Roger McKerlie – my business journey and experiences

Inauspicious beginnings

Although I went to university, where I read English and American literature, I had no idea about the working world when I graduated and to be fair a dissertation on the role of the social pariah in George Orwell’s work wasn’t going to be much help.

My parents were great people and I loved them dearly but my dad was a head waiter and my mum worked in a pub so there wasn’t a huge amount of business guidance and advice coming from that direction. I was also a bit lazy and, whilst I liked the idea of working in a 1980s London ad agency, I didn’t have the perseverance of a couple of my friends who dutifully completed over 200 applications – lesson one in my journey was that they did both get jobs in advertising, so commitment is critical.

On leaving university I hurried to London, a city I was, and still am, enthralled by. I am a proud northerner, but I knew back then that I was never going to return and that London was the place for me. I bummed around, sofa surfing for a while doing temporary work to pay for my fun but I knew I had to do something a bit more “grown up” at some stage. However, I had no skills or experience that seemed relevant to the business world and, whilst some of my more middle class friends were hoovering up well paid jobs in this place called the City, I had never even heard of it.

Having been reassured by many (hugely underqualified) advisors that I had “the gift of the gab” I resolved to get into sales and if I could link that to advertising, well all the better. I remember having a conversation with my older brother, who was already in sales, albeit in what I perceived to be the mind crushingly boring world of electronics, and detecting the scepticism in his voice when I told him I had been successful in landing a well-paid role selling advertising space on a wall planner in south east London.

Of course, he was right to be sceptical!

There was no basic and the promise of earning £1,000 a month on securing 10 sales (each little box we had to sell cost £1,000) was an illusion. Nonetheless I borrowed a friend’s car and actually managed to make some appointments with small businesses who were, it would appear, more naïve than me. Off I went to such wonderful places as Peckham, East Dulwich, Camberwell and New Cross (places I still hold in great affection) diligently getting out my sales presenter and sticking religiously to the script (“our wall planner is the second largest classified advertising vehicle behind the Yellow Pages in the whole of Australia, you know?”). In between being set upon by a ferocious dog outside a lock up on Southampton Way, London SE5 and being physically ejected from a corner shop in Nunhead, I did manage to make a few sales but nowhere near enough to hit the payment trigger of me earning any money.

I at least had the sense to get out quite quickly although that month or two or traipsing the streets of south London taught me a huge amount, not least of which is to get your elevator pitch honed and communicated quickly if you hope to hold someone’s attention. It also taught me the lasting and hugely powerful skill of story telling in business. Forget the technical specifications of what you sell (that comes later) you need to be able to tell a great story about your business, market and products and you need to do it quickly.

Bounce back

A chance encounter with a guy I had been at school with led me to apply for a “proper” job with a huge media company and I found myself working in a 19-storey building on the edge of London and living with 6 mates in a terraced house in Tooting Broadway.

I was, of course, selling advertising space (oh, the irony of being snooty about my brother’s sector) for the leading electronics magazine in the UK. “Space floggers” they called us and indeed we were and proud of it too. Here I learned a huge amount about sales, marketing, publishing, people management, forecasting, strategic thinking and the importance of credibility in business. I rose to become a Group Sales Director with a team of 40 people under my guidance and I stayed 7 years. It was a great place to work, I met some superbly talented people and made some friends for life…oh and I met my future wife there too.

It really showed me how important “work” is and the power of teams in getting things done. I learned that the team is only as good as the weakest link and that a permanent focus on excellence is critical if you want to be successful. I have no bad words or memories about my grounding in publishing at this place. I was well paid, earned big bonuses, had a nice car, a PA and supportive bosses who were happy to spend money on business development.

But, and it is a big but, it was perhaps a little too corporate for me. It was an easy life and I subconsciously yearned for a tougher battle where I would be properly tested against worthy opponents.

So, when my future boss heaped compliments on me when we shared a table at an industry event, I was hooked. Not least because he was offering me the MD role in the London office of an advertising agency! See, I said to myself, I really didn’t need to fill in hundreds of application forms and waste my valuable drinking time at university. Here I was, with a huge pay rise, a Mercedes car and responsibility for a team of 60 people….and a failing business with morale on the lower ground floor!

