Should You Build Distribution Channels or Sell Products Directly?

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This episode of Fractal Marketing with Gerard Doyle is called “Should You Build Distribution Channels or Sell Products Directly?” and today’s guest is Damien Stone, Founder of Water3. Today, Damien shares the journey of his company and how direct sales to a niche market created early success for Water3.

He then shares the expansion of the business in recent times and the role of technology in the business model in their bid to scale up and go global. It is noteworthy that one of upsides to Water3 is the nature of their product allows them to have a greater negotiation position with business partners. At present, the company has no real competitors and is in a prime spot for massive growth.

HIGHLIGHTS

03:53 Branding: Water3’s unique product

06:54 Market timing

09:11 Referral marketing with a remarkable product

16:18 Expansion and technology over the past 18 months

20:39 Water3’s global trajectory

25:39 Reducing risk and convincing business partners

33:16 Damien’s advice

QUOTES

11:44 “You’ve got to be remarkable. And being remarkable doesn’t mean having a bright shiny glitter-covered shirt. It means having something that’s shareable that everyone wants to talk about. So it’s what’s remarking about. And they kind of love stories like that, show you this care in the likes of the brand. And this is such an interesting little aside that will actually stick inside someone’s mind.”

17:01 “We thought long and hard about talking to the beverage companies and then we encountered a path of what are we going to do? The hot points for these guys, a niche market, well, it’s going to make them go, yeah okay, we want more tech. And there’s a huge amount of… software that they built around just being operators ourselves that we’ve had to go through and make a lot of changes on.”

25:38 “And I guess what your story is telling me is, oh, get out there and prove that people will actually buy it, people will use it. Okay, maybe you haven’t done it to the scale that Walmart or someone could take you to but if you’ve proven it yourself, you remove the risk for them. And if you remove the risk for them, they’re more likely to do it and I’m guessing the other upside to it is it puts you on a stronger negotiation position, right? Because you’ve got some idea how profitable it could be.”

30:54 “Who on earth is using that machine at 2 am? Now it turned out, some of our best customers are security guards and the cleaners because they can’t get water anywhere. Nothing’s open at 2 am when they’re walking around. Isn’t that funny how just you often don’t know what your market’s going to be?”

34:22 “Everyone loves it, but no one wants to fund it. What the hell’s going on? So I probably would’ve gone down a couple of other projects if I’d known 8 years ago it was going to take 3 years for us to get started. Or if we do get stuck into another business ambush, made us enough money to get started in the end, but I would’ve probably done some of this stuff a bit sooner.”

The Sunk Cost Fallacy

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A quick monologue podcast from me on ‘sunk cost’, A sunk cost is a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered. Sunk costs are contrasted with prospective costs, which are future costs that may be avoided if action is taken. 

Business insider ‘lottery ticket video‘

Humans may be hardwired to be loss averse due to asymmetric evolutionary pressure on losses and gains: for an organism operating close to the edge of survival, the loss of a day’s food could cause death, whereas the gain of an extra day’s food would not cause an extra day of life (unless the food could be easily and effectively stored)

 

Winning Online Retail with Position & Purpose with Marty Cornish

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This episode of Fractal Marketing with Gerard Doyle is called “Winning Online Retail with Position & Purpose” and today’s guest is Marty Cornish, Founder of Defence Sporting Apparel (DSA).

Marty starts the conversation with an introduction to DSA and his military roots. He then shares the marketing success he has enjoyed with Facebook ads, email marketing, and direct messaging. Marty also shares the difficulties he is having with Facebook political ads and his plans for 2020 to enter foreign markets, most notably the US, UK, New Zealand, and Canada.

QUOTES

13:44 “Now, we’ve had our last product launch which was really effective. The first day of the launch, we sent a message and then on the last day when we’re closing off the product launch or the campaign, we go, look, last chance. We’re closing up. And just two, start of the campaign and end of campaign. So you’re not overbearing a message. You’re not spamming them and you’re building that urgency at the end too which is quite effective for us.”

17:05 “So then, going after audience insights, I started really noticing that my community is really into the outdoors. Like a lot of the other brands up there, their following is very outdoors and that’s when I started testing. So we came up with the great outdoors collection. The interesting thing I learned, my expectation on what I thought would be my existing community would buy. We did the edm’s and we got zero dollar sales.”

23:25 “I think maybe the campaigns, we will have it there because I think it fits in but I think we’re going to reduce our skew codes and kind of be more focused. At the end of the day, my mission, this year, is to take DSA, really break into the US, UK, and New Zealand and Canada markets.”

