“Free Advice is Worth The Price” – How to Find Advice You Can Trust For Your Growing Business

“Free Advice is Worth The Price” – How to Find Advice You Can Trust For Your Growing Business

by | Feb 14, 2020 | Fractional CMO, Insights, Marketing Planning & Execution

“Free Advice is Worth The Price” – How to Find Advice You Can Trust For Your Growing Business

Written By Rajat Kapur

As a business owner or a senior leader in a growing company, asking for help can be hard. There’s a certain expectation and pressure you feel to have all the answers. Perhaps you launched your own business and are out to prove that your vision is a viable one. You want to show that you’re capable of making it a success. 

What we’ve learned, though, is that vulnerability – even for the most esteemed professionals – is a part of life. It’s okay to not know everything and, importantly, it’s okay to ask questions (we wrote about this in our ABCs of What We’ve Learned So Far at &Marketing blog series under the letter “V”). If we don’t seek advice from others, we are limited to our own thoughts and perspectives, which hinders innovation. Without a trusted source of counsel, there is no growth. 

One common challenge that many of our clients, partners, and friends in senior leadership positions struggle with is where they can find sound advice. As an entrepreneur and small business owner who founded a startup just a couple of years ago – and as someone who gives advice for a living – this is a challenge to which I can certainly relate. The good news is that if you’re actively seeking advice, you’re doing the right thing. The success we’ve seen at our company would not have been possible without the input from several trusted people. The question is though, where should you go for advice? And which advice should you take seriously, and which should you ignore? I’ve pulled together a few suggestions to help you be more thoughtful about where you source insight.

Free advice is worth the price

Besides being slightly humorous, the above quote is not always true. However, it sometimes is completely true, and it’s hard to tell the difference. Informally, we all get advice from those around us – our family, our employees, our customers, and the people we meet in less formal professional and personal settings. How many of us received unsolicited advice on our business at a social setting that was completely off the mark? This is the type of advice you may want to ignore. 

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Do they speak from experience? Do they know my industry or challenge?

Do they have a full understanding of my business?

Does their advice align with our company’s vision?

Do their suggestions reflect current trends and ways of working? 

Are they biased in any way?

Do they have an agenda? Is there something in it for them?

“The Rule of Five” 

This concept has been around for a while, but I heard it most recently from podcaster Lewis Howes, and I love his words:

“You are the mathematical average of the five people with whom you spend the most time. So, choose carefully.”  – Lewis Howes

We are in control of the people from whom we receive input and who we allow into our mind-space. If people are giving you bad advice, why do you continue to listen to them, let alone allow them in your inner circle? Sometimes we all need to take a step back and assess the people with whom we share our time. Your “five” should share your values and vision. Don’t get me wrong, though – you shouldn’t always ignore critics. Facing a harsh reality, or learning to think about things from a new lens, is how we make progress – so allowing a counter-perspective can be extremely valuable. But ensure your confidants have your best interests in mind, and that they speak from a place of experience that is valuable to your situation.  

How to find better advice 

In helping clients with strategic guidance over the years, answering the following questions is a great first step: 

What is your organization’s vision?

What are your goals for the year?

What challenges do you currently face, or what might you face in the future?

Upon whose advice should I rely? 

Then, map out who might have the right insight for you:

  • Former colleagues, mentors, or managers. They tend to know you very well, including both strengths and weaknesses.

  • Subject matter experts. They may know your industry, a particular function, or important trends very well. They can help you ‘see around corners’ or identify blind spots in your thinking.  

  • Other business owners (or people in similar roles at other companies). They can likely relate to the day to day struggle of your role and the unique associated pressures.  I regularly speak to direct competitors about the challenges of managing and growing a team, working with difficult clients, and maintaining sanity. 

  • Suppliers and vendors. Quite often, those who rely on you for their livelihoods have a wealth of knowledge.

