Investing for the challenges ahead

I’ve had an exciting week in London meeting clients, prospects and a potential investor (not sure if we need that).

Nobody is looking at the billboards on the tube trains anymore. With free WIFI on the tube its all heads down in phones. Somebody sat next to me was shopping for shoes. I’m in the right business with 2 shoe clients. It was a really productive week other than getting lost in the Canary Wharf Labyrinth for 30 mins in the pouring rain with Google Maps sending me round in multiple circles. We now have 2-3 new business opportunities, subject to contracts 8 clients and 15 lines on the P&L. I always split the P&L by service not clients so the little channels / services don’t get ignored which I know is a big bug bear for clients and having been a client myself.

In my time spent procrastinating this week I’ve come to a big decision to help deliver bigger results for our clients. I’M GOING BACK TO UNI. I had 2 more conversations with business owners this week who had little marketing knowledge albeit very successful businesses they want to scale further. Their brands and websites need some work before we embark on search so I found myself lecturing on marketing fundamentals. As we are working for a bunch of SME’s this is going to be an increasingly running theme I think that we need to be more than just a search agency / consultants but wider marketing directors / consultants to help deliver bigger results.

So at the age of 44 (its my birthday today btw) and +15 years in industry I’ve decided my basic marketing theory needs some dusting off and updating. I’ve signed up to Marketing Week’s Mini MBA in Marketing. I’m very excited. I actually started my advertising career at Marketing Week selling the classified ads in the back of the magazine so I’m very happy to be back in the Centaur world.