NICK HUSSEY

This is the marketing system for GROWTH I apply to my consulting and own business:

1. Simplify.

2. Amplify.

3. Plan.

4. Iterate.

5. Repeat.

I've learnt this the hard way, doing the right and wrong stuff myself. I've seen the same problems and successes in the businesses I've helped.

Simplify: Do what you're best at. Cut what you're not. Don't feel the need to do everything with limited resources. Clarity and simplicity from board level to the customer.

Amplify: Make everything (blogs, films, imagery, events, site, etc) higher quality and more intense: More beautiful, creative, emotive, helpful, entertaining, interesting, different, special. OK or Same, is just Bad.

Plan: It's hard to structure when you're early stage and grabbing at growth. But ad hoc is corrosive. Invest your time in stopping, breathing, planning. Everyone know's what they're doing. Your staff are happier, more efficient. The result is far better. Then, look back and...

Iterate: Look at your data. Ask your customers. Discard what doesn't work. Increase what does. Always improve.

Repeat: Build a simple, tested system that everyone knows and understands. Stick to it. Tweak it until it is better. And better. And better.

There's no secret formula to creating a great brand. 

Just decide on the audience that will most love your product and a message that matches that product. Ignore everyone outside your audience.

That message must then chime very strongly with that audience. 

Use emotion. Be genuine. Create stories about what you do. 

People WANT to follow your story, your trials and tribulations.

People want real. They're sick of fake. They want to support you and help, usually by buying your product.

Tell real stories. To be loved we must reveal ourselves.

Be loved.

The world is full of bad marketing.

Bad because it treats it's audience as idiots. 

This is your opportunity.

In a digital age, where you can simply click away from boring, patronising, repetitive, false marketing, if you champion realness, you win.

Be Real.

If you have a great story, tell it. 

If you have a great product, say why.

Keep it simple. Don't talk down to anyone. Be entertaining. Be passionate.

Your faith in the customer, will be rewarded in their faith in you.

Once you've had your idea, and decided to go for it, there can be a crushing vacuum. 

You need to create opportunities. You haven't proved anything, so people mostly don't believe you can do it. Nobody returns your calls.

But some do. Perseverance is key. You must keep going, and slowly things start to happen and momentum builds.

I never lacked motivation, pre-launch, but I was often downhearted. It's natural.

I had two rules that I stuck to rigidly.

One, was that I'd do a full working day everyday, except our regular club riding day, where I'd do a half.

The main one, was I HAD to achieve ONE significant thing that day.

It might be a meeting set with a potential investor. A business plan finished, or a garment designed.

Some days ten things would happen, others, nothing. So I would keep working into the evening until I could honestly say I had my ONE meaningful achievement.

That keeps you on a positive path. It gives you self respect and stops you falling into defeatism. 

Doing means things happen. 

Keep doing until that one thing happens. It will build as you go.

Insight Version 1:

Simplify Everything.

The End.

Version 2:

You learn so much as an entrepreneur. Perhaps the most important thing I learnt and now evangelise upon, is simplification.

In a startup every element is under intense strain. High growth and innovation is stressful on your resources. Cash, staff, time, energy, everything,

So, simplify.

Simplify your brand message so you are immediately understood, internally and externally.

Simplify your range. Fewer lines means fewer manufacturing problems and cashflow issues. Less design investment. Fewer product images to shoot. Etc.

Simplify your KPIs. Give the company one main goal a year. Write it on the wall. Give your staff simple targets. Share them. Revenue. Traffic. Conversion. All within budget. Write that on the wall. Get everyone to obsess about these numbers. 

Simplify your site. Increase conversion.

Simplify your opportunities. A founder can drown in trying to do too much. Reaching for too many opportunities will confuse and over-stretch staff. It will exhaust you. That's part of learning to say no.

Simplify everything. Including this post, gah.

Being an entrepreneur is hard. It's fraught with fear, anguish, rejection, risk, stress and exhaustion. All the statistics show you will fail.

So why do it at all?

This is a vital question to ask yourself before you embark on such an unforgiving journey. Why ARE you doing it? Really?

If it's to make pot loads of cash, there are 'better' ways. This is rarely what drives entrepreneurs, psychologically.

What's great about it is...

Conquering your fears and self doubt. 

Overcoming the doubters. There will be many.

The satisfaction of knowing you never gave up and always tried your best. 

The removal of regret. - This was my greatest initial driver. I didn't want to be the guy in the pub who said he had this great idea, but... I had to see what i was capable of. It was the possibility of never knowing that terrified me.

Those rare, beautiful moments of success, so hard fought for.

The camaraderie of sharing this intense journey. The shared hardship and the hard fought victory celebrated together.

The intellectual challenge of it all. All your cognitive abilities will be pushed into new frontiers.

Learning so much about business, relationships, yourself and others. 

Meeting fascinating people. They could be bizarre, famous, rich, charismatic, evil, beautiful, conniving, fascinating, anything. As you grow, you will have access to even more diverse human beings.