  • Customers. By creating a mechanism to engage your customers as peers, you can learn quite a bit about how to better serve them. One way to ensure these customer interactions are outside of the day to day transactional nature of your relationship is by creating a customer advisory council.  We have written extensively about how to go about launching a customer advisory council and the Dos and Don’ts of a Customer Advisory Council. 

  • Team members. Don’t limit yourself by only looking externally. The big brains that are already at your fingertips may cherish the opportunity to think bigger about your business.

Mini Case Study

Recently, we helped a company looking to break out of stagnancy create an ‘advisory board.’ Their leadership team had grown the business from nothing over the past decades, but had no exit plan as their retirement drew nearer. We helped them create an advisory board to help them optimize their business processes, grow their top and bottom lines, and prepare for transition. Based on these needs, this group ended up being populated by:

a former customer, who had retired but had first-hand knowledge of the buying criteria in the industry (and a huge personal network);

a retired VP of sales who worked with our client and provides advisory services to others in the industry;

a former CFO who had relevant experience in optimizing similar companies’ product assortment by driving standardization;

an expert with experience in the private equity space who could help identify potential existing options.

Tips on finding the right mix

If you don’t already have people in your network to reach out to for advice and mentorship, here are some tips based on my experience:

  • Request referrals or introductions. If you already know someone in your prospective advisor or mentor’s network, ask if they’ll make an introduction. Many successful people in senior-level positions receive regular requests for advice. The name recognition may catch their eye in their inbox and up your chances of them reading the email. It may also establish credibility and build trust. 

  • Listen first and ask questions. If you have been introduced to someone by a colleague or friend, make the effort to learn about the person and their business. Don’t dive head first into asking them for something. Ask questions about their thoughts and approach. 

  • Make it a win-win. Don’t look self-serving. Figure out how you might be able to help this person in return. Often, formal advisory requires compensation. 

  • Do your research. If you already have a specific person in mind that you’d like to connect with, don’t go into it blindly. Treat it like a job interview. Find as much background as you can on the individual’s experience and their business. Ask others. This will also help you determine if they’re the right fit for you. 

  • Don’t discount “gut feel.” At first glance, those you believed would be your best potential advisors may not be the right personal fit. Personality and fit matters if you are going to rely on this person’s ongoing support and advice. 

  • Make your message clear. While you don’t want to be too aggressive with your ask, be transparent about what your goals are the specific questions you have for them. This is especially important if you’re reaching out via email or LinkedIn. Make it easy for them to quickly understand what you’re seeking. If they have to “decode” your message, it may frustrate them, which makes a bad first impression. 

In our tech-driven world, markets and customers are constantly changing. To help keep up, you need to think outside of your regular networks of suppliers, vendors, employees, friends, etc. You may not get the winning answer or solution you’re looking for right away, but an outside perspective will get your brain thinking in ways it wasn’t before, and could eventually help you come up with that next big idea. 

If you’re seeking advice related to marketing, we’d be happy to help. We’d love to learn more about your business and how we can work together to help it grow. Contact us for a free consultation!

About the Author

As the founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, Rajat “Raj” Kapur strives to provide growing businesses of all sizes unparalleled marketing strategy and execution services. Raj brings nearly two decades of professional experience in marketing, sales, and strategy development experience spanning B2B and B2C Fortune 50, mid-sized, and startups.

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

Your 2020 Marketing Planning And Execution Guide

Your 2020 Marketing Planning And Execution Guide

by | Dec 12, 2019 | Insights, Marketing Planning & Execution

Your 2020 Marketing Planning And Execution Guide

Written By Rajat Kapur

On

Most growing businesses are asking themselves the same question: Are we ready for 2020? The answer to the question depends on what your unique organization is hoping to accomplish next year. How will you plan your goals and set up a strategy to execute them?

