Feel the fear

“Feel the fear, and do it anyway”

As a naturally shy and self-deprecating person, the above affirmation runs through my head whenever I’m in situations that are out of my natural comfort zone or I have the opportunity to try new things, like doing live radio interviews or writing my first LinkedIn article!  I refuse to let my fears and self-confidence hold me back. It’s been on playback loop for the last few weeks as I’ve turned away from the familiarity -and regular pay cheque- of corporate world and set off down the road of starting my own business.

The metaphorical journey started on a long walk on a bright, crisp January day with Helen Brown, a friend, fellow mum and former colleague where we chatted animatedly about our experiences as senior marketing leaders in very demanding roles. If we were honest, we felt unfulfilled and agreed there must be a better way for us to fulfil our career ambitions, do great work and to give something back to our community. Suddenly, combining our talents and energy into our own business was the obvious choice.

And so, we set about putting our years of experience into practice for ourselves, developing our own business and marketing strategy. Customer and market analysis, SWOTs, proposition and pricing development, budget and revenue forecasts, marketing and lead gen plans. It’s been a busy few months! We’ve connected and re-connected with friends, colleagues and acquaintances who have been incredibly generous with their time and feedback to validate the market need we can address. And we’ve relished the lack of IT hurdles as we’ve jumped headfirst into Slack, Hubspot, Box and other Martech tools, many free, that our corporate bubble never allowed or required us to consider.

If I’m being honest, the hardest part of our journey so far has been deciding on our name! A name reflective of what we can offer our customers, while also reflecting our personalities – professional, straight-talking, sincere and collaborative. That’s before we even get to the minefield of domain availability, who else has a similar name and what are the SEO implications.

In the end we feel very happy with our choice, it reflects what we want to do, which is to work with established and fast-growing SMEs to spot the right market opportunities, to be relevant through their brand, content and propositions to their target customers, and create clear blue water if you will, between them and their competitors. To work side-by-side delivering insight, ideas, actionable plans and executional capability.

Our business is See-blue Marketing.