This is Karl Moore Talking Management for The Globe and Mail.
This afternoon, I am talking to Phil LeNir who, after 15 years in the high-tech industry, has become the president of his own small firm called Coaching Ourselves, in a very interesting time to move into small business.
Not only is a small business where you are always tight for cash, and for capital, but we're facing probably the most difficult headwinds in the economy that you and I have seen in our lifetimes. So what's your approach to marketing when you have really almost no budget and you have a tough economic environment? How do you approach marketing?
PL: It's interesting, when I first started the business, I really had no formal market training or anything like that. So I started to pick up some books on marketing and I tried to get an idea of what it is I should be doing, perhaps. They started talking about the various “4 Ps” and so on and so forth, and so I would start building the marketing plan and all these various things.
But very rapidly, as you said, as a small company, you start to say, “Well, wait, I have to start selling something or I have to start generating some revenue and I have to go out there and talk to customers and start to do all these things that I have to get going to get the business moving.” So you put the marketing plan aside, at least I did, and I just had a general idea of what I thought I wanted to do and I started interacting with customers and started getting one customer at a time.
From that first customer, listening to what they have to say, that led me to an idea of, “Oh, well, maybe I can go talk to another customer that is similar to this one,” and that general approach of doing it one customer at a time and emerging forward, at least for me, proved to be highly successful.
What was really interesting is, later on, I did some studies on marketing, I wrote my Master's thesis on marketing, and that's when I discovered a whole wealth of literature on this whole idea of entrepreneurial marketing.
Academics had gone and researched how entrepreneurs go about starting their businesses. I remember distinctly some of the research stating that the entrepreneurs really turned it all around. Where in the more traditional marketing textbooks they might start with a large analysis, segmenting the market, and directing communications through the various markets, the entrepreneurs will start with one customer at a time, look for customers that are similar, and then from there, they will develop a segment that within which they will direct their communications and advertisement.
KM: So the kind of segment, rather than going in beforehand knowing what it is, you kind of discover it through just mucking around and seeing who's interested and who pitches up and says, “Hey, I like what you're doing,” and who they might recommend.
PL: Yes. That was extremely successful for me and it took me a while to, if you wish, unlearn the stuff that I had picked up through the books. It was only through that pressure of really not having any revenue at first and needing the revenue, because I don't have a large amount of capital, to get going, and that you can start to expand outward in all sorts of ways as you start to discover from there what sort of partners will work best for you and where you will best fit in that value chain.
KM: So the thought is, at the beginning, it's just building that. In some ways, I think you've called it “frugal marketing,” since I've talked to you before, so what do you see as frugal marketing beyond the early days? What are some of the next stages?