You will make more decisions a day than you did in a month in a corporation. More. The ability to enact immediate change is intoxicating.

You might make a lot of money. But you are more likely to lose a lot of money.

Being an entrepreneur is INTENSE. Intense can be fascinating. Intense can be destructive.

Are you ready for that?

Your attitude is friendly, humble, here to chat. Who likes chatting about these things we share? We do! Yea!

Be interesting.

Talk normally. No jargon or monotone corporate safety language.

Create and engage with conversations.

Express opinions.

Use imagery & film.

Link to your site, but make sure there's a clear motivation to go there (you'll need great content).

Be nice, be interesting, chat.

If your company is to succeed, and that usually means high-growth, you're going to need to get a lot of doing done.

But the doing isn't the goal. It's the completing.

Entrepreneurs, including myself in the early days, become obsessed by doing, as they see the results of their actions. The more you do, the more that happens. Do nothing, nothing happens. The feedback loop is tight and immediate.

But you get bigger and you need help. You take on staff. Then, you don't let go.

A classic issue for entrepreneurs, and I recognise this was a hard transition for me and my staff, was letting go and delegating. Properly.

Enable your staff. Give them clear guidelines and goals. Write them down. Now let them do their thing.

Maybe they won't do it quite right. But how will they learn? How will you be freed up to add the game-changing value at the top, if you're writing blogs (*cough*) or editing images on the site.

80% good and done is better than 100% awesome and never done.

Let go. Let yourself be helped.

The image to the left is 80% good.

The mirror blue shades are too bling and the drips niggle me. I ignored that. It's an authentic image that helped brighten and illustrate a real trip to Budapest, a content marketing exercise that require expansive content creation, quickly turned around, on a tiny budget. Which it nailed.

You need to be making decisions for which there is no paradigm. You are innovating.

You need to have confidence in your own decision making. 

Problem is, you can't be right all the time. What if? It's the entrepreneur's silent nightmare.

You need self-doubt to make you properly analyse decisions and question your logic.

Too much confidence and you become arrogant, immune to advice, blinkered. 

Too much self-doubt and you become gripped by fear and indecision.

Find a balance, err towards confidence.

But remember, most people are naturally cautious. They will tell you it isn't possible. They might be right.

Told you it was a nightmare.

Entrepreneurs lives are romanticised, glamourised and fantasised.

Apparently they're all flying around the world, driving Teslas, eating sushi power breakfasts and accepting awards for being awesome. All day. Every day.

The reality of an entrepreneur is sitting at a laptop for 15 hours a day, doing meetings you can barely stay awake for, getting rejected a LOT, worry, exhaustion, loneliness (how can you socialise or see your family when you're always working?), stress, burnout and worry. 

But then, if it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. Entrepreneurs are cool(ish) because they TRY. The risks they take aren't just financial, they're physical and emotional. 

Entrepreneurs could (but shouldn't be) be mythologised. Not for their glamourous lifestyles, but for their efforts. 

They keep going, despite the personal risk and hardship. Entrepreneurs don't give up. If you want to admire them, admire their work ethic and never say die attitude.

An entrepreneur's life is fascinating, perhaps cool, but it's crappy as well. Like everyone else.

Don't get bound up in the myth. It is a myth built on boring grey slog.

(I quite like grey).

It's such a common theme. The exhausted founder(s) who won't, no, CAN'T leave their business to take a break.

The holidays I had were short and my wife called them "A change of scene for Nick's laptop". 

People told me I needed a holiday, but I thought that was for the uncommitted, and I was wracked by guilt throughout them.

These are the reasons you NEED to take a proper holiday, with no devices:

Your company cannot grow and survive without you taking decent periods of reflection to absorb, analyse, problem solve and re-strategise.

Your job is to add maximum value. Use your brains, not your touch-typing skills. Stop doing, get on with finding more big ideas.

You need your family and friends, and they need you. Don't be a git. Selfishly, maintain your support mechanisms, they're vital to your best operational capacity!

You need a rest. Your exhaustion means you are inefficient, with lower productivity and higher stress.

Basically, your company will benefit from a PROPER holiday, not just you.

All your money is likely to be in the business, so take 10 days camping. Ride bikes to a cabin in the woods. Just get the hell away from the devices and thrum of work.

Support your business by supporting yourself.

Sure, you need to be innovative, you're a fighter, you can do it.

But some of this stuff will take you years....decades to learn. You need to mainline experience.

There will be dark times. Times you don't know what to do or who to trust.

You need someone you respect, who can challenge you, encourage and teach.

It's lonely out there. Find a mentor. Make time for them, as they have for you.

With insight would I have done anything differently?

Yes of course. If I could change it all so we made perfect decisions, we would have a perfect company and life would be awesome.

But time travel doesn't exist.

Hindsight is a false construct.

If you tried your hardest, and made the best decisions you could, with the best information, then that's as good as it's going to get.

Hindsight is rubbish. Learning is not. Learn, but don't regret. Your best is as much as you can ask of yourself.

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Thank you!