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Build Your Business by Solving Their Problem - a conversation with Callum Armstrong
34 Plays2 months ago
Callum Armstrong (BCom) is a Kiwi social entrepreneur with a passion for marketing strategy, developing businesses, and helping the environment.
Through his business, Paste and Publish Callum provides coaching in marketing that helps businesses to understand how to create content and digital marketing that enables them to grow. The aim is to solve problems for other businesses (B2B services). He equips his clients to generate business leads beyond word-of-mouth and get results online.
In this episode of The Independent Minds Callum and Michael discuss the how outsourcing the provision of a service means that the skills and knowledge never enter your business. They explore the importance of the business understanding what the outsourcer does.
Callum explains how as a provider of marketing services he manages his clients to ensure that the relationship delivers the best outcome for his clients.
He explains how his approach helped Manuka Essentialsto increase business by 500 percent on a budget of $NZ 5,000.
The environmental charity that Callum established is Conservation Amplified.
The Independent Minds is made on Zencastr.
Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform, on which you can create your podcast in one place and then distribute it to the major platforms.
Zencastr really does make creating content so easy.
If you would like to try podcasting using Zencastr visit zencastr.com/pricing and use our offer code ABECEDER.
Find out more about both Michael Millward and Callum Armstrong at Abeceder.co.uk
Matchmaker.fm
Thank you to the team at Matchmaker.fmthe introduction to Callum Armstrong.
If you are a podcaster looking for interesting guests or if like Callum, you have something interesting to say Matchmaker.fm is where matches of great hosts and great guests are made. Use our offer code MILW10for a discount on membership.
Travel
Callum is based in New Zealand.
The Ultimate Travel Club, offers trade prices on travel to New Zealand and everywhere else. You can become a member at a discounted price by using my offer code ABEC79 when you join-up.
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If you are listening to The Independent Minds on your smart phone, you may like to know that Three has the UK’s Fastest 5G Network with Unlimited Data, so listening on Three means you can wave goodbye to buffering.
Visit Three for information about business and personal telecom solutions from Three, and the special offers available when you quote my referral code WPFNUQHU.
Being a Guest
If you would like to be a guest on The Independent Minds, please contact using the link at Abeceder.co.uk.
We recommend that potential guests take one of the podcasting guest training programmes available from Work Place Learning Centre.
We appreciate every like, download, and subscriber.
Thank you for listening.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Independent Minds
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencastr. Hello and welcome to The Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abysida and people who think outside the box about how work works, with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for every everyone.
00:00:23
Speaker
I am your host, Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abysida. As the jingle at the start of this podcast says, The Independent Minds is made on Zencastr.
00:00:35
Speaker
Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform on which you can make your podcast in one place and then distribute it to all of the major platforms like Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and YouTube Music.
00:00:48
Speaker
Zencastr really does make making content so easy. If you would like to try podcasting using Zencastr, visit zencastr.com forward slash pricing and use my offer code, Abysida.
00:01:03
Speaker
All the details are in the description. Now that I've told you how wonderful Zencaster is for making podcasts, we should make one. One that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
00:01:17
Speaker
As with every episode of The Independent Minds, we won't be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think.
Meet Callum Armstrong from Paste and Publish
00:01:25
Speaker
Today, my guest, Independent Mind, who I met at matchmaker.fm, is Callum Armstrong from pasteandpublish.com in New Zealand.
00:01:37
Speaker
Hello, Callum. Hello, Michael. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. It is going to be a pleasure for you and for me. It's going to be great. I know. Thank you very much for being available.
00:01:48
Speaker
It is at the moment 10 o'clock in the evening here in the United Kingdom and 10 o'clock tomorrow morning in New Zealand. And it sure is. What does the future look like? Well, i'm seeing ah I'm seeing a little bit of cloud, mostly sunny blue skies, birds are chirping, not too much wind.
00:02:06
Speaker
Good. Yeah, so hopefully this translates over to the UK. Hopefully so. Hopefully so. Thank you. I've never visited New Zealand, but if I ever do, i will be sure to plan my travel with the Ultimate Travel Club, as that is where I can access trade prices on flights, hotels, holidays, and all sorts of other travel-related purchases.
