But getting access to the same level of expertise without facing the permanent overhead cost has paid off for software company, Silkmoth.

The firm, which does the “heavy lifting” or back-end building of websites to help companies market themselves and manage e-commerce, commissioned Matthew Goldsbrough of Goldsbrough Consulting in 2003 to do a small project. Three years later, the company had National Tyres as a client – now one of its biggest.

“That was the direct result of a specific marketing campaign Matthew put together and has been worth many thousands of pounds to us,” says Keith Jones, Silkmoth’s managing director.

Before Matthew got involved with Silkmoth the business – about half the size it is today – faced a challenge: “At that time we were concentrating on day-to-day activities and it was difficult to focus on how to present a credible story for winning new business,” Keith says.

“As well as trying to figure out how to show that what we did was different, we were also going after business that was – with hindsight – not quite right. As companies began to expect more functionality and value from their websites – plus immediate technical support – this was the arena we needed to be in and where we could outshine the “one-man band” website designers who don’t typically have the infrastructure to support customers properly.”

Structure, Strategy and Tactics

What Silkmoth needed to accelerate its business development was strategic thinking and establishing a clear market position; focusing on what it did well and pricing its services at the right level. “This was really Matthew’s principal experience and value for us,” says Keith.

“He was also valuable for tactical activities we needed, such as copywriting for our own website, along with direct and email marketing alongside developing a databases of prospects – all things we just didn’t have the time to do.”

“After seeing his work on that initial project, what we liked was his methodical approach; an ability to think clearly and direct others’ thoughts in a structured way. What he’s got is a well-defined system for working through marketing issues and producing good results.”

In time, Matthew’s role evolved into that of a freelance marketing director, complete with his own Silkmoth business cards. Keith explains: “He met clients, attended our board meetings in a non-executive role and provided the necessary marketing input, becoming an integral – albeit outsourced – part of the business.

“And, if we met a company that wasn’t quite ready to go down a particular route with its web presence, we would introduce Matthew to help them with their own marketing issues and that would, when it made sense, lead to business for us also.”

Partner Strategy Extends Silkmoth’s Reach

Today, Silkmoth works with a number of design partners to generate new business and has a much clearer idea of its strengths. “Matthew helped us to consider carefully and develop our key proposition for clients and partners, and that – in large part – is the way we continue to present our services now,” Keith says.

“With marketing and sales you can convince yourself you haven’t got the time to do it or, when running your own business, fall into the trap of believing you can do everything when, in reality, you don’t have the skills.

Focus and Direction

“So, getting an external view prompted us to think about our business in a different way and forced us to focus. Having regular, monthly meetings with Matthew meant there was always time allocated in the diary to discuss marketing and sales, which is vital to avoid the management team getting side-tracked by business-as-usual activity.

“Matthew’s approach is direct, but that’s part of the appeal. In business, I don’t have a problem with tough truths; if you are paying someone for their professional advice you’d be a fool not to listen to it! And if you can see some unfulfilled potential in your business it’s worth buying in the right advice to take it forward.”

ITIS provides traffic information – analysis of what’s happening on the road network. If you’ve heard radio traffic bulletins, used up-to-the-minute traffic information for rerouting on your satnav device, or called on your mobile phone to get information about the hold-ups on your way home, you may be unaware that there’s some very powerful data processing going on behind the scenes. ITIS gathers data from lots of sources and puts it through sophisticated analysis to generate information that we can all use in a lot of ways.

Gary’s small team was working to develop relationships all around the world that would lead to companies licensing ITIS’ technology. Gary talks about the project in this short interview.

Clarity From Complexity

The first thing I had to do was figure out what the obstacles to their success were; the second step would be to remove them.

In talking to people in the team, it was clear that they didn’t have a single clear definition of what ITIS does. This often happens in technology companies, where people inside the company are relatively comfortable with the complexities of what they do. But from the outside, the picture needs to be very simple.

And it was a picture that turned out be crucial. I turned all the information I gathered about the various projects and technologies that ITIS could deploy into a simple diagram of their software platform. Getting agreement on what should or shouldn’t be in the diagram took many discussions, and the final version was, I think, the seventeenth revision. The picture was backed up by a succint textual description of how the software operates. Having defined ITIS’ offering in this way, it needed a name, and I helped the various decision makers to come to a consensus on what it should be: TrafficScience.

We’d reduced a complex story to one that was easy to communicate.

Telling a Consistent Story

With conversations happening simultaneously on all six continents, it was important that the message about ITIS was communicated consistently, and was easy for people to find.

The existing ITIS website, built largely in Flash, was not performing well in searches. Nor did its style give a good impression of the company. A new website was needed.

I project managed Silkmoth, who did the website development, and Axon Garside, who did the visual design.

I brought in another associate, Penny Lines of No Nonsense Marketing, to work with me on the content for the website. She interviewed ITIS customers and business partners to produce case studies that illustrated how ITIS had helped organisations to be successful in every market sector that ITIS operates in.

The new website set out a clearer story about ITIS. One that is easy for people to understand, wherever they are in the world.

New Business

The website has been steadily bringing in high quality inquiries from around the world, and Gary Gates’ team is turning these into lucrative projects. Gary told me that “without the website  and clearer messaging, we would never have made this amount of progress.”

