Through being a member of Sydney based entrepreneurial education movement, The Entourage, I was recently privileged to sit with a select 10 other business owners and spend an intense 34 minutes with Mark Bouris of Wizard Homeloans, The Apprentice and Yellow Brick Road fame.

I have never felt so much pressure in my life, as Mark went around the table and asked each participant “What business are you in”. Despite there being some pretty darn successful people in the room, it became quickly apparent that the answers weren’t to his liking.

Anything that started with “We do….” or “We have…” was respectfully accepted but quickly retorted by “But what actual ‘business’ are you in? What do you do for people?”

 

Some of the B2C guys before me got it, some didn’t.

Now, I’ve heard this style of elevator model explained before and have experienced many a Wantrepreneur say daft things like “We’re in the Staff Engagement Business” when they really just install Speakers in Offices so I was stuck between the etherial and the clearly wrong…..

Even having the fortune of seeing 6 Business Owners sacrificed before me still did not prevent me from stuttering and bumbling my way through something to do with Advertising…. and Media Agencies….and Digital…….. “I’ll come back to you” was Mr Bouris’ quick reply.

And so he did.

That extra 3.5minutes Mark Bouris sat, staring at me from the other end of a rather long boardroom table and working with me to quickly understand the business I was in and what the underlying offering we have is, was priceless.

And at the risk of overposturing or being too fluffy, it became clear. We are in the Business of Survival. Let me explain –

With the rapidly changing media landscape affecting all sides of the Advertiser, Media Buyer and Media Seller, two things have become quite clear to us in the past 12 months:

1. Privately owned, independent Media Agencies are usually not properly equipped to deal with the torrent of Digital Options that have already arrived and are still coming. Much of a Small to Mid Range client’s ‘Digital Advertising’ spend is now on Adwords, Retargeting and SEO. And there are a million new players in that space. Some of whom actually do it well…

Bringing MyMediaTradingDesk into the market as an offering to Private Media Agencies over the last 12months has really been an experience in seeing this survival first hand. By adding this simple service, easily accessible to the large listed Media Agency giants but out of the technical and time reach of the smaller Private ones, has reinvigorated a fair few of our clients. Some of them are putting $5k a month of new year-on-year revenue through their business from Programmatic, some are putting through $50k. All this from a “New Product” they are able to take to existing and new clients of theirs, and meet the Marketer where their head seems to now be at, “Digital Stuff that gets me Sales”.

Although I would never be arrogant or ignorant enough to propose we are the white nights in such a storm of business operating difficulties as at present, but it is good to know we are firmly in The Business of Survival.

If you haven’t seen how we work with Private Media Agencies – you can find out here.
Or maybe as a Marketer, you prefer to buy Media yourself, directly. If that’s the case then we can help too as per here.

 

An old W. Edwards Deming lesson of “Learning is not Compulsory…. neither is Survival” springs to mind. So, here’s to more Learning…. maybe without my sweating palms, stuttering voice and dead-pan stairs from Multi Millionaires though next time!