Over the past 25 years, I have helped many organisations across corporate, public and charitable sectors market themselves.
In my first ten years I came to realise how poorly people planned the deployment of marketing resources and the great inefficiencies that resulted. This is hugely profitable for marketing services agencies but not so good for clients’ shareholders. I also realised marketing departments in non-fast moving consumer goods organisations had little influence on marketing or strategy; rather they were executors of promotional lead generation type activities.
So I spent the next ten years learning about strategy and planning in such organisations. And I saw that however great the strategy, without organisational cohesion, clarity and focus, execution was vulnerable to failure.
On the way, I discovered how important purpose, vision and values were to identifying and sustaining how value flows in a market. And most importantly, I realised that positioning was critical to achieving market success.
See for yourself and check out what happened to Steljes, SMART or TurningPoint.
So I set up WYS in 2008 to provide a system that would help leaders direct their organisations in a better way. This aims to provide the way by which they could focus their staff on doing the things that market values and delivered what they want. In short a way to connect their goals to market success using their organisation’s energy.
To date, this has yielded great performances for organisations I have worked with since. See here and here for two examples.
I am highly selective about whom I work with. My criteria are as follows:
- Leaders with a clear purpose and vision
- Strong values and a long-term outlook
- An idea, product, service or policy with high value potential
- The resources and the will to succeed
Personally, I care about the role business plays in making the world a better place. I believe prosperity accrues when shareholders, staff, customers and the wider world in which they operate all benefit.
And as I have five children, I’m interested in the long-term good of all.