Date: April 2015

This month has been the biggest month in Marketing Eye's history. Our sales have exceeded our forecasts by over 40%. As a professional services firm, this is great, but not as easy to manage as one might think. 

Marketing Eye is at the end of the day a consulting firm with billable hours, not too dissimilar to a law firm or accounting firm. When there has been a huge surge in sales, it means that there needs to be enough people to fulfill the work that the agency has been employed to do.

Instead of working "on" the business, I am working "in" the business doing client work. This is hard, as I am a perfectionist and everything that I do has to be "perfect". As we all know, perfection does not exist, so the pressure I place on myself is enormous.

Mark Twain once said “it usually takes me three weeks to write a good impromptu speech” and he probably wasn’t joking. The best speeches you’ve ever heard were meticulously scripted and rehearsed before they were delivered with that engaging element of panache that had you so hooked.

No matter whether you are a politician, motivational speaker or inside sales rep, you need a good script and you need to practice it. A dynamic script will ensure you have every base covered, including lapses of knowledge, any objections you may counter and a deep understanding and awareness of the product.

Many businesses were in rebuild mode last year and are slowly creaping back from the economic turmoil of the last few years. It's been trying times and like most entrepreneurs, I am cautious about what lays ahead.

A reluctance to too much risk in the business is something that has held me back time and time again - and with good reason. I want to scream from the rooftops that I am ready and prepared to take risks to achieve my ultimate goals, but I know that it is fortuitous that I hold back and think through things a bit more deeply.

We are embarking on an influx of new employees. Reflecting on our growth and what it means to the business, I am more determined than ever to get our onboarding process right.

Fortunately, marketing is our forte and as such, there are a few things that we can do to make the onboarding process memorable.

It's dawned on me that old-fashion marketing managers are becoming increasingly unsettled in their high chairs with the massive transformation that has occured over the past 5 years in responsibilities.

I use to say, "marketing provides the forum for sales to occur". And that still rings true today, but what needs to be added to the bow is "marketing is responsible for revenue derived from inside sales platforms and anything digital or content driven".

Marketing practices within the workplace must continually evolve and this evolution must occur through legitimate avenues to education because an education without substance is no education at all.

So when you look at subscribing to education programs, ensure that they are legitimate and conducted by experienced industry professionals.

The journey that Marketing Eye has taken over the past few years has hit a major milestone and the business is now heading into a future rich with possibility.

This is despite our expansion into the US, which was undertaken with a half-arsed approach; we set up ‘part-time’ and employed a few people who were left to their own devices. After initial training, of course.

Failure is inevitable and is something that is mostly out of our control. After all, who actually sets out to fail? I don't. But it happens, a little more often than I would personally like.

I fail at so many things; staying true to walking my dog each day, keeping 100% of employees engaged all the time, communicating the value proposition of our business when we have severely overserviced a client and it has then become an expectation, keeping a timesheet, and letting go.

My biggest failure 

In the past few months, I have had a business that is fairly much smooth sailing. We are adapting to our growth issues and ensuring that we streamline processes and constantly improve what we are doing in every facet of the business.

It's interesting to go through this process and realise that after 10 years, some sort of switch has been turned on, and we are picking and choosing our clients. We can't scale fast enough to cater for our burgeoning growth. Scale for most businesses isn't hard as long as you have the right processes in place. But for us, it is extremely difficult. 

Have you ever wondered about the reason why when you think of someone, they somehow appear? I do - all the time!

Tapping into my intuition has kept me in good stead and when I have ignored it, it has always come back to bite me.