35:54 “A big part of my focus this year is we’ll get some insiders breaking through the US market with DSA because it’s such a bigger market. It’s such a bigger market cap. It’s going to be a challenge which I’m excited about and I think that’s where it gets exciting, that B2C, tapping into that audience because they’re very patriotic.”

HIGHLIGHTS

06:49 Branding: How to appeal to the right target market

12:13 Extending into more niches

20:41 Creating a trusted brand and scaling

24:42 Market validation and supplying defence forces

29:14 Measuring referrals and exploring resellers

36:39 Facebook issues with political advertising in the US

——————————

RESOURCES

https://www.instagram.com/marty_madestatus/

 

 

Scaling Your Business Using A Remote Team – with Meryl Johnston

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This episode of Fractal Marketing with Gerard Doyle is “Scaling Your Business Using A Remote Team – with Meryl Johnston”. Meryl is the Founder of Bean Ninjas, a bookkeeping and financial reporting firm, and today leads an in-depth discussion on how to achieve success using a remote team that works with members from anywhere in the world.

Meryl shares the birth of Bean Ninjas, her insights on making her first hire, and the sheer hustle it took to grow the company into a 20-person strong organization. She talks about how specializing in Xero was a huge step for the business and looks back on the masterminds that helped form the company into what it is now. Meryl is a Chartered Accountant who specialises in cloud accounting software “Xero”. The business is now 4 years old and has a distributed team of 15 based in 6 countries around the world. Bean Ninjas were recently awarded the prestigious Xero Bookkeeping Partner of the Year for Australia in 2019. Prior to Bean Ninjas Meryl worked at international accounting firm BDO, ran a consulting business and taught accounting at a local University.

HIGHLIGHTS

01:31 Bean Ninjas and their early adoption of remote teams

08:07 Making the first hire and its birthing pains

12:52 Marketing: finding and maintaining new clients

16:47 Bean Ninja’s creative courses

21:26 Gaining recognition and building the community

30:03 Discussion on masterminds

34:56 Marketing advice you wish you knew back then

QUOTES

07:41 “It’s just we want everyone to be productive and successful and so we have conversations with everyone about, do you need another monitor or are you happy with work from home or do you want us to pay for a coworking space? So it’s a bit more individualized at the moment.”

09:45 “And in hindsight, I probably would hire a VA much further down the track and hire the more senior people possible to help create the processes and take ownership of departments and hiring other people rather than getting the most junior person as, well, the cheapest person that you can as the first hire.”

13:16 “And so we followed that methodology and launched in a week and got our first customer in a week. And really, we got that customer from posting in a Facebook group about our story that we were launching this new business. We had created a web site in a day and we were just having a crack. And so people kind of liked the story behind that and that’s how we got our first customer. And then it was hustle.”

21:26 “We were really proud. In 2019, Xero selected us as their Australian bookkeeping firm of the year. So out of all the bookkeeping firms in Australia, we were number one. It would’ve been very difficult to do that if we were splitting our focus across multiple pieces of software.”

30:37 “The very first mastermind I was in was for accounting firm owners who wanted to think differently and that’s where I found my first co-founder was in that mastermind. We founded Bean Ninjas together. So that was a huge benefit that we found each other… And then built enough trust through those regular calls that we felt that we would be good business owners.”

35:02 “It would be to focus more on sales. So in our early days, it was direct sales that brought in customers and I probably spent a bit too much time on brand building and content which is a long term strategy. And so I’m glad I did because all of that work that I put into content really helped but it didn’t pay off until 2 or 3 years down the track. And really, we needed to be making sales.”

RESOURCES

BeanNinjas Website

“The 7 Day Startup: You Don’t Learn Until You Launch” Book by Dan Norris

Connect with Meryl on Linkedin 

Dissecting a successful course and book business with Anthony Metivier, the creator of the Magnetic Memory Method

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People with excellent memories and memory championship winners are not too different from you and I. 

They just use a combination of techniques to enable their minds to memorize things.

You might find it hard to remember names, facts, equations, lists, tasks you need to take care of, a new language and so on.

But if you follow the right techniques, you can remember almost anything you want.

On this episode, I’m talking with Anthony Metivier is the founder of the Magnetic Memory Method, a systematic, 21st Century approach to memorizing foreign language vocabulary, dreams, names, music, poetry in ways that are easy, elegant, effective and fun.
An author of over 10 bestselling books, Metivier holds a PhD in Humanities from York University, an MA in Media and Communications from the European Graduate School, and an MA and BA in English Literature from York University.

But we cover more than just memory, we talk about how Anthony has created a huge multi-channel content machine that funnels people into his memory course.
But more than that, Anthony explains why his purpose and altruistic goals are the secrets to his success.

