Bill Taylor, co-author of Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win with Polly LaBarre, reminds us that tough economic times are also times of innovation.
Don’t let risky times dull your appetite for taking risk. More then ever, companies and their leaders have to offer a positive alternative to a demoralizing status quo. So why wouldn’t you move now to shake up your market and transform your company, especially when rivals are too timid to respond?
Taylor mentions that Henry Luce launched the lavish and super-expensive ($10 per year!) Fortune magazine in February 1930, just months after the Great Crash. “It was a counter-intuitive move that became an immediate success–and went on to become a publishing icon.” Taylor adds that Frederick Smith launched Federal Express in 1973 even as jet fuel prices were rocketing. Re/Max, now a major force in residential real estate, began in 1973, just as the housing market was entering a severe downturn and that Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft Corp. during the recession of 1975.
So, here we are in January of 2009, scrambling for a foothold inside our own media maelstrom. What shall the entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs among us do? It’s more than a rhetorical question. The inner call to “change things for the better” is also a quest. For some in media and marketing that change may look like better cost-per-acquisition ratios. For others, it might mean a hardly tapped multi-level storytelling universe with brands as content sponsors and/or producers.
I am sometimes startled by my own innovations, as I was this week when a potential client reached out to me here. Understand, that’s what I want to happen. I want people to take this free daily offering, digest it and then realize we are available for hire. I’ve found though, that it helps a great deal to go ahead and ask for the sale.
You already know what the front-end offering is here. But what about our consulting services on the back-end? Consultants need a focus, and we have one! Our focus is on content and its increasing importance in the marketing mix. So, if you need a Content Strategy, Idea Deck or implementation plan, give a shout and we’ll help you make something good happen.
Recessions are a great time to start a business, we started our creative agency in Oct 2008, pretty much the day te world had ended according to the media at least!…
http://www.revolverrevolver.co.uk