Marketing planning and execution can be a challenge for companies of any size, but it can often be particularly daunting for growing businesses. Chances are, you might be struggling to strategize and map out what the coming year or even the next quarter should look like. If you do have an awesome plan in place, maybe you’re not quite sure what the execution part looks like. Why is this? More often than not, it all comes down to resources. Modern marketing departments often need up to 10 distinct roles, so having the bodies to staff a full marketing team is not always feasible. But, do not be discouraged. By taking it one step a time, and having the right tool, you’ll be on your way to setting yourself up for success in 2020. Let’s start by going back to the basics.

What Does Success Look Like For You?

 

When it comes to marketing no one size fits all approach should be taken because there’s something about every growing business that’s truly unique. However, the first step you should always consider is developing your marketing framework. Start by zeroing in on what your long-term success vision is. A success vision will help you narrow your focus. In his Inc.com article “Creating a Company Vision,” Ari Weinzweig, founder of Zimmerman’s, explains it well:

“It’s not as mystical or out there as it sounds. A vision, quite simply, is a picture of what success will be at a particular time in the future. It encompasses answers to an array of questions: What does our organization look like? How big is it? What are we famous for? Why does anyone care about what we do? How do people who work here feel about their jobs? How do I, as the founder, feel about the business? What’s my role in it? Complete the visioning process, and you’ll have a clearly articulated end for your organization— something that won’t change every time the market or your mood shifts.”

So carve out some time to spend on your vision, because that is what you’re going to plan your entire tactical calendar around for the next year.

Once you’ve done that, it’s time to dig deeper. Ask yourself the following questions:

  • Who are my target prospects?

  • What are my prospects’ biggest challenges? (What problems are they looking to solve?)

  • What makes me unique as the solution to these challenges? (Go ahead and brag a little bit!)

  • What marketing tactics can I use to attract my consumer’s attention? (Sometimes it helps to think about what other companies have done that you’ve noticed and responded to)

Don’t Boil the Ocean

Once you decide what tactics you want to use to attract your prospects’ attention, take a look at who on your team can take ownership of marketing management. Try mapping out all the things you aspire to execute in a given period of time, but be realistic. Make your goals reasonable, measurable, and choose a finite number of tactics on which to focus monthly for the next six months.

When it comes to planning and executing those tactics for the next six months, the importance of having a marketing calendar can’t be emphasized enough. The calendar should have the dates, themes, tactics, success metrics, links to relevant documents, and arguably, the most important piece: one single owner. Since you may have multiple employees, management, outside contractors or agencies working with your company, having “everything in one place” increases focus and allows you to quickly spot errors, bottlenecks, and opportunities.

Let this calendar be your guide. Here are a few suggestions for creating this calendar.

Execution Tips

  1. Assign one person to ‘own’ the execution calendar – it needs to be an accessible, working document where everyone goes to make updates at least once every two weeks (if not multiple times per week!).

  2. Make sure that the cross-functional team uses this document as a single source of planning so that everything stays in one place.

  3. Decide what success is and how it will be measured.

  4. Pick tactics that meet the success vision, and select success metrics before execution.

  5. After each phase of execution, document the results and determine if they met expectations.

  6. Adjust your strategy as you go! If it’s working, keep it up. If it’s not, make some adjustments.

  7. Check-in often, track your progress and celebrate the wins.

If you follow these steps. 2020 has the potential to be the best year yet for your business. Ready to get a jumpstart on your 2020 marketing planning and execution? Need some examples and a guide?

Download our FREE Marketing Planning Workbook for a guide to planning your marketing like a pro!

 

DOWNLOAD WORKBOOK
About the Authors

As the founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, Rajat “Raj” Kapur strives to provide growing businesses of all sizes unparalleled marketing strategy and execution services. Raj brings nearly two decades of professional experience in marketing, sales, and strategy development experience spanning B2B and B2C Fortune 50, mid-sized, and startups.

