Moving on to Pastures New

I am delighted to let you know that on July 4th I will be joining the Owen Pugh Group of businesses as General Manager of their construction plant and haulage business; Owen Pugh & Co Ltd (www.owenpugh.com).This is a fantastic opportunity for me as the Owen Pugh Group is a particularly positive and progressive group of companies working in a changing industry. With Owen Pugh & Co employing over 100 skilled staff, with annual sales of around £7m, and operating around 60 trucks and 40 items of heavy earth-moving plant there will to be plenty of challenges and opportunities to keep me busy!

This does of course mean this I will be winding up my coaching and consulting work and dedicating my energy and attention to Owen Pugh. My experience over the last six years of working with so many fantastic people and businesses will now prove to be absolutely invaluable in my new role. There are many people who have been of enormous help to me during this period and I owe you all a great deal of thanks and gratitude.

I will of course remain an active member of the Entrepreneurs Forum and will pop up from time to time in other places, so I look forward to being able to keep in contact with you by one means or another.

Now, where did I pack-away my Tonka toys….

The Sales and Marketing Imperative

As I sit and write this blog I can’t think of a single business that does not need a constant stream of new orders or customers. I know of none that can rest on their laurels.

Nevertheless, in the six years that I’ve been working as a coach and consultant I have in the past come across some exceptions: businesses (including my own) that were enjoying a totally full order book and quite literally could not take on any more work. However, for each of those businesses (again including my own) that idyllic situation turned out to be rather temporary and they subsequently found their sales pipeline to be rather thinner and weaker than their business needed to maintain a buoyant or even profitable position.

Unfortunately, for those businesses the unhappy realisation that their sales pipeline was insufficient was rapidly followed by a panic inducing realisation that it would take months to refill the sales pipeline back to an acceptable level, and that there was little or nothing they could do in the short-term to turn around the up and coming paucity of sales.

So if even the most prosperous businesses must give constant attention to their sales pipeline to ensure that feast is not soon followed by famine, what does that mean for the vast majority of businesses who in this new and rather unappealing economy are probably suffering a weaker pipeline than they would prefer?

In very simple terms in means that sales and marketing must be the top priority in the vast majority of businesses, because it is an awful lot easier to do everything else you need to do to develop your business when you’re not short of sales.

So if sales and marketing are legitimately not your top priority I love to know why not.