The third instalment of a series of marketing tactics and ideas for your business.

Are you the sort of person who shouts at Newsnight? Do you grumble at Radio 4? Swear under your breath while you’re reading the paper? I am. We’re the people who care – the people who are politically aware and want the world to be a better place.

Your politics might have nothing at all to do with your business. If you run a software company, you might think that that’s got nothing to do with your dislike of David Cameron, or that you get upset about child marriage in developing countries. You might think that you shouldn’t talk about politics in case it puts off potential customers.

But maybe you can use your passion to enhance your business.

Get A Campaign Going

Find a cause you believe in which is related to your work (even tangentially) and run a campaign around that cause. Don’t just aim to raise money – everyone does Movember (well the guys anyway). Make it into an actual campaign if you can. Your software company might want to campaign about issues of internet privacy or intellectual property. If you’re an ethical lettings agency like my client Catherine Bancroft-Rimmer, you might want to see the anti key money laws tightened up, forcing less scrupulous agencies to act more ethically.

Image by Richard Callanan

Put some thoughts on your website, write to your MP, join up with another organisation which is campaigning on the same issue. Encourage other people to do the same.

And bingo. You’ve got something to talk to your customers about, an instant way to stand out compared to all your boring competitors, a reason to get in the paper, something to write about on Twitter. And you might just have started something which could make the world a better place.

I keep talking about this idea of a grown up business, and it’s one which seems to resonate with a lot of the business advice clients I work with. But what do I mean by a grown up business, and why would you want to be one?

Photo by M.C.P.

The features of a grown up business

A grown up business is one where the owners have decided that they’re going to do things properly. They’re going to have proper systems which can cope with more customers and more work. A grown up business will probably have employment contracts for the staff and freelancer agreements for the associates. They’ll probably be using a proper accounts package, and maybe getting a bookkeeper to do all the numbers for them.

A grown up business is focussed on making decent money

They’re going to make some serious money, whatever that means to them. For some of the businesses I work with this means building a business worth a few million, and for others it can mean getting to an income of 50-60k pa.

Not doing all the work yourself

The owners in a grown up business will be delegating some, or all, of the work to other people, so that they can concentrate on growing the business. They’ll be focussing on supporting the other people in the business so they can do their job well, co-ordinating all the activities, and taking responsibility for the sales and marketing.

Do you want to be a grown up business? Meet me for a coffee and a chat, and let’s see how we can get you there.

You might know that I have another company besides the Joy of Business – Tender Winner.  There’s some cross over between the two businesses, as tendering for contracts is often part of the high growth strategies I help my Joy of Business clients develop. So I thought I’d talk about whether tendering might be a good idea for you.  If you want to find out more about tendering, or other ways to grow your business, then do get in touch for a chat.

When is tendering a good idea for your company?

Sometimes, I do end up telling people that tendering isn’t right for them – it just isn’t a good fit. I’d rather do this than take their money to find and bid for contracts they have no hope of winning.  Not only is this the only ethical choice, with the Tender Winner money back guarantee, I’d end up processing a lot of refunds.

So when should you think about tendering as part of your business development strategy?

Tendering works really well for companies who are big enough to handle a substantial new contract, but are still ambitious enough to want to grow.  You have to be hungry for new business, but your company can’t be starving in the meantime.  As a rule of thumb, if the contracts you’re looking at are more than 20% of your current turnover, then they’re the wrong contracts for you.  You won’t get past the prequalification questionnaire stage, and you’ll be wasting your time.  Find some other opportunities, or ask us to do the research for you.

Tendering also works well for companies who sell products and services which can be judged on price.  Printing, cleaning, graphic design, these can all be judged on price as, rightly or wrongly, they’re seen as commodity services where one supplier is probably as good as another.  Don’t think that tendering is only for standard products and services though – if you look at the Tender Winner highlighted tenders you’ll see that there are all sorts of weird and wonderful contracts out there.

Tendering for business is usually a medium term way of generating business.  The tender process might take 6 months, and then the contract might not start for another 6 months.  So you have to have the patience, and the cashflow, to be able to play a long game.

And you won’t win all of the tenders you bid for.  Not even the people who have been through the Tender Winner Win More Analysis win all of the time, so your company needs to be able to risk not getting the work.  But of course, when you do get the work, it can be a substantial new contract for you, and lead to more work in the future.

The Boston Consulting Group matrix is a classic business tool, taught in business schools and MBA courses all over the world. I was writing about the things I learnt on my MBA course and if any of these are of use in the world of small business, and I thought of a version of the BCG matrix I use all the time with clients. If you want to know whether I think an MBA is useful for running a small business, read this, and here is the classic version of the BCG matrix, as this is a highly distorted Julia version.

The point of this little picture I draw for clients is to illustrate how different services or products bring in cash at different times for the business. And the most important factor in running a small business is cash flow, because without good cash flow you are stressed or dead.

This is a picture of the cash generated by a business which sells three things – cats, llamas and hippos. Every month, the business sells lots of cats. The blue section of the graph shows that cats are a good, regular seller, bringing in regular amounts of lovely money. In BCG terms, they are cash cows. Apologies for mixing my animal metaphors here.

Every few months, the business sells some llamas and some hippos. These are higher priced animals, so they’re good for cash flow, but we can’t rely on these sales as we can do with the cats.

My point is that your business needs both types of sales. You need the regular cat sales, even though this doesn’t bring in the big bucks. But the solid cash flow from the cats allows you the time to develop your sales of the llamas and the hippos, which top up your sales.

Which ones are your cats, llamas and hippos?

Many years ago I started doing my MBA course. I was working full time, setting up and running social enterprises in Edinburgh, and I had to work lots of evenings. I didn’t want to give up my friends and my social life, and I still wanted to go to the pub. I knew that I was going to have to study 10-12 hours per week, on top of the 50-60 I was already working. Something had to give.

Photo by Vicky Townshend

I asked around other MBA students who were already doing the course. One woman told me she got up at 5am to do 2 hours studying before getting her kids to school and then going to work. I knew this wasn’t going to be for me. A couple said that they spent all weekend studying – again, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to resist going out to play, but that I could spend Sunday afternoons (the most boring time of the week) on the books.

And then someone said that they’d given up TV, and it had freed up enough time to study. So I looked at how I spent my week, and thought about what programmes I actually enjoyed watching. I decided that I would tape those programmes; this was a while ago, so I was recording ER and the West Wing on video tape.

And I’ve hardly ever watched live TV ever again. I have no idea what happens in East Enders, and I run away from the living room shrieking if I know Come Dine With Me is on. I record (now on my DVR) some quality drama, comedy to cheer me up, and some films. When you include films, I probably watch about 5-10 hours of TV a week, but it’s all things I actually want to watch, and I’ll actively enjoy.

Apparently, average TV viewing in the UK is 30 hours per week. I’ll leave it to you to decide how much of my extra time I spend on running my business, how much on reading novels and business books, and how long I spend in the pub……