A steep learning curve

With hindsight it went wrong from day one. I was told within an hour of my arrival that the gents’ toilet was unpleasantly blocked and when I asked my colleague to summon the brilliant maintenance men in their blue boiler suits and get it fixed, he did, quite literally laugh in my face. Obviously, they didn’t exist! We don’t need to expand upon this story other than to say I quickly learned what the expression a “hands on” role meant in the real world.

I did manage to bring in a couple of capable Lieutenants without whom I would have had a nervous breakdown but it was an uphill struggle. The agency was losing money and clients hand over fist and I had neither the financial means or, more importantly, the experience to halt the slide. By some miracle we did manage to reach break even in year one (I genuinely still don’t know how we did it), made a small profit in year two and then thundered backwards into a loss in year three, which spelt the end of my tenure there.

I wish I could revisit that situation knowing what I know now. For starters I would have made it my number one priority to oust the alcoholic, bullying and incompetent guy who was my boss so that the regime of fear could have been lifted. I learned many lessons at that place – mostly on how not to run a business – but the biggest one is that fear has no place in business. Apprehension yes, pressure definitely, a degree of nervousness about the impact of one’s decisions absolutely but unbridled fear of authority no way. People need to make mistakes and they need to learn from them but if they are terrified of taking any sort of action then there will only be one outcome. Life is too short to spend it worrying about what some idiot with power is going to do.

In a state of desperation and anxiety I consulted a friend who was an employment barrister and I told him that I sensed my time was coming. He prepared me for the fight and, for the first time in my time in the agency, I felt supported and therefore ready to do battle with this guy. The day came where he “offered” me an alternative role, I asked what would happen if I said no, he immediately deduced I had a lawyer on my side and he dismissed me from his office and didn’t speak to me til the day I left (with a decent pay off in my back pocket) when, bizarrely he asked me if I wanted to go to Christmas party that night!

I learned a couple more valuable lessons during that stressful time (he made sure my colleagues on the board isolated me for 4 months before I left) one of which was to trust other people even if that is risky. I had breakfast with the CEO, and much more experienced agency man than me, who I knew and liked from my media days. I knew he had been fired a couple of times on his journey through this tough world and I just needed someone to confide in.

If he had made my approach public I would have been finished and the pay off would have gone south, but I needed to get a different angle on my situation. I remember it like it was yesterday when he told me that when the day came I would feel nothing but relief. He was right too. When I walked out of that place I felt like the weight of the world had been lifted off my shoulders.

So, I also learned that creating a toxic environment will never work. As I was about to find out in the next chapter of my journey, yes, employees let you down and disappoint you but equally they can inspire and emotionally overwhelm you when they support you. Creating a positive team environment where everyone is respected, listened to and valued is critical to business success.

Break out

What my former boss didn’t know (because he was arrogant and didn’t read the signs) was that I wasn’t going to sit on my hands and weakly accept what was coming my way. When I was approached, over the most clandestine of beers by my somewhat reluctant 2ic, to suggest we set up our own agency, I was taken aback. I had brought in 2 people over him and I knew he resented me in the early days but, whilst the others I brought in quickly smelled a rat and baled out, he stood with me and we developed a healthy respect for each other. More importantly, he had worked out we had complementary skills and that we both knew we couldn’t be any worse than our previous place had been. Another lesson learned – don’t underestimate people and, in fact, actively listen to what they have to say.

So, I took my redundancy money and my don’t- do-it-that-way manual and set up my own (sorry, our) new agency. The next seven years were the greatest thrill of my business career and I learned so much it was untrue. When we finally parted company, when he bought me out of my 50% share, I concluded maybe we should have gone our separate ways some six months earlier but the previous years had been brilliant and I thank him from the bottom of my heart for being such a good business partner. We never became friends (probably a good idea!) and we never badgered our wives into uncomfortable social situations, but I did spend more time with that man than any other human being for those years and we grew and prospered together.

