Are you an aspiring entrepreneur? You know that is your desire, however you are unsure as to how to attain it? In this snippet of an interview between Dale Beaumont and Siimon Reynolds you will find great recommendations to move from being an aspiring entrepreneur to being a true entrepreneur, with the capabilities of running a successful company.

Siimon Reynolds is one of Australia’s best known advertising experts and Executive Director of the Photon Group, which currently turns over $180 million per annum.

What recommendations would you make to an aspiring entrepreneur who wants to get started in a business of their own?

In my opinion, there is a science to achievement. If you really want to achieve something, you must set goals. Aspiring entrepreneurs need to think about their goals and work toward them every day. They should set deadlines for reaching certain milestones and seek out people who are experts in their field, and follow their advice. If you do that with enough dedication and passion, and if you keep looking at your results and adjusting them so that you are always on track you will be on the road to success. It’s so important to be clear on your goals and the steps required to achieve them, if you’re not clear on the steps, then you are running blind and you will find it difficult to move forward.When you are in the business, it is important to maintain it. These are three simple techniques to increase sales in any business:

• Try to sell more to current customers rather than search endlessly for new ones.
• Offer some premium product or service, high in price and value. Often five or ten per cent of your customers will buy it.
• Stay in contact with customers via phone calls, mail or emails. People like to buy from people they have a relationship with.

For more on this and Recommendations for an Aspiring Entrepreneur Wanting to Start Their Own Business check out Secrets of Male Entrepreneurs Exposed!

The post Recommendations for an Aspiring Entrepreneur Wanting to Start Their Own Business appeared first on Business Blueprint.

So what is marketing anyways? The world of marketing can be quite vast and seemingly too big to tackle. However if you understand what marketing is all about, you could change the direction of your company and see a success far greater than you imagineable. The key is getting it right. In this interview between Dale Beaumont and Siimon Reynolds, find out what marketing is as well some incredible lessons he has learnt over the years.

Siimon Reynolds is one of Australia’s best known advertising experts and Executive Director of the Photon Group, which currently turns over $180 million per annum.

What is ‘marketing’ and what are some of the most valuable lessons you have learnt about succeeding at it?

My definition of ‘marketing‘ is putting your product or service in its best light so that it persuades others to investigate and hopefully buy it. I think that marketing is basically a replacement for door-to-door selling. If we could all afford to knock on everyone’s door and put forward the best case for our product then we would because one-on-one conversation is pretty hard to beat. But because this is not possible, we come up with marketing that will, at the end of the day, be a replacement for what we would have said if we were having a chat. To succeed at marketing there are a number of steps you need to take, I believe these are some of the most valuable lessons I have learnt.

• The first is that you can gain a great knowledge about marketing through books. There is an excellent series called the Guerrilla Marketing series of books, in particular The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook. There are also a number of marketing classics such as Jay Abraham’s Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got, and Permission Marketing by Seth Godin, which is all about creating relationships with your customers instead of just trying to sell to them. Just by reading these books you’ll know more than virtually anyone in advertising.
• Above all, you need to work on the overall proposition. What do you stand for? What is your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)? This is about trying to find a niche, something unique that you can say about your product. If you can find your USP, and own it, it’s a very special thing. The ESP is the Emotional Selling Proposition, a good example of this is the Virgin brand. What is Virgin really all about? Sure, there’s a certain element of value to it, but it’s really about the emotion that comes from dealing with the rebel – the small guy or the underdog who comes out on top. Another example is when I buy a pair of Nike shoes, I feel like I’m ‘just doing it’, I’m getting on with my life, I’m participating. In addition to this, you need to become more popular, which is what your Organisational Selling Proposition (OSP) is about. This is about making your organisation congruent with its product and its ESP. What does your organisation stand for and how can you promote that? The classic example of this is The Body Shop. People don’t just buy their soap, they buy what The Body Shop stands for – its environmentally-friendly image and Anita Roddick going out to the natives of Peru and actually paying them for their recipe. So, the USP, ESP and OSP are what you start with.
• The next step is to try and ‘own’ just one word that represents something in consumers’ minds, for example, when I say, ‘Volvo’, you think ‘safety’, when I say, ‘Mercedes’ you think ‘status’. If you can own a word and a space in the consumers’ minds, that’s when you know you are at your best.
• Then it’s a matter of developing a brand and diffusing it throughout everything you do, not just your advertising. Everything needs to be congruent with your brand – your business cards, your salespeople, how you dress, what your logo looks like, absolutely everything. A good example of a brand not working is when you say that you have the best service, but the reality is that your customers are waiting on hold for ten minutes. FedEx is a good example of a congruent brand and it has become the largest courier brand in the world because of it. [[If you call FedEx, from anywhere in the world, you will be answered within two rings]] and often you don’t even have to wait for one ring! Now that is an amazing, phenomenal example of service! It’s every bit as powerful as an advertisement, if not more. They really want to be who they say they are, and that is what the strongest brands do. Once you have created your brand you must stick with it and have consistent branding, you can be flexible within it, but you must hold your key position.
• The next step is to experiment by developing a series of advertisements that are consistent with your branding to test what works and what doesn’t. At the heart of good marketing is testing and continually refining. You might write a headline that a lot of people respond to, but maybe five times more people would respond to a different one, for example, you can say ‘50% off’ or ‘Two for the Price of One’, and even though it is exactly the same proposition, I can tell you, one will get more results than the other. Experimentation is a huge part of marketing success, if you don’t experiment, how will you know what’s really going to work?

