Business Coaching

Free Business Coaching and Business Mentoring

I was horrified to find in my post yesterday a letter from leading business services firm Deloitte & Touche a letter that threatened my economic and moral position by offering free business coaching and business mentoring in the Birmingham area (where I live and work.)

My Moral Dilemma

Do I stay true to the purpose of my blog in bringing you developments within the business coaching industry together with the best high impact, low cost business development solutions?

At a time when I am developing my custompreneur ideas (customer focused entrepreneurs) which is based on putting the needs of the customer first, can I hold this information back?

"To Thine Own Self Be True"

It seems appropriate to turn to local hero, William Shakespeare (Hamlet for anyone interested) for guidance.

I truly believe in the importance on focusing on the needs of the long term interests of the customer and "what goes around, comes around" so you can see for yourself my response.

I have gritted my teeth and decided that I must stick to my values, even if that means telling you about a business coaching service which reduces my opportunity for income.

High Growth Business Support Programme

Birmingham City Council is funding the new High Growth Business Support Programme until June 2009 which is "a fully funded programme designed for high growth businesses based in the Birmingham area to benefit from bespoke coaching over a 10-12 month period.

The majority of the business coaching will be done by the Academy of Chief Executives (who I wasn't familiar with until yesterday) and will focus on the personal development of the entrepreneur and business management teams.

Requirements

The entry criteria are:

1. Trading period of at least 6 months
    
2. Small and medium sized enterprises with proven annual turnover, growth and capability.

Showcase Events

If you are interested in finding out how you can have a free business coach, there are two showcase events to present the benefit of the programme to high growth local businesses on 26th of March and 29th of April 2008.

More Details of the Free Business Coaching

Telephone 0121 696 8546

Email bcchighgrowth@deloitte.co.uk

Website www.birmingham.gov.uk/enterprisecity.bcc 

Is It Right To Use Government Funding To Alter The Competitive Balance?

We have had this problems for many years in the business coaching and small business advice industry.

Successive governments want to encourage small businesses and the enterprise culture to develop so they pour tax payers money into subsidising services that the private sector already provides.

There have been some success stories but most of the time, I hear from people who have not been very impressed with the government sponsored small business initiatives.

Hopefully this business coaching scheme will be different but I do feel that it is unfair competition and would love to hear anybody's ideas on how I can compete.

Clearly if this free business coaching is successful in Birmingham, it will roll out across the UK and threaten far more business coaching firms.

How Do I Compete Against Free Business Coaching?

If you read my business coaching blog then you will know I have some concerns about the traditional "trading time for money" basis of professional services where the entrepreneur carries the risks.

I offer my clients the option of choosing a "payment on results" basis where fees come from the extra profits that are generated by the business so that if the coaching works, I am well rewarded.

If it doesn't (and personal chemistry and individual responsibility are essential) my business coaching fees are zero on the basis that the business has not seen a tangible benefit.

This does mean that I need to be quite fussy about who I choose to work with since:

1. The profitable opportunity has to be there - it it isn't then both you and I are wasting our time.
    
2. There has to be a commitment to measurement.
    
3. There has to be a real desire from the entrepreneur to want to move forward and therefore a willingness to try new things.
    
4. The business has to have a vision for the future.
    
5. The entrepreneur / business management team have to be nice people who I can trust.

My approach to business coaching is based on the Eight Pillars of Business Prosperity.

I still believe that this is an attractive proposition for entrepreneurs. It shows that I am entrepreneurial and that I believe in their business.

To Your Success

Paul Simister

Your Profit Coach, business coaching for customer focused entrepreneurs

Manipulation in Sales & Marketing

For the last few days I have been thinking about the dangers of manipulation in sales and marketing techniques.

The more we know about the way the human mind works, the motivations and desires we have and the art and science of influence and persuasion, the more the unscrupulous can manipulate our own minds to act against our best interests.

A number of forces have all come together to make me consider the business ethics involved in marketing:

1. I am starting to build up my ideas for the customer focused entrepreneur (or custompreneur) series of blog articles and Squidoo pages which will lead to e-books, an online coaching program and hopefully a proper published book.
   
   This focuses understanding, designing, communicating and delivering value to customers as the engine for business growth.
   
   Nothing wrong with that but I am having to think about the differences between perceptions and reality. For customers to buy, they have to believe. A customer has to perceive that the product offers value for money over and above that offered by competitors but they don't discover the truth until after they have used the product or service, and may not even know then.
    
2. I have been watching and listening to the Jeff Walker and Mike Filsaime presentations in Rich Schefren's Business Acceleration Program to write the second part of my review. It has come over loud and clear, just how powerful these techniques are if used by the wrong people in the wrong way.
   
