The point of About Us pages is to communicate some background, not just about why the business set up, but about the character of the person that's actually running the business, and in this case, obviously it's me. And the idea is, is that over time, if we were to have a meeting, one of the things we wouldtalk about in our first meeting would be, Who are you? What's your background and how did you get here? And so, with part and parcel of what we advocate in terms of business, it's really important that I you communicate who you are digitally.
Because it means anybody can see it at any time and it has a knock on effect to the rest of the business. So anyway, enough of that, a bit about me, I mean I when I was a youngster.
I left the UK just before I was eighteen, so I was seventeen and three quarters, but I left the UK travel through Europe and India, Malaysia, Australia and then I came back a couple of years later and I'd worked in camera shops in Australia and in the UK and and the final camera shop I worked in,
I trebbled the guys turnover and I was really kind of into selling. I wasn't into cameras or anything like that. And from there, I got involved in direct selling and my area was in Mayfair, central London. And so I did all the typical stuff in back in the day, which is the cold calling in the rainand snow and tele sales and all that kind of stuff. And I did that for a couple of years, so I was employed for a couple of years. And then after that I set up a business with a business partner and we sold pretty much anything that would go into an office.
And so I've got a quite unusual appreciation or awareness, you could say, of what needs to happen within the infrastructure of an office. So we sold everything from, you know, photocopiers the size of a room to PC networks, furniture, ceilings, partitioning, telecoms, everything.
After that, I started, I went out on my own and I went solo again, and this time concentrating on telecoms and integration of software and telecoms. And it was a kind of a transitional period in the technology market and a pursued that, I approach it quite differently to other people because I was looking at the the systemisation of what could be done within a business. And I produced documentation and methodologies. I produced a specific ring binder that I sent out to companies that explained the current technologies, and my approach was, well, 'have this ring binder is taken a long time to produce,and if you're if you're looking, you know, in the next twelve, 18 months, give us a call'.
That approach worked because ultimately made me Dealer of the Year, two years running in the UK. And so I basically pursued it, but the one of the big factors, though, I think within my career time in business is I couldn't scale up. And. It perplexed me and flummoxed me, I just couldn't understand, what I was supposed to do to scale up my business profitably. I'm not talking about taking on staff because at one point I had 30 to 40 staff working for me, but my logic, my intellect was saying this this ain't working.
Because if you're going to scale up, you want to do it profitably, taking on more people to me isn't scaling up. And so I constantly looked for a more efficient way of working. And that's why I was really quite into the integration of systems and software and telecoms linking into CRM all that kind of stuff.
And it perplexed me to the point where I thought I'm going to have to change. Now, we don't just have those ideas, and they just pop into our head and we go and act on them. As directors, of course, we both got life going on and family stuff and all that kind of thing.
And first business is kind of what makes a person, I guess. three months after I started my own business still in telecoms, my daughter died in a bicycle accident, she was out with my wife, my wife at the time, and my world collapsed.
I mean, absolutely collapsed. three years later. I ended up in the Wellington Hospital in St John's Wood in London, and I had a quadruple bypass. And by this time, I'm 34. But the big point of that are the point of these life issues, we're directors, aren't we...
What do you do? You don't get to go, 'I'm just going to put the company on hold for a bit and go and deal with this and deal with that'. You can't. You've got bills to pay. You've got staff to organise and manage, families to look after and so on.
So you have no choice as a director. You just get on it. You haven't got a choice and that you can see how that would kind of dovetail with my drive to understand how to scale a business profitably.
How can you make this thing called a business work efficiently, even without you being there? And so the culmination of these things, you know, three, three or four years after having bypass it, got divorced. And that had his own set of problems in dealing with the courts and children, all that kind of stuff.
And then a year, about a year or so year or so after a separated, I met Liz, and Liz and I hit it off because lots of reasons. But her children were the same age as mine and she worked in telecoms, she worked in voice recording, so of course, natural natural affinity to absolutely understand what I was doing and everything else.
