes in my lifestyle now.  Once I develop the acute problem there may be no cure.

So, are you trying to prevent people developing the problem, helping people with the problem resolve it or offering palliative care to those stuck with it?

So, you might offer a service that supports people in demanding roles, so that they can review their work and anticipate likely problems.  You may support people in demanding roles, who have a problem and need help resolving it.  You may support people who were in a demanding role, crashed and burned and now need to rebuild their career.

Is it worth investing to prevent?

People fail.  They make a mess of things all the time.  The challenge is to learn from the experience, pick yourself up and start over.  Without failure we would not encounter experienced people who have learned how to handle failure.

People in challenging positions sometimes think they were set up to fail.  Perhaps a malevolent manager put them there deliberately to fail.  But actually, many people learn from their mistakes.

So, when is it worth investing in prevention?  Obviously where someone’s health is at stake, it may be worth taking precautionary methods.  However, one of the things people who face problems learn is the value of making space to reflect and be aware of the situation they are in.  They may undertake coaching not because they don’t feel competent but because they are competent.

Experienced people know they need help.

Is this a problem that the proposition prevents before it happens, or solves after it happens?

You can see this is an important issue.  If your market is professional people, you may be seeking people who want to prepare themselves for problems through your services.  They are confident they can solve their own problems and so they are not seeking a consultant who can solve problems for them.

If someone has a problem and needs help resolving it, they may have less experience and need help with their approach to problem solving.  It may be they need some specific expertise they can’t find in-house and if that is what you offer, that’s fine.

But let’s assume you are a website designer.  Someone’s website is not bringing in the business they were expecting.  How do you know the problem is with the website?  It could equally be a problem in the customer’s organisation.  If it is, your work on the website will make little difference.

Your ability to dig deeper and seek the really causes of problems is crucial, whatever business you are in.  Find out what the real problem is and be prepared to make a referral if it is something you cannot address.  Solving the immediate problem without addressing the reason for the problem may do your business little good.

Can you remember when you solved a problem but did not address its cause?  What happened?

0 Selling Information Online and Offline

If you are selling information online or offline, remember this: you can’t!  Obviously, most information is already available online.  These days a Google search will almost always result in finding the information you need.

Well, what if I invent something, some new information?  It will take about 5 minutes before it becomes available online!  There are secrets but it is difficult to keep them.  I’m about to join a coaching programme and they will share business secrets on the programme.  From what I’ve seen so far, I already know a lot of these and if any are new, I suspect I’ll be able to find them somewhere online.  So, why am I doing it?

Content Curation

Ah yes, you may think, this programme will have curated the information.  True the coach will have accumulated information from multiple sources.  One big advantage will be finding it all in one place.  It saves me the trouble of seeking it myself.

And of course, it may be the information is online but I’m not aware of it.  I could find it if I knew about it.  But I don’t and so someone else is saving me time and effort.

Furthermore, they will organise the information.  This is important, there are any number of tools for marketing online and in-person and each has some value.  Most of them don’t work and one reason for this is tools in isolation are not effective.  They need to be deployed strategically and most people are not good at strategy.

The point of content curation is to find content, organise it and structure its use.  This website has a blog that accumulates a lot of information in one place and to some degree organises it.  It may be of value to someone who uses it but they need to know what they are doing.

The purpose of accumulating this information is marketing.  To blog or to curate information in other ways, increases credibility.  It shows you know your subject area.  It is essential but in no way sufficient if you’re planning to sell a service.

Structured Experience

The key to any service is the way you structure your knowledge so that you can sell it as an experience.  I may know many online and offline tools but it is when I experience using them that I learn how to be a practitioner.

It is interesting that many professionals have a coach.  Indeed this could be define a professional; they pay someone to help them think through their work.  This is sometimes called non-directive consultancy.  The point is the consultor is the expert, their coach or consultant helps them think things through, encourages them to try new things, perhaps suggesting appropriate tools.

Every professional carries a metaphorical tool box.  Knowing the tools is one thing, experiencing their use is another.  The challenge is not to carry around a couple of tools you’re brilliant with but to know how to deploy new, untested tools.

You know most things don’t work and whatever you deploy will be a matter of trial and error.  But experiencing the impact of using new tools, discussing them with others and refining practice enables us to experience success.  Success leads to more success, increased confidence and  effectiveness.  This is why the non-directive consultant or coach offers structured experience and not just a load of methods.

Integrate Marketing, Don’t Bolt It On

I remember many years ago, doing a week’s training in Participatory Appraisal.  They said, everyone comes on this course to learn the tools.  They covered them in about an hour.  The rest of the time was learning how to use them properly, experiencing the inner nature of PA.  And this is true of any practice.

Marketing is not a bolt-on to your main business.  You need to learn how to market your business as integral to your business.  You need to find out what you are good at, experience success and work out how to move on to increasing confidence and success.  Successful professionals and business people pay good money for that.

This is why I write a blog and sell coaching.  It is through joining two or more brains together that we experience success.