Self-made millionaire at age 14.
Is this true? Often our culture dictates when you can start earning money, how we do it and how much we allow ourselves to earn.
Some cultures are more willing to invest in marketing than others. In America, I expect that many successful people have a huge array of people to model themselves on, emulate and idolise as images of achievement and success.
Here in England though, it's still not the general culture to 'flash the cash' - and promote your own financial status. Within the varied multicultural society here, established business orientated cultures can easily access their role models via their social networks, TV or magazines for example. However, among the black communities in particular the West Indian, there appear to be very few public business people to model.
Creating Long Term Models of Success
Business success has it's own established and tested models of marketing from PLESTEL models to the 4P's of price, product, place and promotion. If you follow them after good market research, and regularly monitor and audit them, generally you should have a smooth running business.
While many are investing in the advantage that the great and dynamic changes which are constantly occurring in marketing, in particular the current trends in Internet Marketing and Social Networking Media, many people still resist getting on board with the latest media tools.
Marketing works. Yes, it labourious, creates expenditure and there is so much learning to do, its practically a full time occupation, but if that is not the area of your business, then yes, you should focus on what you want to develop as a strength, then let someone else do the marketing. Many people, especially those who were fortunate to grab prime locations for passing customers, take for granted the advantages of additional marketing.
If you know you are operating a business within a niche market in particular, then yes, you really do need to market even more. So I have to question the disadvantage that some cultures place upon themselves by limiting their marketing investments. If marketing grows your business by a few percent each year, that may be the equivalent of the interest you would have been paying on the capital invested. If regular marketing grows that business into double figures for growth each year, then in a short amount of time, you will double your income or the capital invested.
Marketing investments can be monitored as closely as that of any other business factor and in doing so, you can then project those decisions and expenditure on a graph to identify the correlation between marketing activity and results.
A story of trip to the hairdressers prompts me to suggest you also bear in mind your own contribution to the equation after you have succeeded in driving a customer to your business, by maintaining a SWOT analysis of yourself and your business. There is no point blaming the customers for staying away from a business, if experienced customers realise that they have fallen for the price, place, promotion and offered product, but when it comes to styling hair, you just can't cut it!