This really taught me the value of teams and partnership. They can be brutally painful if they go wrong but when they work, they add magic. Since I sold my stake in that business I have set up another one but I have a different model, in that I limit the number of people on my payroll, but I have constantly built important partnerships and collaborations because you really can’t do it on your own.

At the peak of our time together our business was flying and we were making superb profits. That meant we could have some fun too. On a “fact finding” trip to Sydney we had a great time but we even managed to finance that trip by designing, writing and booking an ad campaign for the Australian office of a UK client….try doing that before email and the internet! The point was our confidence was high – in our team, our abilities, our ambition and our work ethic and those things are hard won but easily destroyed. Keeping things in perspective is an experience that only success and failure can bestow.

So, when we hit the downturn after the whole Y2K thing (younger people will need to Google it) and the tech crash of the early noughties came along, we didn’t panic. Sure, we had to downsize and cut costs but we survived. We did this by being honest with our people and working our nuts off to support our clients, who don’t forget, were having their own tough times.

Going it alone

I did say that ours was a business marriage that should have ended six months before it did and I was finding myself a little frustrated that he was, in my opinion, taking too long to make decisions and, at the same time, like a band member who wanted to record a solo album, I had some other projects on my mind and I couldn’t see where he fitted into them.

So, off I went for the next stage of my adventure.

I realised quite quickly that I no longer had the appetite to build a business which employed lots of people with all of the administrative issues that brings. I wanted to get my teeth into sorting out problems and seizing on opportunities for others – in effect I realised I was becoming that most maligned of beasts, a consultant.

The conclusion I reached, over a few years I must confess, is that I was best suited to having a couple of business projects of my own on the go whilst advising other business people on the areas I know a little about. Afterall, it doesn’t take long before the skills and experiences you sell to others become old hat and outdated so I decided I would combine running my own show with consultancy.

My clients will testify whether this approach has worked or not but I haven’t had too many complaints and people seem to want my input and advice so I must be doing something right.

My business philosophy

The most important thing I have learned is that there are many ways to succeed (or fail) so there is no “manual” that aspiring business people can follow. There are some givens of course:

• You have to have a good idea that the market wants or needs – me too businesses rarely survive a market correction
• You have to be passionate – if your business doesn’t occupy nearly every waking moment you are unlikely to be very successful
• You have to be brave – going it alone is arguably one of the most stupid, hair brained things you can possibly do, but, boy, will it make you feel alive! You have to have balls to do it, so look yourself in the mirror and ask “can we survive without a safety net?”
• You have to develop all round business skills – it is relentless and a lot of the “stuff” around running your business is boring and not what you set it up to do, but it has to be done….you do need to understand the importance of cash and how P&L works and you do need to learn about sales and marketing
• You need support – whether it is through a business partner as I had or through advisors do not think you can do this alone – it will drive you insane and you could be miles down the wrong road before you realise you took a wrong turn so surround yourself with good people

Sales

If you want to work with me, I will make no apology for focusing a lot of time and energy on sales. It is the life blood of any business and it doesn’t matter how technically great you may be in your chosen field, if you aren’t making sales then you will fail. Of course, sales is not as simple as simply flogging your products and you need to do it profitably or what is the point? But, making sales is hard work and it is a never-ending process and you need to devote a huge amount of your time to it. What’s more, as the business leader, if you can’t sell your products then you have a problem. So, learn, rehearse, ask questions, test and amend your sales pitch constantly.

Should everyone in the business be a sales person? I get asked that question a lot and my answer is this: they don’t need to be a sales person (that is a specialist role) but they absolutely do need to be able to talk about their business with authority and clarity. It is not unreasonable to expect the people who are employed by a business to know what it does, who for and what the benefits are – in effect this is the Sales Value Proposition. But to get to this point the business leaders need to create a learning environment where they can impart relevant information to their teams and create a culture where those teams are entirely invested in what the business does.

