Small Business Coach – Todd Royer
Business Development Consultant – Todd Royer
Can you afford the time and money to do your marketing so it works? Probably not. It takes you away from your primary business. But since online marketing offers powerful tools for business growth and your competitors may use it successfully, cutting into your sales and biz career, you have a dilemma.
What is really missing from your marketing progress is that you need professional business development consultant advice. You have to rethink how you can get everything you need to use online marketing to your maximum company benefit. The resources are available to you; you just have to rework or recreate how you go about marketing field. If you make alliances with other business owners to pool resources then everything will changes. When a network of allied businesses shares a staff of employees to do all their on-line marketing improvement things happen.
Networks of businesses who hire employees to handle all their marketing activities become free from most of the marketing time demands trade. You can turn you energies to finding best practices and most efficient methods to market and you have a network of partners to develop, discuss and contribute ideas. But what about the money?
The advantage of having a staff for business development is that they can earn their keep. By setting up and running online stores for each network member, the staff generates income. (Sign up for The Art of Business Growth and get links to sites that make this very easy to do.) A network of business alliances becomes the way to get far more and better operational functions than you could on your own.
But there’s even more to a well structured network of business alliances. With online marketing resources set up, the network partners then turn to doing events together those brand the network businesses as unique and preferable to your competitors. That drives profits. And unique events attract and build a loyal customer base that can’t be matched by competitor companies. This is a great system for local brick and mortar businesses of all sorts.
There is one caveat. Arranging and structuring your network has to be done correctly.
Last year my partnership network put together a marketing program that required three of us to coordinate our knowledge of Google Places. None of us could do it alone. In fact my two partners had previously tried the project on their own and had little success. There was a missing piece and that’s when they turned to me. The fact that we all needed each others’ skills to perfecting job and that the outcome was greater than any of us could have had by ourselves made it easy to cooperate. It just made sense.
Go ahead… go to the top of the page. Sign up for “The Art Of Business Growth” video, which comes with follow up emails that explain all the pieces of this system, including many of the resources you will need.
Small Business Coach – Todd Royer
The advantage you get from organizing and offering a live event is completely tied to how valuable that event is for the people to whom you offer it. So creating profitable events is best done by first communicating with your email lists. Flat out ask them what they would like. Or, ask them to choose from a list of three or four possibilities. If you are at all confused by the feedback you receive, then send out another email and ask more questions.
But the real secret sauce for profitable events isn’t just matching the content of the event with the audience – although that is absolutely important. The secret to profits and success is the collaboration between partners in the planning and execution of the event. Synergy is what you are after. You want to design an event that is unique and could only be available through the collaborative efforts of working partners. It’s this collaboration that puts the event out of reach of your competition. After all, your competitors don’t have the same partners and materials available.
The problem with all collaboration is the possibility of conflicts between the collaborators. Conflict, which can serve as an engaging part of the event’s material, is, however, the downfall of events when it happens between the collaborators. Basically partners’ synergy never gets off the ground when the principal creators aren’t able to contribute openly due to disagreements and opposition.
“The basic pattern in conflictual marriages is one in which neither gives in to the other or in which neither is capable of an adaptive role…. The relationship cycles through periods of intense closeness, conflict that provides a period of emotional distance, and making up, which starts another cycle of intense closeness.”
Murray Bowen
If you have selected your business partners because they have a heartfelt passion about some special part of their business, then there’s a basis for compatible collaboration. You are trying to avoid the relationship cycles that bring people close together only to push them apart. You have your area of heartfelt passion and he or she has his/her area of heartfelt passion. That means all of you should far more easily be able to defer to others’ areas of expertise. The collaboration is infused with genuine enthusiasm from all partners and that is what feeds synergy and allows for creation of unique events.