Marketing Director Tracey Colla focuses on ensuring each client’s needs are being met in a timely, productive, and creative way. She is a well-rounded marketer, with a talent for identifying uncovered opportunities, and go-to-market strategies and launches. Marketing planning is one of her favorite things to work on!

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

How NPS Can Collect Valuable Insight For Businesses Of All Sizes

How NPS Can Collect Valuable Insight For Businesses Of All Sizes

by | Dec 4, 2019 | Business Intelligence & Analytics, Insights

How NPS Can Collect Valuable Insight For Businesses Of All Sizes

Written By Rajat Kapur

On

What is NPS, and why is it important? 

NPS. It’s an acronym you’ve likely heard tossed around before, but it may be something you’ve associated with larger companies, like Netflix, Starbucks, or Amazon. The reality is, though, that NPS can be just as effective for growing businesses of all sizes – and it’s something we at &Marketing often recommend.

Net Promoter Score (or NPS), measures customer experience and brand perception and helps predict a business’s growth. In other words, it’s a quick way to gather customer insights for your business. The calculation is based on the answer to a simple question where respondents answer “How likely are you to recommend company/brand/product X to a friend, colleague, or relative?” using a scale of 0 – 10.  0 represents “not likely at all” and 10 represents “extremely likely.

Respondents are then grouped into the following categories:

  • Promoters = respondents giving a 9 or 10 score

  • Passives = respondents giving a 7 or 8 score

  • Detractors = respondents giving a 0 to 6 score

The Qualitative Component

Just as important as the numeric component described above collected through quantitative questions, qualitative feedback can also be gathered from your customers through NPS. You can complete the qualitative portion either as part of your survey, or as a 1:1 interview. 

At &Marketing, we find that this is where you unlock the greatest value, as open-ended questions allow you to dig deeper and get more detailed insights from the people consuming your brand. These responses tend to be more actionable to a small or medium-sized business than the actual numeric calculation. If you’re interested in incorporating more qualitative components to your NPS framework, we’re happy to help.

The Pros and Cons

Let’s break down the pros and cons of NPS to determine whether these components might be able to contribute to the growth of your brand.

Pros

  1. It’s quick. NPS allows you to efficiently gauge areas for improvement, versus traditional surveys, which take a long time to fill out and can focus on areas that the customer doesn’t actually care about. It’s also quick for respondents. With a short survey, you’re likely to get more people to actually take it as opposed to a more time-intensive one. 

  2. It’s focused. You can hone in on the areas that drive customer satisfaction and referrals, in customer terms. Instead of asking several questions about super specific encounters with your brand (which might frustrate customers), you keep it high-level and focus on the bigger story. 

  3. It’s measurable. You can calculate a ‘score’ so you can understand if you’re doing well (high number) or have significant room for improvement (low or negative). 

  4. It’s easy and inexpensive. It’s a simple process to execute and comes at a low cost for smaller budgets.

  5. It’s almost immediately actionable. Are you looking to take your business to new heights in the new year? The data from NPS is a great place to start to put that plan into place. 

Cons

  1. It’s not scientific. Despite being numeric, NPS is not based on a legitimate scientific formula or statistical significance.

  2. All customers are seen as equal. The reality is, each of your customers is different — they might be different sizes, come from different backgrounds, and may have varying needs—  you’re not always comparing apples to apples with NPS. 

As you can see, the pros typically outweigh the cons unless you feel strongly about a scientific formula or a specific weighted structure to your results.

Now, let’s touch on a few quick reasons NPS is beneficial for growing businesses by focusing on three specific areas: change, growth, and results. 

You can monitor changes over time

Because NPS is a quick and effective way to take the pulse of customer satisfaction, you can use it to measure changes based on any important benchmark (business cycle, management change, new branding, new product, change in product, etc). 

You can recognize room for growth

You can use the insight from Detractors as an opportunity to learn about potential areas for improvement, which is critical when you’re looking to grow your business. 

