Blog Author Mellissah Smith - Page 43

June is not for the faint hearted. Not only are business owners like me trying to get last minutes sales in to boost our financial performance, we are also trying to ensure that we take advantage of any tax breaks that may come our way thanks to the Australian Taxation Department. Sadly for me, I am not part of the criteria for the asset tax break of $20,000, but I am sure there are a few other areas that our accounting department can take advantage of.

I've recently changed the narrative of my business. It's not something I took lightly. Re-defining what value you provide to the market place can be game-changing, or business destroying. 

If you look at Uber for instance, they could have failed, but yet they succeeded. Is it sustainable? Most probably. Is it worth the market value associated with the business? Not really. Did they not only change their original narrative, but create a new narrative for the entire industry - disruptive in design?

After spending some time in New York talking to hundreds of entrepreneurs from around the globe, I am rejuvenated and ready to tackle my next challenge.

18 months ago, I decided to employ my niece who was 18 at the time, to work at the Marketing Eye Sydney office.

This is not a decision I took lightly and I spent a lot of time thinking it through. I decided that given how young she is, I would have her answer the phone and do administrative duties with the hope she would show aptitude for an area of the business, and we could further train her.

Like many other people around the globe, I am a huge fan of Ghandi. His memory lives on in my everyday life, as I surround myself with his powerful, insightful quotes that he chose to share with the world.

This quote rings very true to where I am sitting right now:

It's that time of year again where marketing managers are frantically working out how to best spend their marketing budget for 2015/16. There is a lot of fine tuning to be done given the changes in marketing technologies, applications and an ever changing consumer behavioural pattern.

Just 2 years ago, who would have thought Instagram would take over the world of social media? That LinkedIn would become the most power recruitment platform taking significant marketshare from Seek, Monster and Indeed? 

To be comfortable in one's own skin is the beginning of strength. That's what they say, and to be honest, I believe it.

I became comfortable in my own skin a few years ago. I stopped trying to be what other people wanted; the outgoing, fun, ambitious Mellissah. Instead, I started being me; a shy introvert who loves business and spends time with people who really matter. 

On my own terms

It wasn't until I became comfortable in my own skin that I really started living life, on my own terms. I know that people prefer the outgoing persona that I use to present, but that is damn hard work. Do you really know how hard it is to be "likeable" and someone who everyone wants to invite to a party? I never had to have "missing out syndrome" because everyone wanted to invite me to everything. Why not? I came with interesting stories, always smiled and talked to everyone. But let me tell you something about that... I was performing. I wasn't the real me.

Effective marketing is understanding your customer intimately. One of Australia's leading CRM companies, Innovent has recently developed a new marketing campaign that is essentially "human". 

In a presentation at Cebit 2015 on Tuesday, I shared the value of marketing automation implemented correctly in a business. Rather than use another case study, I used my own company, Marketing Eye, as an example of how to implement marketing automation and gain immediate results.

To give perspective; Marketing Eye has a substantial amount of traffic coming to our website each month, mainly due to the popularity of this blog and the effectiveness of our SEO team.

This month has been the biggest month in Marketing Eye's history. Our sales have exceeded our forecasts by over 40%. As a professional services firm, this is great, but not as easy to manage as one might think. 

Marketing Eye is at the end of the day a consulting firm with billable hours, not too dissimilar to a law firm or accounting firm. When there has been a huge surge in sales, it means that there needs to be enough people to fulfill the work that the agency has been employed to do.

Instead of working "on" the business, I am working "in" the business doing client work. This is hard, as I am a perfectionist and everything that I do has to be "perfect". As we all know, perfection does not exist, so the pressure I place on myself is enormous.