It’s not enough to just arrange the business network logically, including partners with various heartfelt passions for their work, you must also clearly state these areas of expertise among all network members and agree upon leadership in each area by the person who has the heartfelt passion. You lay down ground rules from the start so there is leadership in particular areas of expertise. It’s not that others can’t contribute in those areas, but there’s a leader to be consulted and to guide development in each area of expertise.
These considerations help produce positive results. The profitability of each event rests on its uniqueness; it’s that uniqueness that boosts it’s value to customers. Customers are subconsciously attracted to events and products that are created with cooperative collaboration – after all, collaboration is rare and socially valuable. The results are all about positioning and the network businesses have the opportunities to position themselves very positively with customers and their customer’s friends. It’s essential that all members of the network contribute to construction of a series of events that establish the network’s excellence. Four to six events in a row of highly unique valuable content that was matched to the customer’s desires by asking them before starting, sets the network of businesses apart from all competitors. You have become special in your marketplace.
Business Management Consultant – Todd Royer
The biggest internet marketing problem for small and medium sized businesses person who has running an organization is finding the time to be involved. Then when a business owner does allot part of a day he/she finds the technical knowledge needed just to do simple things is overwhelming. It’s been happening this way for over twenty years now. Back then it was having to learn about LAN (local access networks) and finding faster computers every year or two. Now it’s far more sophisticated.
The problem is this, you can act as if an internet presence doesn’t require your attention, but you know better and will feel badly for ignoring this part of your business. So where does that leave you? You have to look for help and rely on people you don’t know, allowing them to access vital & administrative parts of your organization. Even worse, over time you become very dependent upon those technical support employees.
With a network of partners’ business management consultant everything changes. You are now part of an executive group that can pool resources. It’s possible for your group to hire a small staff that handles the websites and internet work for all of your network managerial work. That’s a huge advantage… and you don’t feel more and more dependent on a single person. Instead you become more and more confident you know how to handle your online marketing.
Here is where the structure of your network comes into play. If you have built the network with a larger company at him middle and a collection of smaller companies as partners then the larger company is probably the leader. Since all members are selected partly for keyword advantage and partly for the advantage of possessing a heartfelt passion for some part of their business, the network structure has to protect these assets. To build your networks strong have your own management consultant doing no more delay.
Leadership by the larger company should provide stability that the smaller companies can’t offer. The point of this leadership is not to dominate decision making, but to keep the network together and heading forward. The smaller partners add many possibilities for creative sales events that the larger company can’t do without them.
There are a variety of tactical reasons that should make sense before a business partnership can be considered. Your skills have to be complimentary, your businesses should work better together than they do apart, and each partner should bring something unique to the table. But consider this.
What types of interactions will you and your potential partners be involved with? You have to study this question. Will those interactions bring more life and more opportunity to everyone and will they not cut off other people’s growth? These are important issues. If you can answer yes to both of these questions, then you have the foundation of a relationship that will not eat away at your integrity or your emotional energy.
How you feel about your business partners over the long haul is very important and to lay down a successful foundation for those relationships right from the start you have to know they are going to be positive. The interactions are going to produce results that you will be proud of.
In practical terms, you have to begin seeing the synergy that is possible by working together and know that synergy will be a positive force you can thrive on. In the networks I coach I want the business owners to develop events around activities they are passionate about. In other words, I want the two or three owners to work on events where each is contributing from the center of their life’s most heartfelt interest. The results of those collaborations are very likely to yield extreme positive synergy. That’s what you are after.
Look for your own heartfelt passion and begin exploring how you would like to share that passion. This exploration will give you guidance about who to select as a business partner. Don’t be rigid about your demands, be creative about the possibilities. But be sure to ask penetrating questions about any potential partner’s heart felt passions. That is what you want to know you are going to be collaborating with.
Networks built around these heartfelt desires and passions offer exceptionally positive synergies and creative possibilities. Those are the synergies that you can shape into unique events and products for your customers and clients. That’s how you set yourselves apart from all your competition. You offer unique heartfelt events and products that you are proud of. Customers are strongly attracted.