You can get simple and direct results

Formal NPS methodology only requires one direction question, with a 1-10 answer. However, depending on your business challenges, we recommend implementing a few additional open-ended questions to gather more extensive feedback.

Are you convinced of its value yet? &Marketing can help implement NPS for your current or former customers to help discover what’s most important to them, and what makes your company unique.

Ready to get started implementing NPS into your business growth strategy? For more background on NPS and help with determining how to get the most value from it, please contact us. &Marketing prepares, conducts, and helps analyze NPS surveys both for ourselves and our clients 

About the Authors

As the founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, Rajat “Raj” Kapur strives to provide growing businesses of all sizes unparalleled marketing strategy and execution services. Raj brings nearly two decades of professional experience in marketing, sales, and strategy development experience spanning B2B and B2C Fortune 50, mid-sized, and startups. 

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

Kissing the Bricks! Celebrating Two Years Of &Marketing With Our First In-Person Meeting

Kissing the Bricks! Celebrating Two Years Of &Marketing With Our First In-Person Meeting

by | Nov 7, 2019 | Insights

Kissing the Bricks! Celebrating Two Years Of &Marketing With Our First In-Person Meeting

Written By Rajat Kapur

On

Last week we held our first ever in-person team meeting at &Marketing. The goal was to celebrate the milestone of how far we’ve come after working together for over two years. Most of our team works from “wherever” and finally had a chance to meet one another face-to-face! We enjoyed laughs, plenty of food & drink, excellent dialogue led by our domain experts, and a surprise trip to “kiss the bricks” at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The entire trip was a game-changer for our team, but here are a few of my biggest takeaways.

Highlights 

I expected everyone to enjoy meeting in person, and they did! During our hiring process, we don’t just look for smart, talented, and technically qualified candidates. We painstakingly ask questions about work style, dealing with ambiguity, and other intangibles to ensure each person will blend well with our existing team and work culture. Since most of our employees come from personal referrals, we can prioritize how adaptable and easygoing people are without much effort. Mix all of that with some wonderful meals, a few late nights, and some well-orchestrated “&Marketing Trivia” about hidden fun facts (not all of which were politically correct!) about our team. 

Biggest Surprise: 1+1=3 

The lightbulb moment that surprised me the most during this gathering was the amount of concrete, work-oriented actions that came out of the brainstorming and ideation. Each of our domain experts presented new ideas and best practices as they relate to their specific areas of focus. We encouraged questions, interruptions, and provocations to take what the speaker discussed and bring it to life by applying it to our everyday thought process and work execution. This is where the real power of all of these people together came to life.  

At least ten different moments, we thought of an intersection or collaboration that either wasn’t happening or could happen better on a day to day basis. We joked that these types of ideas “paid for the meeting,”  because if executed, these concepts actually might pay for the costs of meeting many times over. 

 

 Planning for 2020 

This was also a great opportunity to take a step back and look forward to develop our 2020 plan. In the chaos of the everyday grind— especially at a small company— we don’t think about our longer-term journey. This mentality is accurately captured by the below mini-blog from the great Seth Godin.   

“A Year From Now” 

Will today’s emergency even be remembered? Will that thing you’re particularly anxious about have been hardly worth the time you put into it?

Better question: What could you do today that would matter a year from now?

We used our meeting time to:

Reflect on where we have succeeded and struggled

  1. Identify our biggest opportunities for the upcoming year
  2. Set concrete goals to improve service delivery, employee satisfaction, and most importantly, our clients’ results!  

What’s Your 2020 Plan?

Let this be your call to action. Ask yourself these questions:

  • Has your team gotten together recently?

  • Have your team identified your biggest challenges and top goals for the next 12-24 months?

  • If you are a remote team, how you can bridge the distance gap that can sometimes occurs? How can you set aside distractions and transform the culture and trajectory of your business?

 

Sign up for &Marketing’s newsletter to receive more updates on how we create a positive and motivated remote work culture.

