• 8 Questions You Should Ask To Get The Right Fractional CMO For Your Business
    Hiring a part-time CMO is a cheap way to add strategic focus and speed up growth in your business. However, many businesses have a CMO who fails to deliver. Here are 8 questions you should ask to ensure you get the right person on board: The answers to these questions should help you assess the…
  • Leo Burnett’s Secrets of Emotional Advertising
    Years ago, I discovered “Communications of Ad Man” by Leo Burnett in the P&G office library. I took copious notes and have continued to learn from his work. Here’s what I absorbed from the master of emotional branding. 1. Focus on Human Emotions: “What helps people, helps business.” Burnett believed in tapping into universal human…
  • PPPT: The Unconventional Path to Mastery
    I read an article on Medium this morning, by Desiree Peralta, a successful entrepreneur, who believes people shouldn’t buy courses but should learn through experience, as she has no doubt done. It went so much against my professional experience and the pivotal role that structured learning and mentorship played in developing my skills. I started…
  • Maximise Your RoI: 6 Essential Tactics to Drive Down Acquisition Costs.
    Profitable advertising requires two things, higher Long-Term Value (LTV) and lower Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Achieving a ratio where LTV exceeds CAC by a factor of two signifies not just a profitable campaign but a scalable business. Below this level, your business will struggle. The competitive edge in SaaS isn’t just in the product but…
  • No excuses for lack of high-growth
    Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard reminds me that no company has an excuse for substandard growth. Despite its size, Microsoft has managed to triple its revenue over the past 10 years, delivering between 9% and 10% average growth in key indicators such as revenue, net income, and free cash flow. Though mainly from…
  • Hiring, the Achilles Heal in Strategy
    Hiring remains the Achilles heal in strategy implementation and in scaling. Hiring slows down the growth of many high-growth companies, furthermore, compounding the problem, a large percentage of senior hires don’t work out. This is because many companies continue to have a dated hiring philosophy (as seen in their job specs and adverts) that focuses…
  • Slow growth to high growth
    To transform from slow growth to fast growth requires a radical change to a business’s core or the setting up of a side business that has the potential to outgrow its parent. To transform, one or more of three things need to change. The business needs to move into a growth market (or invent one),…
  • Making a scaling decision
    I happened to be in two conversations over the past week centred on making an investment in scaling a business. And they prompted me to share my experience in making scaling decisions. To successfully scale a business, at least five things need to be in place. A strong value proposition, product-market fit, a scalable market,…
  • The DNA of business
    The DNA of business The only purpose of a business is to find and retain a customer. Peter Drucker. Businesses and business models come in all sizes, shapes and forms. However, at their core all businesses have the same six basic building blocks that drive their success. Every business can be defined by considering the…
  • Staging for Startup Success
    Staging for Startup Success “Success is a process.” ― Alex Noble “If you put good people in bad systems (processes) you get bad results.” ― Steven Covey Most start-ups fail because they don’t get to product-market fit. Start-ups (and other early-stage ventures) that go through a gating process, whereby they invest more only after scaling…

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