marketing

Marketing Budgets for Bootstrapping

By brendan at 9 April, 2009, 9:36 am

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?

By brendan at 3 April, 2009, 5:36 pm

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

By brendan at 24 March, 2009, 8:29 pm

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 [...]

Newslettah!

By brendan at 13 October, 2008, 5:31 pm

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

By admin at 3 July, 2008, 4:07 pm

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 [...]

7 Secrets of Great Dinners

By admin at 10 June, 2008, 1:28 pm

I went to an interesting lunch the other day – a discussion on narrative as a tool for coaching, which is a more complex way of saying how stories have impact on people in the workplace. Lots of anecdotes about things that have happened inside companies that have had impact (both good and bad) for [...]

Hard or soft serve?

By admin at 23 April, 2008, 12:32 pm

Last year I met with a British researcher who was out in Australia to talk about Innovation policy. From my point of view, the interesting thing about David Connell was that not only was he a researcher at Cambridge, but he was also, until recent years, the CEO of a Venture Capital fund specializing in [...]

Signature or Mental Blocks

By brendan at 18 June, 2007, 8:15 pm

The other day I got an email from Ausindustry that stated at the bottom: “The information contained in this e-mail, and any attachments to it, is intended for the use of the addressee and is confidential. If you are not the intended recipient you must not use, disclose, read, forward, copy or retain any of [...]

How I learnt to love bad customers

By brendan at 9 May, 2007, 4:51 am

I think that my journey to love bad customers started with Warren. He was making a reasonable living out of multi-level marketing and wanted to embrace the internet. Highly enthusiastic, Warren would never plan because planning and paperwork were beneath him. Instead, everything occurred at the last minute and had to be the latest technology [...]

How I learnt to love bad suppliers

By brendan at 18 April, 2007, 4:54 am

I got a quote the other day from a computer guy, who emailed: “I will charge you $350 to upgrade your Drupal installation to the latest version.” This was probably the worst quotation I have ever received. (Drupal is an open source content management system that I use in one of my businesses.) So I [...]