If you’re like many of our visitors, you’re an entrepreneur, small to medium-sized business owner or manager, non-profit employee, service professional, marketing director or manager, business student or someone starting (or considering) their own business.
And you’re looking for answers… solid knowledge from qualified professionals who can help you solve your most pressing marketing challenges.
Consider this… a US Department of Commerce study concluded that 62% of all American businesses, regardless of size, fail within the first six years. Moreover, 40% of small companies go under before their first year anniversary and 80% of first-year survivors never make it to their fifth anniversary.
These grim statistics point to the serious challenges entrepreneurs face, even though the United States still offers the world’s best environment for small business owners. So, it begs the question, “Why is it that so many extremely intelligent, hard working people, with innovative products and services just can’t make it?”
Exploring these incongruities – the “whys” and eventual solutions – serve as the foundation for our books, seminars, presentations, and coaching and consulting services.
Like other businesspeople we were seeking the same answers and after years of observations and research we uncovered what we feel is the genuine truth.
In short, America’s companies are failing at alarming rates because their founders, owners, employees or managers do not understand that:
But most importantly, they miss "the big one." That is, “Success Is In The Plan.” Simply put, without a marketing plan there is no strategy… without a strategy, there is no business. Yet, experts estimate that 84% of American companies of all sizes have underperforming, or no, marketing plan. Is this relationship coincidental? Absolutely not…
Many business people believe that writing a marketing plan is complicated, painful, boring and worst yet, unnecessary! And while others think it’s a good idea in theory, they’re daunted by the intimidated by the process that they put it off … until it never gets done.
In each of our service areas (business consulting, personal coaching); search engine marketing (Pay-Per-Click, broad based and Local SEO); e-commerce, reputation management, educational venues (seminars, speaking engagements, teleseminars); and books (see “The Procrastinator’s Guide to Marketing”, “Mastering Online Marketing” and Guerrilla Marketing On The Internet") we take our audience by the hand and comfortably guide them through a practical, yet comprehensive, step-by-step system for growing and sustaining a profitable business.
As entrepreneurs, consultants and coaches, and former executives, we have been working professionally with the subject of marketing for nearly three decades… and are ready and willing to share our valuable insights – those hard-earned wisdoms, “real-life” lessoned learned, objective assessments and of course, our subjective judgments.
We hope you’ll take advantage of the resources we’ve provided on this site. You’ll find lots of helpful articles on a wide range of topics, timesaving templates and tools, and fascinating discussions. You can access them by registering on our site.
Mary and David's book, The Procrastinator's Guide to Marketing, is a masterful guide for anyone wanting to go from "how-to" to "know-how." It's superb and in-depth content combined with its powerful ideas and strategies make it the kind of reference that all business people should keep prominently close at hand and use daily. Jay Conrad Levinson, author of "Guerrilla Marketing" book series.