Hello, my name is Thad Jones and I have been in Sales and Marketing in one form or another for going on thirty years now. Dating myself further, my first Sales position was selling pagers in the early 90’s with the now out of business PageNet, Inc. At the time, Pagenet, Inc was the largest Paging company in the United States. As advances in technology made paging obsolete, I began selling everything wireless including Mobile phones and eventually even cable tv and internet services. I’ve sold wholesale, service and retail alike and the last thirty years have been dedicated primarily to providing Marketing services for my clients. I’ve sold everything marketing including Print, traditional Advertising and a variety of other Marketing services over the course of my career. I’ve been employed as a Sales trainer and hired as a Marketing Consultant, and believe me, I’ve had to constantly find ways to reinvent myself to keep up.
With that said, over the last five years I’ve immersed myself in Online Marketing, and as I do with everything, I dived head first in to not only selling Online marketing, but truly understanding how it works. I believe it is my job to eliminate the guess work for my valued clients and for my own endeavors as well. As a Marketer, I don’t believe in throwing darts at a dart board. It’s my obligation to know what works before I sell it. I have always felt this innate responsibility to educate my customers on the services I was selling. I wanted them to know what to expect before they invested hard earned dollars in to something that may have been completely foreign to them. A large portion of my clients over the years have been small business owners who had often shied away from advertising because of the fear associated with it. I felt it my duty to provide them with my thirty years of experience to build value not only in what I was offering, but who I was as a person and a professional Marketer. I didn’t do what I did for the quick sale. I did it because I loved the challenge of marketing my client’s products and services, and I truly wanted to see and be a part of my customers success. I took great pride in doing the right thing, even when it meant turning customers away who didn’t have the resources to do the things I offered properly. I took no satisfaction in taking someone’s hard earned money to provide them with something I knew wouldn’t help them. That is why I felt it was so important to educate my clients as much as I could before allowing them to sign on the dotted line.
It is with this same sense of pride and ethical morality that I am creating this blog. I want to help as many business owners as possible understand the Marketing process from the ground up, because while there is immense value in Marketing your business and your services. It has to be done right, and by done right, I mean you have to have a plan, and that plan has to include a budget that will allow you to market you and your business effectively. Don’t spend just to spend and sometimes not spending enough is exactly that. As an entrepreneur, I understand what it feels like to watch your saving dwindle as you work to grow your business with an uncertain outcome. The old adage you need to spend money to make money only applies if you have adequate resources to cover the inherent upfront losses of a marketing campaign. Of course, if your business is at a point where you can’t afford an effective marketing budget, then I’m sorry to say it, but you may be in for a slow death. It is generally under these circumstances where I won’t take someone’s last dollar in an attempt to save my clients dream, and as I said earlier, I have literally turned clients away that look to me to save their business. The services that I have sold my entire life have helped grow a wide variety of businesses, but it has to make sense and it has to be measured and it can’t be with your mortgage money. If that is where you are now, you may need to consult with a Business Advisor, consider financing or maybe even consider selling your business.
Regardless of your situation, if you are in business for yourself and you want to grow what you already have, then I believe the information I provide can help you accomplish your goals. The entire point of this blog is to eliminate years of hard lessons learned by providing you with my thirty years of experience in what works and what doesn’t. For business owners, I believe it is vital for you to create a stable infrastructure and a solid foundation for your business, one capable of sustaining growth before you begin marketing your products and services. If you build a company top heavy in sales with no legs to support the growth, then it is only a matter of time before those very sales will crush what you have built in the form of bad reviews and unhappy clients. As your revenue grows, please continue to strengthen your foundation every step of the way. Don’t over extend or grow too fast. Now of course, too fast is a relative term to your resources and different for everyone and every business owner, but I always implore my clients to make sure they have a plan for growth that involves supporting an increase in sales, because once they come to me, they needed to be ready to do what it takes to support their sales and they must have the budget and the courage to make it happen. My goal for this blog is to first, introduce you to Online marketing with a series of specific blogs to help you understand the entire online marketing process. Eventually I will discuss the pros and cons of some proven traditional marketing methods, but It’s important to note. During this entire blogs series, I simply want to educate and shorten your learning curve as much as possible. I hope you will enjoy hearing what I have to teach and find it helpful and informative while building your revenue streams. The first blog will be titled “understanding what you are getting in to” and it will post next Friday.
I look forward to getting started and hope you are too. Thank you for reading. See you soon.