Sharing the rewards is one of the most important ways to achieve this and I am constantly staggered by the number of businesses that think targets and bonuses are only for the sales people. Consider this: if your bought ledger clerk is out for dinner with friends and they meet someone who could be a customer of your business (or a supplier, or an employee, or an investor, or an influencer, or a competitor, or an activist…..) do you want them to be able to represent the business in the best light or hope they don’t say something that is plain wrong?

Involve everyone and help them to buy into the business and not just see it as a place they spend time and get paid.

Marketing

I have met a few people who have said to me that marketing is a waste of time. From memory none of them have been successful.

Marketing is what a business is about. What is the point of it if no one knows it exists? There are many “rules” around marketing but the one that is incontrovertible is that if the market doesn’t know you exist it can’t buy from you.

Now, there are many ways to look at marketing and many desired outcomes from it. If you run a huge organisation like Coca Cola, for example, marketing and the constant reinforcement of your brand is pretty much the whole purpose of the business. Sure, there will always be product extensions and acquisitions to be talked about but fundamentally when you have a huge brand like that your job is to pump money and quality into the keeping the brand front of mind.

Most SMEs don’t have the luxury of simply investing into the brand and then letting the customers come to them. So, I am clear with all of my SME clients (the space I like most, because I believe I can make more of a difference than in the corporate world) that marketing should be the servant of business development.

That is not to say that your sales manager has complete sway over the messages and disciplines the marketing manager uses, far from it. But, as you are growing your business (and when do you stop doing that?) there is a strong argument to say that all marketing activity should be focused on helping the sales function to increase your market share. This doesn’t mean that there is no value in brand building at the same time and in fact, if you are smart, the two go hand in hand but until you achieve the luxury situation where your sales people are simply order takers because your brand is dominant, then every pound you invest needs to generate a return on investment.

Does your marketing activity do this?

Networking

I tried to work out how much of the business I have ever done has come from networking and I reckon it must be north of 80%. Yet, I meet too many business leaders who don’t network. That is crazy. It is the cheapest and most effective marketing tool you could ever hope to come across.

So, let’s be clear on what I mean by networking.

Yes, there are many business networks in the market (I own two myself) and they have their place. You need to assess whether the formulaic networks who meet with determined regularity and follow a rigid process are for you or not, but a couple of them are superb businesses, highly profitable and growing so they must be doing something right.

I won’t labour this part of the market except to say that they are a powerful way for you build a network and make important contacts – for a small amount of investment someone is giving you the tools and the platform to meet hundreds of business people, some of whom could become very important to your business. In return for a small amount of your time!

I do have a lot of views on how to maximise formal networking groups but my biggest is this: see them as  places to build advocacy for your business and not as a market you must sell to. I have seen delegates physically turn their backs when they see the “shark” sales person heading towards them. I had to tell a CEO of a business which was a member of one of my networks that his sales manager could no longer attend our events because he was a pain to our other members but, more importantly, he was actively damaging the brand of the business that employed him.

So, next time you attend an organised networking event don’t go there thinking you have to sell (that will cause most people huge anxiety anyway) but instead go with the frame of mind that you might just be able to help someone else…it takes all the pressure away, people will warm to you and, over time, some of them will become your biggest supporters.

If you don’t want to attend organised networking events then there really is no excuse for a business leader not having an extensive network of contacts that they can call upon for a myriad of reasons. These should not just be customers and potential customers either.

As part of your marketing strategy, I suggest you conduct a stakeholder analysis and you should then build your network with everyone that could be considered a stakeholder in your business. I guarantee you that at some stage you will need them.

Can I help?

I do hope so.

So here is my “elevator pitch” to anyone reading this.

I am very experienced (some, but not me, say an expert) in helping build businesses profitably. I focus particularly in the SME space and am best used by those that turnover between £1m and £100m (yes that is a big gap but they all bear the same traits and have the same ambitions).

I think strategically first and will help you to create and implement a business growth strategy and supporting tactical plan.

I will use my particular skills and experience in sales, marketing and networking to move you forward but at the same time I can take on the “chairperson” role to ensure your leadership team is united, focused and driven to act as a team.

Finally, because I operate in the SME space, I know that from time to time you will need an extra pair of hands to get stuck into a particular issue and I am more than happy to do that.