Anthony’s YouTube is a great resource

Automating your business with Christopher Drake & Zapier

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As an Entrepreneur who is as lazy as I am smart, I’ve always loved automating and sliming down my to-do list.

Out of all the automation apps, Zapier has always been my favourite. What I’m talking about here, is the automation of activities in your business.

If you like your ‘Out of Office’ messages pinging away when your on holiday’s, you’re going to love the idea of Zapier.

Which is why today I’m talking with Christopher Drake, who is an automation and Zapier expert. Christopher runs that Startup Company which specialises in this expact topicc.

You can follow Chris on Twitter here and here and read more about KanyeText.com here

 

 

 

 

How to grow your business through referrals with Joe Sova

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With many new ways to advertise to potential customers, we often forget about the oldest and most trusted form. That is referral marketing.

A Nielsen study showed that consumers still thought of ‘word of mouth’ advertising as the most trustworthy. 83% of consumers say they either completely or somewhat trust recommendations from family, colleagues, and friends about different products.

However, even if you have happy and satisfied customers that love your service, they still might not recommend it to others.

On today’s episode, we’re going to be talking to a business owner who’s driven eight years of growth through referral marketing. I chat with Joseph Sova, Founder and President of Ideal Payroll Service.

Ideal Payroll Service is an Omaha based company that provides payroll processing & human capital management solutions. We are built on personalized service, open communication, and local accountability.

Joe is also a creator and local podcast host of Local Business Talk. Local Business Talk is a talk show that covers local entrepreneurship and business success. We cover topics in our community and learn what it takes to succeed in the world of small and mid-sized business.

Follow Joe’s journey on LinkedIn.

The journey from Practitioner to Product with Hassanatou Barry

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If you’re a freelancer, contractor, agency or consultant, you know the pain of billable hours. I’m guessing you’ve also dreamt of productizing or knowledge in some way?

If you’ve tried to package up your advice, then you know how hard that can be.

In this episode, I’m talking with Hassanatou Barry, who is the Babysitter Guru. Hassanatou is taking her experience as a New York City babysitter, and servicing the Babysitting Community, with advice that’s often hard to find and often, not openly shared.

The Babysitter Guru empowers babysitters through informational content and resources to better their journey and experience in caring for children while also being an expert for parents to ease their transition into seeking quality childcare.

As a loving babysitter and dedicated advocate for the past 7 years, my goal was to create a platform to educate others on best practices and also provide guidance. Whether it’s making a difference for one babysitter or several, my dream is to create an impact within the childcare industry.

Follow her journey on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Could you Sponsor an Athlete? with Andrew Stallings

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While sponsoring Tiger Woods or Roger Federer is most likely way outside of your budget.

Athlete sponsorship can be more accessible than you’d think.

On this episode, I chat with Andrew Stallings from the Athelo Group, about how he identifies opportunities, what areas are undervalued, and why the talent story is more important than their Instagram followers.

Andrew Stallings, Founder / Head of Partnerships of the Athelo Group, is a 10+ year Sports and Entertainment Professional that has worked in many realms of the industry from Media (SiriusXM Radio) to Sponsorship and Brand Strategy (Octagon / AB InBev).

After working with a wide variety of pro athletes for several years, I discovered a need for niche category athletes in terms of 360 management, creative strategy, and partnership consulting + execution.

With Athelo Group, we pride ourselves on working with athletes in Action Sports, UFC, Motorsports, and other rising properties by offering a vast and extended array of services that are beneficial to both the athletes we represent and brands we consult for.

Follow their journey on Facebook & Instagram. Follow Andrew Stallings on Twitter.

New Year’s Business Resolutions

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New Year’s resolutions make lots of sense. If you could improve one thing every year, the results would be amazing. So here are 13 ideas for new years business resolutions. 

I’m not going to be so arrogant as to suggest you should follow any of these; rather, I hope the following 13 New Year’s business resolutions are an inspiration for your 2020 goals. 

  1. I Will Get Focused and Become More Productive
  2. I Will Charge What I’m Worth
  3. I Will Grow My Team and Delegate More
  4. Make sure your website content is the best it can be.
  5. Concentrate on getting backlinks
  6. Become your own online PR agency
  7. For businesses with two or more owners, enter into an owners’ agreement
  8. Conduct a security audit
  9. Do your friends know what you do?
  10. Who are all these LinkedIn connections, anyway?
  11. Reduce those SaaS subscriptions
  12. Do you prospect for new business?
  13. Do your clients/customers know how you help them?