Two decades of business. Two decades of learning

In Feb 2021, our business - Blue Frog Marketing - celebrated twenty years of operation.

Over those twenty years, I've learnt a lot about running a business.

Learnings that came from both success and failures. From good times and bad.

I thought I'd document a few of these learnings to help other business owners in their journey.

I have a lot of admiration, respect and affinity for business owners. They are a different bunch, who have a crack and take responsibility for staff, customers, suppliers. They take risks, make mistakes, and have a go.

Most of our work over twenty years has been with business owners - in fact we've helped more than five hundred of them achieve more than $2billion in revenue growth over the years.

That doesn't mean our marketing and strategic advice a perfect record, but we've won more times than we've lost.

Here are five key lessons I've learnt over those years:

1. Work with social people - by far the biggest problems we've had in our business have been with unethical people who only care about themselves. Clients who haven't paid bills despite work being delivered, suppliers who don't deliver on their promises. Through those mistakes, I've learnt I only want to work with people who value others, care about others, and try to do the right thing by others and the economy and the planet
2. Exposure - early on in our business, we had a client go out of business through no fault of their own or ours. But we were very exposed to them as they made up around 50% of our revenue. Our lesson was make sure that we spread our risk with no client making up more than 20% of revenue at any time. And also ensuring on the supply side that we have alternative options so we aren't exposed to a supplier failure.
3. Bill up front - on a few rare occasions we were taken for a ride by unethical people and companies by failing to get some payment up front for our services. On one occasion we wrote an entire marketing plan, report and delivered it and then never got paid. Ouch! We now bill 50% of any work up front but have a 100% no question asked refund policy. If a client genuinely hasn't got value, we refund their money. Something we've only had to do twice in twenty years. On small projects where we possibly shouldn't have engaged the client in the first place.
4. Work with those who value strategy - at the heart of our success is great strategy built on understanding customers, markets and value. When we follow our process to inform strategic plans and marketing plans, we are almost always successful. On those rare occasions where we have ignored this to focus on 'tactics' or rush jobs in spending money on marketing without insights - we fail. Our policy is to work with people who value the idea of carefully ands strategically planning their business and marketing.
5. Response Time - whilst we are careful in our strategic planning, we've also found over time that clients value both communication and responsiveness. In fact with these two things, we can solve any issue that arises between our business and clients. We are famous for our quick, clear and decisive communication so clients never feel like they are left in the dark. And if a problem arises we communicate with them until it is fixed. No matter what.

I've had the great pleasure to work with hundreds of amazing business owners. I've also surveyed and presented to tens of thousands more. And I'm honoured to be a seven time best selling author and six time national award winner for our marketing.

Our ongoing success is built on developing great strategies for clients who we value and who value us. And keeping strong communication flowing between all stakeholders in a project.

I hope these lessons learnt over twenty years in business will help you. There are of course a lot more elements of business success that are important.

I want to wish you success on your journey....

Hunter