First to Market – Good or Bad?

Back in the 1990s, when I was involved in telecoms, there was a thing called “First Mover Advantage”. The popular belief among VCs and entrepreneurs was that it was important to be first into the market with a new product or business model, so you could take the lion’s share of the market before anybody […]
Guerrilla or Gorilla? What kind of Marketer are You?

Just before Christmas I received the sad news that Jay Conrad Levinson had died at the age of 80 after a two and a half year battle with bone marrow cancer. Jay was a Giant of the marketing world. In the 1960s he was an old-fashioned Ad Man. As an executive at Leo Burnett and […]
A Simple Lesson from one of the Most Successful Business Women who ever lived

Mary Kay Ash founded Mary Kay cosmetics in 1963 with an investment of $5000. Today Mary Kay Inc. is a multibillion dollar cosmetics company with a sales force of 1.7 million in more than 30 markets around the world. The company’s explosive growth is largely down to its creative business model. Mary Kay is credited […]
Are you a Capitalist or a Gambler?

One of the basic principles of our economic system is that capital flows towards the most deserving hands, normally the opportunity for the best return for the lowest risk. So the entrepreneur, as business owner, acts as a magnet for capital attracting wealth to his business, whether from investors in exchange for a promise of […]
Which is more Scarce? Time or Money?

I get around quite a few SMEs in the London area and the two most common complaints I hear from business owners are that; 1) there never seem to be enough hours in the day and 2) there just isn’t enough money to go round. This has been particularly so since the Big Freeze took hold in […]
Coffee Table Talk – Jane Austen and Entrepreneurship

The other day I paid a visit to Chawton Cottage in Hampshire, the house where Jane Austen lived during her most productive period as a novelist. I’ve always been fascinated by Jane Austen. When I was at school she wasn’t as well-known as she is now, so being an Austin freek was a bit pretentious, […]
How to Save Money on your Payroll…

In a recent UK survey supervisors were asked to rank the importance of 10 motivators for their employees. The employees were then asked to rank the same 10 motivators in order of what was important to them. Here’s what the survey found:- It looks like there’s a big difference between what the employees think and […]
Freedom at Last! Cognitive Bias Modification…

For many years advocates of positive thinking have preached a simple message: thought precedes action, so if we want to become more successful, the first thing we need to do is change the way we think. We’re told that we can do this by changing what we say to ourselves when talking to ourselves (so-called […]
A bicycle with round wheels…it’s outrageous!

Image credit to www.sport-magazine.co.uk The Science of Marginal Gains One of the more amusing stories to come out of the London Olympics was a comment by Isabelle Gautheron, the boss of the French cycling team, that the British “were supposed to be using the same wheels the French team, but they couldn’t be because the […]
Body Language: How to pull Deals back from the Edge…

From an early age we’re taught to pay close of attention to the words we use when trying to get our point across…..but the research shows that, when it comes to face-to-face communication, only 7% of the message we transmit is down to the words we use, 38% is down to our tone of voice […]