What I learnt from applying Big Company tactics to my wife's business - and how it has made me a better employee

This summer, as is the way when working for a mainly European company, meetings are less and many colleagues take the time to recharge their batteries, go on holiday with their families or spend quality time at home – perhaps working on a house project, before September comes around and the travelling, meetings and work schedules ramp-up. Normally, my family and I are no different, we have taken the opportunity in the past summers to go on road trips to US and Europe, undertake a project in the house such as completely renovating a room or tackling the garden.

This year, however, has been very different – and please bear with me and hopefully you will understand why this posting is on LinkedIn and not just tucked away in my personal blog or on FB, as there are some important business lessons I think that I learnt, or in some cases, re-learnt, this year. I always remember a business coach once saying “To know, and not to do, is not to know” and this is very true – it is of no benefit to be able to recall great business phrases, motivational 1-liners and teachings from the many business books we all read, if we do not put into practice what we are putting into our minds.

So, back to our summer this year. Helped by our daughter having a new job and therefore no desire for a holiday and our son wanting to be glued to the Overwatch World Cup online, we decided to not take a holiday this summer, instead we concentrated on my wife’s small business and how we could help it move to “the next level”. My wife has been running her All Over Health business for 6 years now and it has a modest but healthy turnover, which has grown steadily year on year, without a massive growth spurt – but with a solid foundation.

Coming from a background of working with governmental organisations (UK Government, United Nations), large corporates (Airbus, British Airways) and having experienced the highs and lows of life in a start-up at BiblioTech, I was sure that I could add real value to the next phase of her business growth and approached it with a great deal of enthusiasm.

The first item I tackled was organisational – I put in place some of the things I have found useful in my previous jobs, such as electronic to-do lists which we could share and assign tasks between ourselves, using Wunderlist as well as some Excel based tracking tools for customer contacts, follow-up calls and other management tools. This was my first, but not my last, piece of “Managing the business” change. I went on to create a new marketing pack, with leaflets, A4 folders and business cards and the associated social media tools needed to re-enforce the printed marketing sets so people could find out more about the products on offer and the science behind it.

The learning curve on designing print marketing vs creating shiny Powerpoint slides to illustrate points I had vastly under-estimated and gave me a new found respect for people in my organisation who do this as their main day-job, or the many design & print companies that offer this service. In fact I would say one of the main take-aways from the whole experience was understanding the many things that small businesses have to deal with every day, compared to a large corporation which has in most cases a team that specialises in that aspect of the business. This has given me some real benefit back to my own day job as I now appreciate the importance of aspects of the value chain that I had perhaps under-valued or taken for granted and I hope it will reflect in my attitude and gratitude to those people.

I also helped Kim by driving her to meetings which previously she would do, then she would do her  presentation, then drive home. In one week we drove from our home in Oxford to Manchester and back on the Tuesday, Coventry and back on the Wednesday and finally London and back on the Thursday – all for 2 hour roadshow meetings in hotel business centres and this is something Kim does every month. I helped carry the projector, the screen, the empty product cases, the 6 pop-up banners, the marketing kits, the sample products for people to try, the tablecloths, the products that people had come to collect – the list went on and again it brought home to me how difficult it can be when you are a small company trying to grow on a bigger stage. It is easy to forget when working for a large company exactly what lengths the SME has gone through to be ready to pitch in front of you. This will I think benefit me going forward in showing more understanding when sitting in our conference rooms listening to pitches on how Product X will help us.

Another initiative that I undertook was email marketing, using a pdf version of the printed kits I had designed, I did some research into areas of the UK that could (a) benefit from the products and (b) did not seem to have people already marketing those products as yet. I found 20 people in 2 regions that I felt would really benefit from offering the products to their client-base as an additional revenue stream and build spreadsheets to track responses as well as setting up MailChimp to handle the campaign. I made sure I did my research on each person so that I could personalise the email, which I did and sent off the emails, feeling very good about what I had achieved. Imagine my surprise that after 4 days I had not had any positive responses back and after 2 weeks, over half never responded at all, even after a polite email reminder after 1 week. This is, I think, an important take-away for me, which is that I spent a long time “Managing the business” and not enough of a ratio “Doing the business”. I would smile at Kim’s many post-it notes around her office at our home, her endless pieces of paper with people’s names and notes on – I was sure my system would be better and get more results – but we should remember that it is sometimes very easy to get side-tracked into managing a situation rather than just getting on with it.

Overall I think the experience has been a very good one for me – I have learnt a lot from working with my wife – I have learnt that running your own business is much harder than I had appreciated, with lots of hard slog, but it is also hugely enjoyable. I have given speeches in front of thousands of people on topics I am familiar on, but to see her give a talk on “How your Microbiome is Amazing” to 30 people in a Novotel in Manchester was just as rewarding.

Of course, I would like to think that some of the structures I have put in place will help as the business continues to grow and expand. I have had very good feedback from customers about the marketing kit I created, a skill I had never needed to learn and understand before and I have learnt more about creating an online brand through blogs, videos and social media training that I ever thought I would. The end result though – and this is key to anyone running their own business, is that after my “expert consultancy”, the business revenue did not increase, the only increase was in the Management overhead I had applied to it. Kim, however assures me that it can take up to 6 months for revenue changes to occur after new ideas have been applied, so I live in optimistic hope that I made a difference.

The main thing I have learnt from my summer though has been to remember to get the ratio between “managing” and “doing” right – and this is something that will definitely help me when my job goes back to being as busy as it was before the summer break. I will go back to work just as rested mentally as I would have been if I had been on a driving holiday through Europe, or sitting on a beach somewhere.

I have thoroughly enjoyed helping Kim and look forward to continuing to help her and the bonus is that I would like to think I will be better at my own job as a result.