I’d run into David at an event a few weeks ago, where he’d told me ‘we’ve made more money in the past three years, since working with you, than we did in the previous fifteen’.

David Hammond

Naturally, I wanted to learn how well they’d been able to put into practice all of the changes we’d discussed, and confirm the influence I’d had on their 48% increase in turnover.

In the business planning project three years ago, Peter and David provided me with a lot of facts and figures about their business – far more than is often the case in businesses of their size, or ones much larger. There was a level of detail there which you wouldn’t have been surprised to find in a multinational, but was unusual in a business turning over seven million pounds.

Volatility of Orders, Pressure on Production

Auto Marine make cables – which you no doubt guessed – for a wide variety of customers. For many of those customers, Auto Marine is their supplier of choice because they’re able to make precisely the product needed, delivering it quickly and on time. Enabling that responsiveness to customers appeared to place great stress on production. Looking at the day-by-day numbers, there appeared to be great volatility in the type and number of products ordered.

Peter Hammond

I encouraged Peter, who’s the managing director, and David, who’s responsible for sales and marketing, to stand back and take a longer view. I showed them that when you looked at the numbers on a quarterly or annual basis, the volatility wasn’t apparent. Each customer ordered fairly predictable amounts of a subset of the product line. They just placed orders at short notice.

Focusing on the Right Problem

So rather than focus on managing volatility, we turned our attention to increasing the range of products that customers bought, and ways of increasing forward visibility of orders – amongst many other things in the business strategy.

Peter said the other day, ‘Once we could see that we didn’t need to deal with volatility after all, it was possible for us to spend time on the things that really did matter’.

In the business strategy I produced with Auto Marine I recommended that they simplify the metrics they use to manage the business and increase their visibility. There on the wall of the conference room in which we met was a clear and simple list of objectives, together with measurement of progress towards them, and identification of who was responsible for their achievement. Clear direction was there for every person in the company to see.

It was great to be able to go back and revisit a project, to see how much had been accomplished by the people I’d worked with. And it illustrated very clearly that before you can solve a problem, your analysis has got to clearly identify what the problem really is.

This is a story about how I found the right way to bring a business idea to life for Howard Scott, of H.J.Scott & Co., an Independent Financial Advisor in Bolton. And in so doing, enabled significant improvement in a business.

Change in Regulation Provides Business Opportunity

In mid 2005, the legislation controlling the activities of Independent Financial Advisors changed substantially, and tighter controls forced advisors to be clearer about how they provided their service.

Howard, the lead Partner with the firm, recognised that this change created an opportunity for H.J.Scott & Co., since the IFAs that successfully made the transition to the new regime would be at an advantage over those that did not do so as quickly and thoroughly.

‘Before we were introduced to Matthew,’ said Howard, ‘all the necessary ingredients for business growth lay on the table. An existing mature business was running profitably, partners in the business had an appetite for change, and there were legislative changes which could bring opportunity.’

Howard asked me to provide personal coaching and marketing advice. ‘As with some chemical reactions, nothing happens in a business until a catalyst is added‘, said Howard, ‘Then the results can become explosive. I wanted Matthew to act as the catalyst of change for our business.’

I scoped the project with Howard like this:

• Define the company’s mission and targets.
• Create a differentiated market position for the business that would enable it to be competitive in a changing market.
• Define the product and services offering, including pricing and other terms.
• Outline the marketing strategy that would capture and retain appropriate clients.
• Coach Howard and the rest of the team through a transitional phase in the business.

In occasional meetings over the next year, I worked closely with Howard to decide the right goals for the business. Howard found it challenging, ‘Matthew helped us to devise a strategy and monitored our progress through a period of rapid change. He showed us that 20 years of business growth had been driven by nothing more than comfort and convenience.’

‘He challenged us to step outside of our comfort zone’, continued Howard, ‘and demonstrated that if we were to try to grow the business, the results would be exponential. Matthew always asked the questions we didn’t want him to ask – the questions for which we had no answers. He made us challenge ourselves and helped us to answer the very questions we had been afraid to ask.’

Still Needed Convincing

But I still hadn’t convinced Howard of one thing.

I wanted him to change his business model so that he would actively seek appropriate customers, rather than just accept those that came to him. I knew that would make his firm more profitable, but I struggled to find a way of showing him how beneficial I thought it would be. Then I had an idea.

I asked him to imagine going to a dance, and not having the courage to ask the prettier girls for a dance. I said that he was likely to ‘go home on the bus alone’.

Howard’s expression changed: he’d clicked with what I was saying.

Restructured Business Model

By defining what customers of the business needed, Howard was able to restructure how services were delivered, and seek the clients he really needed to deal with.

A fee-based service was defined which would enable better quality time to be spent with fee-paying clients, and enable those clients to have a clearer expectation of what H.J.Scott & Co. would provide in managing their wealth.

The fee-based model was a complete changeover from a commission-based business model, and necessitated fundamental, far-reaching changes in systems and processes.

Concrete results soon started to happen. Within a year, income had increased significantly, and profit had risen by almost 50%, on an already successful base.

‘Matthew’s advice has had a significant effect on the profitability of the business, and he has communicated difficult concepts with stunning simplicity’, said Howard.

Several years on, Howard still tells people about ‘Matthew’s story of going to a dance’. Which just shows you the power of finding the right way to connect with someone.