For more of this interview and more on ‘what is marketing’ check out “Secrets of Male Entrepreneurs Exposed!“.

The post What is Marketing? appeared first on Business Blueprint.

Meet Siimon Reynolds. He is one of the country’s most respected marketing experts and has taken home almost every advertising award in the world for his creativity.

From Ground Zero to $500M

Siimon Reynolds built The Photon Group from nothing to owning 50 companies with 6,000 staff and a value of $500m on the ASX, Reynolds made it the 15th largest marketing group in the world. He now speaks with Jack Delosa about marketing, money, and why people fail.

“What are the reasons people fail?” I ask Siimon as he sits across from me in a black Mercedes “Well there’s a stack of them,” He says laughingly, “and I’ve experienced most of them.”

Although he’s built one of the largest and most successful marketing groups to come out of Australia, Siimon Reynolds remains intimately connected with what entrepreneurs in the start-up phase must do to stay ahead.

Pick One Thing and Become the Greatest in the World At It

Siimon illustrates the importance of knowing your core business activity and sticking to it particularly in the early stages of business.

“There’s so much competition, unless you specialise and focus. Why should anyone go to you?” Although SMEs and corporations can diversify into other markets, Reynolds argues that that’s not how they got there.

“What happens is that we see successful companies and see that they do many things, but what we sometimes don’t realise is, how they became successful is they owned one niche and they became an expert at it.”

While building The Photon Group, Reynolds went from a two-man band to owning over 50 companies; most of which were still in the growth phase of their business. He talks about the importance of business owners not only focusing on one thing, but being efficient in the way they develop their model.

“We get stuck having meetings, talking to staff and doing emails, all this peripheral stuff that is not actually generating new income. 70% of your time within the first year of a new business should be spent on sales and marketing. And that’s not the case, the research shows that 11% of a business owners time is spent on sales and marketing. But that’s the stuff that keeps you alive.”

Recency and Frequency

Siimon indicates the keys to marketing are what he refers to as Recency & Frequency.

By systematising, automate whenever and wherever possible with the way you market your business to prospective clients. And, in turn, this will create a cash-generating machine; all it takes is focus and discipline.

“Often, it’s the recency and frequency with which you have contacted a client that gets you that client. It gets you on the short list and gets you top of mind and this makes them want to ring you or go and buy your product or service.”

By automating this frequent contact with your target market, Siimon Reynolds explains that you will remain at the top of the client’s mind.

The Power of Automation

While he was in advertising, his companies would contact prospective clients 16 times a year. Most of these contact points were automated, and some were managed by a person who had it logged to contact prospects each and every week.

“We moved from people hearing from us once a year, to people hearing from us 16 times a year. And that’s everything from articles that were useful, phone calls, presentations or inviting them lunch or sending them gifts or sending them books or giving them a birthday card.”

This was a move which obviously paid dividends.
“What happened was that numerous times we’d be put on short lists for big accounts, simply because we had recently contacted them when they wanted to look for a new ad agency.”

For small business owners, Siimon Reynolds explains the importance of applying this strategy.

“Have a calendar of contact points, so that you know that over the course of 12 months you’re going to be hitting your target market, this many times and in this many ways. And make a diary out of it.”

He encourages entrepreneurs to experiment with different marketing strategies and different business models particularly during the early stages.

“Keep refining the model, the organism gets healthier and eventually you’ve so refined it that it looks magic to a competitor because they can’t understand that it was tiny changes that did it. It just looks so far ahead of everybody else that it’s incomprehensible.”

The Importance of Mentors

Siimon also indicates of having the right mentors around you; most especially the ones who have “built a business themselves or can show you tangible results they’ve produced with other clients” can make the difference in the success of a venture.

In a protest against the slow and theoretical based teachings in universities, Siimon Reynolds has recently built a business school called The Fortune Institute. His goals are to educate entrepreneurs who want practical business education —quickly.

Learn Something Every Day

With all his successes, Siimon Reynolds still spends an hour every day, learning something new.

“People with a learning mindset beat everybody else. They just beat everybody else.”

He explains that talent is overrated and that the persistent learner will out-perform the talented ones every time.

“I don’t have to be brighter than everybody else, I don’t have to have more money than everybody else, and I don’t have to have more luck than everybody else. I just have to OUT-LEARN everybody. And that’s the easiest thing to do because almost no one is focused on continual learning. If you spend even one hour each day learning, and then the rest of the day applying what you learned, you would be able to revolutionise any industry. You would definitely be a top-performer.”

You can follow Siimon Reynolds at www.thefortuneinstitute.com.

In other note, Jack Delosa has been named in the top 30 entrepreneurs under 30, in Australian Anthill Magazine’s 30Under30 Publication. He is the founder of The Entourage, a movement of young entrepreneurs (18-35) leveraging the experience of top business leaders world-wide. You can email him at jackd@the-entourage.com.au.

The post Siimon Reynolds: Why Do Business Owners Fail? appeared first on Business Blueprint.