   Jeff Walker is in the pre-launch stage of the new version of Product Launch Formula which I am promoting through a Squidoo page - Product Launch Formula 2.0. Yesterday I felt compelled to add a health warning to warn people about the damage that using it could do to their reputations if their product was not up to standard.
      
3. The latest Guerrilla Marketing Association I have listened to and blogged about was Marketing Using The Powers Of Psychology. One of the key messages is that if you keep repeating something enough, people will begin to believe it.
    
4. I have come across a highly acclaimed series from BBC 4 called "The Century Of Self" which looks at the Freud family's role in the controversial story of the growth of the mass-consumer society in Britain and the United States. The videos are below although each is long.
   
   The write up on the  BBC website says "By introducing a technique to probe the unconscious mind, Freud provided useful tools for understanding the secret desires of the masses. Unwittingly, his work served as the precursor to a world full of political spin doctors, marketing moguls, and society's belief that the pursuit of satisfaction and happiness is man's ultimate goal."

Can Marketing Do More Harm Than Good?

This is heavy and could make my brain hurt.

By improving our marketing skills, whose benefit are we really doing it for?

Is it truly win-win as I propose in my thoughts on the customer focused entrepreneur?

Or is it only win-win when built up in a world of self deception and illusion?

Do you remember the Keanu Reeves film "The Matrix" when we don't really live the life we think we do or the Jim Carey film "The Truman Show" where a man was the real life star of his own soap opera and everyone else around him were actors?

Is it right that "you can fool some of the people some of the time but you can't fool all the people, all the time?"

It seems to me that Jay Conrad Levinson is right with his allusion to marketing techniques as marketing weapons.

Like any weapon, a pistol, a rifle, a dagger or even "the bomb", marketing can be used as a force for good in the world to protect the innocent and to publicise the truth. To persuade people to buy the great products that consistently deliver on the advertising promises.

But it can also be used as a force of bad will, to rip-off the innocent and to defraud the unwary.

Caveat Emptor

It's not a new problem as one of my few Latin phrases shows - "let the buyer beware".

But another thought has struck me.

If the seller is to behave ethically and stay within a verifiable version of the truth, what about the manipulations by the buyer. The less known Latin phrase is "Caveat venditor" - let the seller beware.

Who hasn't seen a buyer exaggerate the possible volumes that could be available or to disguise the genuine price offered by a competitor just to put the salesman under pressure and to win an extra price concession?

Video 1 - The Happiness Machine

The BBC describe this episode as "The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.

Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar."

Video 2 - The Engineering Of Consent

The BBC's description of this episode is "The programme explores how those in power in post-war America used Freud's ideas about the unconscious mind to try and control the masses.

Politicians and planners came to believe Freud's underlying premise - that deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires and fears. They were convinced that it was the unleashing of these instincts that had led to the barbarism of Nazi Germany. To stop it ever happening again they set out to find ways to control this hidden enemy within the human mind."

Video 2 does not have that much to do with marketing but it is extremely interesting and is amazing to see how much power the psycho-analysts had in the fifties and very early sixties.

Video 3 - There Is A Policeman Inside All Our Heads: He Must Be Destroyed

It seems that Freud's ideas were challenged by the ideas of Wilhelm Reich who believed that the inner self should be encouraged to express itself rather than to be controlled. The self help movement has turned this into us into the Me Generation.

To quote the BBC again "But the American corporations soon realised that this new self was not a threat but their greatest opportunity. It was in their interest to encourage people to feel they were unique individuals and then sell them ways to express that individuality. To do this they turned to techniques developed by Freudian psychoanalysts to read the inner desires of the new self."

Video 4 - Eight People Sipping Wine In Kettering

This final video turns its attention to the way that Tony Blair and Bill Clinton borrowed the marketing ideas of business and applied them to the world of politics. Based on trying to target people's inner most desires, they tried to do good, unaware that the ideas they used were developed to control people.

Conclusion

I would love to hear your thoughts on the ideas expressed in the article and in particular the videos.

What do you think about the development and the popularisation of powerful methods of influence and persuasion, both as a buyer and a seller?

I feel certain that this is an article that I will add to and extend after I have let the ideas in the video sink in and consider the implications.

Update - Mind Control Marketing

A few years ago top marketer Mark Joyner wrote a book called Mind Control Marketing which explained all kinds of psychological tricks. It became an instant success but was suddenly taken off the market. Mark Joyner was concerned how these techniques would be used to manipulate customers.

Mind Control Marketing has now been released as an ebook with an extra chapter. Click on the link and see my thoughst but Amazon critics loved the original book.

To Your Success

Your Profit Coach

Paul Simister

Business coaching for customer focused entrepreneurs