Peter Drucker famously said:

peter-drucker-portrait“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

It is with this statement that I intend to help you, and your company, grow in market-share. There are plenty of patents, great ideas and useful inventions stacked in the dumps, simply because there hasn’t been great marketing to bring those products to the masses who need them. Similarly, for every great invention there is a helpful service that hasn’t been fully leveraged, because of a lack of marketing strategy to profitably bring paying customers to the service provider.

I’ll leave the innovation up to you; that’s what you’re good at. However, if you need to take your idea, your product, or your service to market, you need to be smart. Unemployment sits at an uncomfortably high level, and it’s harder than ever to start your own business. It seems like every week I read about a company in New Orleans going under because of lack of marketing. Their idea was great, but there execution left money on the table. So much money, that if they would have found a better way to acquire customers, they would have been able to be competitive.

There are two types of marketing, glitzy marketing that impresses marketing professionals, and direct response marketing that measurably brings in profits. As a business owner, I whole-hearteldy believe in the latter. What gets us all in trouble is marketing to marketers; hiring a design firm to make a cool logo without measuring its direct impact on sales and customer retention.

If we were to work together, the first questions I would ask you would be about the future you want. Two years forward, what would your business, your personal life, your legacy, look like? Have you even planned that far in advance? If you have, simply enroll me into that future. If not, we’ll work to detail it, with specific numbers and success criteria to know when and how you’ve hit it. Then, we work backwards. If you want to increase product sales by 25% in 2 years, what’s your plan to do so? How will you retain more customers? What is your current lifetime value of your customer? How do you increase it?

I have worksheets I’ve produced to help all sorts of businesses measure their marketing effectivness, figure out how to trim fat, and where to spend more time. The leverage points I identify will help you grow your business in an exponential way.

If you’d like to dig into specifics about your business, I welcome your inquiry. I am available by appointment to meet in the city, however I regularly am flying to visit my clients abroad. As a marketing consultant here in New Orleans, I’d like to help you sell more, serve more, and make our city a better place to live in. You can contact me here.