About the Author:

Rajat “Raj” Kapur is the founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, and a board member of the Kind Like Joey Foundation.  After a career working with large, global companies, he’s dedicated to providing growing businesses unparalleled marketing support. 

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

A Legacy Of Kindness & My Proudest Professional Accomplishment

A Legacy Of Kindness & My Proudest Professional Accomplishment

by | Oct 3, 2019 | Insights, Storytelling & Branding

A Legacy Of Kindness & My Proudest Professional Accomplishment

Written By Rajat Kapur

On

A Legacy of Kindness & My Proudest Professional Accomplishment 

One of my proudest professional accomplishments to date is the creation of the Kind Like Joey Website (https://www.kindlikejoey.org/).  

Why does one website, when my team has worked on several dozen (if not 100+) get this accolade? Some explanation of the circumstances around why this website was ever needed in the first place may help.  

About a year ago, my good friends Dan and Marina lost their 14-year-old son to a sudden and tragic auto accident. This was especially sad because we knew the family so well, and Joey was an exceptionally polite and respectful young man. But what happened after his passing is what makes this story truly exceptional. We found out later that their son had built a reputation as an extremely kind individual. Dan and Marina were inundated with letters and stories of their son helping others without ever worrying about getting credit. Walking kids to their locker and classes so they wouldn’t get bullied. Talking friends through rough periods. In a world full of negativity and bullying, here was this wonderful young man doing great things under the radar, taken from us too soon.

What Good Can Come of this Tragedy? 

In the days and weeks that followed Joey’s passing, the community was struggling to find solace. So we decided to build on Joey’s legacy of kindness. We created a Facebook group that has grown to 900+ members and an Instagram that has 1300+ followers, many of whom are Joey’s peers. We also held a golf outing in Joey’s honor in May 2019, and we’re proud to say it sold out and crushed the original fundraising goal thanks to the overwhelming response from local businesses, friends, and complete strangers. We’re now going to make it an annual tradition.  

Then we decided to take it a step further to formalize as a 501(c)(3) — a process that took several months and was made official a couple of weeks ago. The Foundation’s mission is to honor Joey by encouraging others to spread random acts of kindness, to offer a college scholarship annually, and to provide assistance to families that have experienced the sudden loss of a school-aged child in the Greater Philadelphia area. The college scholarship doesn’t ask the typical GPA and activities types of questions. The criteria revolve more around living up to Joey’s legacy of kindness. We’re proud to say that we were inundated with amazing stories of kindness that we gave out several scholarships in May to graduating seniors at Joey’s high school (see the picture of our board members at the award ceremony).

So How Can You Get Involved?  

Some specific activities that our Foundation has taken on need regular support.  

We regularly send checks to families who have suffered a similar sudden loss to cover unexpected funeral expenses. These expenses can be well into the tens of thousands of dollars, which most families cannot readily cover.  

  • We host and cover the cost of a therapist for a monthly bereaved parents support group. 

  • We support other foundations to increase awareness of their work.  

  • We run ‘kindness rocks’ campaigns to spread kindness (see our Facebook and Instagram pages for examples!). 

  • We offer student scholarships based on Kindness

  • We promote a “Kindness day” on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to encourage people to do a random act of kindness in their community in Joey’s honor.

We are also excited to promote a 5K on October 20th in Chalfont, PA.  Even if you don’t run, there will be many family fun activities to help bring the community together.

 

 

These are a few of the reasons why the website the &Marketing team created is my proudest accomplishment.  It has the chance to positively impact the most people and leave a legacy of which I’m incredibly proud.

“In a world where you can be anything, be kind. ”

— ANONYMOUS

About the Author:

About the Author: Rajat “Raj” Kapur is the founder and Managing Director of &Marketing, and a board member of the Kind Like Joey Foundation.  After a career working with large, global companies, he’s dedicated to providing small and medium sized businesses unparalleled marketing support. 

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.