And so over time, with all these different things that were happening and of courts, and everything else, it got to a point, a kind of a transition point, which was, I'm going to find out how this scaling thing is supposed to work.
And so I got involved in marketing, jacked it all in, stopped and started again and consumed everything that I could do in terms of marketing. When I was doing all the technical stuff, I immersed myself in it to the point of being able to install all of it myself, not be an engineer, but to absolutely sell it properly.
And I did the same thing in marketing, and I immersed myself in everything digital to know everything I possibly could about it, because surely that's what needed to be done to understand what these people knew. And I found out that they didn't know, either.
So, because of that, I thought, okay, well, this is nonsense. So I did everything digital that you can imagine. I built websites, I did a whole raft of things. I mean, one the websites side of things, I built this website called The Standard because one of the other things we
did, this kind of life changing thing. Liz and I became Christians and we got baptized. And so I pursued that and joined the dots and built a website that's now read in 195 countries. So if you can follow this pattern with me that I'm joining the dots in technology.
Got that one? Just follow the dots in in Christianity. Got that one sussed. And now I'm looking to join the dots in business and marketing to look at how to scale a business properly and efficiently and profitably. So as we're following all of this, I realized that there's a fundamental problem that businesses are not getting the exposure
00:08:01:19 - 00:08:22:14
Nigel Maine
that business to consumer businesses are getting like the typical brands and so on, and so right, OK, that's what we need to do. So everything set up produced. All this content needs to be varied because nobody knows, if the person that you're speaking to, likes to read stuff, watch stuff or listen to stuff so you have to produce all of it to accommodate their taste. It all made complete sense to me. I produced 110-120 bits a different content. I was ready to go. And the world came to a halt. I mean, I was skipping skipping years here, we're talking about last year.
It all came to a halt! It took me a couple of years to get everything ready. And then 2020 happened and the lockdown and pandemic. So I'm like man, oh, man, talk about timing. What do we do?
How do we get this movement and I was almost there. I knew I was almost there, but it... And it all fell into place. The fundamental problem was marketing automation software, and you think, well, how can that be? If you think about this, you use marketing automation software.
You must, by definition, hide all of your content, behind an email, which means Google can't find it period end of, nobody can, unless they give you an email address. So I thought, right, okay, what do we need to do?
We did set things up in a certain way. You can produce this content that everybody has a certain taste to want to read, watch or listen to. And in doing that, promoting that you have to advertise it.
To do what B2C is doing, which is to produce adverts to promote content. It is as simple as that. You create your content and you don't have to do loads of it, because it's only what you need to sell your products, you need the adverts to sell them.
That's what I did. I set up the adverts. I set up the mechanism that sold your content, that sells content to drive people to buy your products and the other part is, if you want to do that, you ought to make that work more efficiently.
You change your infrastructure as well to accommodate the content that you're producing. And that's in a nutshell, so I've gone from from these kind of blocks from from working for myself and trying to get a technology business to thrive and to scale it up but I couldn't.
And parallel to that, we've got all these different life experiences that both you and I would have gone through and, you know, how do we deal with that? And then whilst looking at joining the dots with all of those and all of my life experiences, I've then arrived at this methodology to say this is how it needs to be done and it's not about software, it's not about A.I. is not about anything, not about IBM. Nothing like that at all. It's about an adjustment that needs to be made within a business. So that's how I got where I am today.
I've written books. I've spoken publicly, preached baptized people, done a lot of different things. And I suppose that's it. There's nothing really much else to say. If you want to talk about your story, give me a call. If you want to talk about your business marketing.
Give us a call and we'll see what we can do and see how we can help. But we have a very, very different approach to every other marketing business out there. Because people buy people, and that's what we've always done, and we've told them we've done that through storytelling, and that's what we've done for a millennia.
But that's it from me. I hope you've enjoyed this, and I'll catch you in the next one. Bye for now.