Whats in it for the Elite?

I’ve been thinking about two sided markets a lot lately. Two sided markets are where two distinct customer groups are serviced by the same provider and the existence both customer groups provides value to the other. Eg Computer Games. Computer Game Developers need lots of consumers with a platform for them to be [...]

7 Lessons in Email Marketing

I got an interesting email the other day, by someone signing up to the free Churchill Club newsletter.  He hadn’t received a username and password for it and wanted to know why.   I explained by email that it was a free newsletter and you didn’t need one. This of course [...]

Its the great ideas I want, not just the good ones!

Last week it was my parents something or other wedding anniversary (north of 45, south of 50).  I got my daughter to give her Grandmother a call to say “Happy Wedding Anniversary, thanks for making me possible”.  Anyway we, my daughter and I,  got into a discussion about who my family was.  How could my [...]

A Process Approach to Effectively Managing Sales & Marketing

After a long struggle, I now have real ‘cut-through’ in my sales and marketing processes. I’ll tell you the secret…[ Note I wrote this 18 months ago, but only just found it again]
When I looked at marketing texts, they tell me that marketing is about product, price, placement and promotion. Unfortunately, this hasn’t ever helped [...]

6 steps to Blog Heaven

The another day Amanda Gome rang me for some advice on how to run her business to have a chat about some future events. We got to talking about blogging and how difficult it was.  I was in the first group of Bloggists for Smartcompany (around 20 of us) of which there is now only [...]

Marketing Budgets for Bootstrapping

A long time ago I studied Accounting at Monash University (well it seems like a long time ago).   When I did it I was in a small sub group who had plenty of varied work experience.  In fact at that stage I had been a software engineer, salesman, army officer and had started and had [...]

Is your SEO expert ripping you off?

There is a nice conversation running in a LinkedIn group called “On Startups – The Community For Entrepreneurs”. The conversation is titled – Is your SEO expert ripping you off?
Interesting as I often wonder the true value of SEO because :

If your competitors are doing it too (likely), are you both paying for [...]

Event Report : Green is the New Black

From the Churchill Club Event on the 19th March 2009
The global energy business alone is worth 6 trillion dollars. that’s a big pie. What size piece can Victoria and Australia capture and can we take a leading role in sustainable design and green thinking? But after discussing “Green is the new Black” with our panel, [...]

Newslettah!

2000 I was running a multimedia business called Carradale Associates and had the opportunity to vend it into a new IT support business. I pretty much let all the contractors I was employing go, other than the oldest one who I really wanted to look after. Unfortunately he and I had a difference of opinion. [...]

On the subject of Scalability

A number of years ago I had a business that offered IT professional services.  We defined professional services as high level IT project skills such as designing networks and commissioning  web server farms.  Edion ran hard and fast from the beginning, clocking up over $1M in sales in year one, and around $3M in year [...]