Jeremy Hall - Confessions of a serial entrepreneur » General Posts

30 plus “Dear John” letters

Jeremy Hall — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 08:16:04 +0000

A small £400 advert in a local paper has resulted in 30 replies. At the time of writing this, the CV’s are still arriving.
The man who sent his CV in from India will not be getting the job, it does help if you at least live in Europe! The three or four people who sent in CV’s with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, well you do not deserve a job. For the others, we are sorry, you are clearly trying hard to find a job and it is with regret hat we have to sent you a letter of rejection. Sending a rejection letter is not a nice task, but unfortunately one that has to be done.

Getting our data for free

Jeremy Hall — Sun, 20 Nov 2011 07:45:58 +0000

I have an idea that will mean all the data we get will be free to us. In simple terms, we collect data on a specific market, i.e. waste recycling companies, then sell this data to companies in this market. I am going to test it with a targeted sector to see what success we have.
Will keep you posted to its success.

Creating a database to market to

Jeremy Hall — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 07:44:24 +0000

We already have a significant amount of data. Regardless, we intend to build a database of suppliers that we can market our business to in 2012. In the twenty plus years I have been working, I can count on one hand the companies that have focused on building a quality database – and then spending the time and money keeping it up to date. Take a look at your own database, how up to date is it. How many contacts have left and how many e-mail addresses do not work? Even if you employ someone to check this data, there are typically mistakes with every company you have entered.
So yet again, I find myself employing a temp to collate some data for our 2012 activities. More investment, but hopefully an investment worthwhile.

Our marketing budget for 2012

Jeremy Hall — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 07:43:56 +0000

One of our key marketing challenges is setting the budget. It can be as big or as little as we want. For a few thousand pounds a year we could accomplish quite a bit. With the internet, our shop window can be viewed all around the world for what is a relatively small investment. Add into that some pay per click advertising, and we will elevate our self to the top of any Google rankings.
The budget can just grow from there. Whilst I view advertising as a waste of time, a mailing campaign can produce results, but will the results be greater or less than the cost? Going back to online advertising, we are looking into the benefits of a You Tube channel. This again needs serious investment into the creation of video clips.
Setting this budget is a problem that most business leaders will have. If I knew that every £1.00 I spent brought back a minimum of £1.00, I would spend £1m. However, we do not know this and there will be a natural tipping point. Be it I do not know what the budget will be for next year, I do know it will be greater than 2011 and we do need to take a few more risks here and be more adventurous.

Mr. Tao and his marketing budget

Jeremy Hall — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 07:40:07 +0000

At Wyse Leasing we employed a Marketing Manager. Simon Tao was a dedicated and resourceful employee who presented to our board of directors every month. Somehow, this 1/2 hour presentation went on for two hours – he just seemed to monopolize our time. He was a fountain of knowledge when it came to our customers and suppliers data. He would tell us how many companies had spent less than £5,000 with Wyse Leasing in Scarborough or the total number of companies we traded with us in the UK that had a net worth over £100,000.
However, he needed a budget, some money to play around with. In those day(circa 2000)we would spend about £120,000 per year on brochures, some advertising, mailing campaigns and the occasional event. Now most of companies like ours do not spend money on this form of marketing, a lot of the budget being invested into online advertising.
So this brings me onto my topic, is a Marketing Manager without a budget like a Minister without portfolio? Marketing Managers often request a budget to spend on various ideas they have, to confirm their existence. In this world of marketing, I can only assume the bigger the budget, the bigger the role. It does make me consider, what will our marketing budget be for 2012?

Marketing day

Jeremy Hall — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 07:39:40 +0000

Reading Nigel Botterill’s book, he notes that every day he spends his first two working hours on marketing. His door is firmly locked between 7:30am and 9:30am. For me this is not practical, but I do agree with having dedicated time focusing on marketing activity every week. Being a person who is sales focused, I would much prefer to be in front of a customer. However, as we grow there may be two, five, ten or fifty sales people who need that marketing input.
We need to focus more on marketing. I know that most companies we visit are exactly the same, there is no clear strategy to marketing, and the best most business leaders do it attend some breakfast club or local seminar.
I would like to dedicate every Friday to this task – along with taking the kids into school, doing my blog, going to the gym, dealing with staff and customers questions etc. You could argue that having a Marketing Manager, we do not need to do this. However, this task of brand development is bigger than just one person.
Maybe dedicating a day per week on marketing is not realistic, but regardless, marketing needs more of my focus.

Collating the data for the new website

Jeremy Hall — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 07:38:26 +0000

Google and other search engines pick up words and phrases and based on the relevance of them to your site, and will decide where to put you in their ranking. We all know, you have to be on the first page of Google at worst, and at the very least in the top three listings when it comes to companies searching for you. The challenge is to work out what people will search on and then to enter this onto your website.
For us, this is a massive task. You can pickoff all the town names, product names, terminology (such as leasing, finance, rental) and then have to mix them together. Having a basic understanding of SEO and Google rankings is just not good enough, the only way to get to the top of the list is to become an expert. And yes, apparently every SEO company you speak to will tell you they are an expert and even more interestingly, how all the other SEO experts get it wrong!
For us, it is all about the basics – collecting the relevant data and documenting it on our website. This alone will take up many, many months.

Our new website

Jeremy Hall — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 08:00:45 +0000

I am not an expert on web development or SEO, but we will need to be. By the end of 2012, I want our www.westwon.co.uk website to be at the top of Google rankings. I may have mentioned this before, but it is incredible how so many companies develop a site then leave it alone. They do not add to it or change it on a daily basis. We will be looking to create a Mecca for leasing in the UK, having a website with all the terminology Google needs to keep us in front of potential customers, and a site where daily changes are the norm.
This is a time consuming and costly task, but one that needs to be done.

How to give someone a target in a role without targets?

Jeremy Hall — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 09:15:36 +0000

Yes, even the Marketing Manager will have a target, a highly difficult task as it is very difficult to measure success from marketing activities. We have is slightly easier as presently no business comes via the web and we have been undertaking no PR over the last few years.
With every business opportunity that come in, we always enquire where the customer heard of our company name. Being in the finance sector, this is a prerequisite for fraud detection, hence, we can clearly monitor what business opportunities this marketing initiative is creating.
This person has to pay for themselves and make a profit. If after six months we cannot see tangible results, then there is no job for them. And rightly or wrongly, this will be made clear in their interview.

Marketing Managers job role

Jeremy Hall — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 08:59:07 +0000

This must be a great job for someone. We have advertised the role as highly flexible hours, term time only where the individual can even work at home. Whilst that may be exactly what someone is looking for, being honest, I do not think the role will be that interesting as I can see most of the time being spent on doing the “donkey” work.
Even before we advertised for the person, I wrote down exactly what we were looking to be achieved. There are two key areas:
1. Getting our name out in the press
2. Developing our web presence
Now, we can add on lots of different things to this job description, but ultimately it will be kept clean and simple.