00:02:25
Speaker
There is a link and a discount code in the description. Now that I've paid the electricity bill, it's time to find out more about Callum.
Callum's Journey: Sales to Agency
00:02:34
Speaker
So Callum is a marketing coach and social entrepreneur.
00:02:37
Speaker
Now, I know what you're thinking, but stick with me. This is going to be interesting. Since 2018, Callum has developed a content platform marketing agency, coach clients and started, built and exited a handful of companies.
00:02:53
Speaker
Callum helps B2B service businesses to go from not knowing when the next client will show up to owning a 24-7 customer getting machine that works whilst you are sleeping.
00:03:05
Speaker
I'm a great one for earning whilst you sleep. The big question is, though, what does that involve? So, Callum, tell us a little bit about you. yeah so i grew up in a family where my father was running a business. He he was a marketer, salesperson, and went on to lead the company.
00:03:24
Speaker
And so throughout my childhood and teenage years, i was constantly hearing about how business works, how sales works, hearing what happens behind closed doors in the boardroom,
00:03:35
Speaker
At the same time, I was passionate about science and nature and the environment, which led me to starting a charity. But yeah, so essentially, I was always passionate about sales and marketing.
00:03:45
Speaker
ah As a kid, as a teenager, I was always looking for the next business idea, the next thing to sell, the next job or hustle to have. When I went to university, that continued.
00:03:56
Speaker
After I finished studying my marketing degree, I got a job driving around the country selling carpet, of all things, I discovered that there was not enough native forest in this country.
00:04:08
Speaker
And so I started the skincare business, long story short. When I started it, I needed an income. And my friend who was running a marketing agency said, well, I need a writer. So I just happened to start writing blogs for him.
00:04:20
Speaker
It was an easy, f flexible income while I started my my first business. It turns out I was okay at it. I mean, he kept giving me more work and other people started asking me for to to write content for them. And that kept me going until the lockdowns.
00:04:34
Speaker
And then in early 2020, as everybody knows, the world came to a standstill. And so did my my skincare company at the time. it was considered non-essential and so the income of that business went to zero and i i was running my freelancing and then a few clients that i had said to me hey we're going global we're growing really fast can you build an agency put a team around you and uh and deliver the same quality but at a larger scale and
00:05:06
Speaker
That essentially evolved into my agency, Paste and Publish. We grew to nine people over the 18 months or so that followed. And then I realized that it wasn't my place in the world.
Empowering Clients through Coaching
00:05:19
Speaker
I thought I could add a lot more value by coaching people and by building the capabilities in their business. I like to say, instead of giving you the pie, that being the deliverable, I'll give you the bakery that makes the pies so that you can do this ongoing forever.
00:05:32
Speaker
I had a lot more joy out of training my team, upskilling them and coaching them, giving strategies to clients and coaching my clients than I did for actually delivering the work. And sometimes I would do all this free stuff along the coaching lines just because I wanted to spend my time doing that, sometimes at the expense of the business.
00:05:49
Speaker
So I decided to become a coach. And then that evolved over the last few years into what is now ah coaching and consulting business with just me and a few other people here and there. What you've done then is developed a skill, built a business around that skill that has given work to other people, and then worked out as many entrepreneurs do what it is you really want to do, and then created another business around that, the sharing of the knowledge, the expertise, don't give me a fish, give me a fishing rod and you'll be able to do it yourself. Yeah, exactly. It's ah there's just so much joy that comes from seeing someone level up.
00:06:28
Speaker
you know I can deliver a great piece of content. If I run your marketing, I can get your results. But ultimately, if our relationship ends for whatever reason, and that doesn't have to be a bad thing, you're left in a bit of a pickle.
00:06:42
Speaker
And also, you you haven't you've had an easy, I pay money and I get results. But seeing that capability be built and knowing that I had a hand in building it um is just so much more fulfilling, at least for me.
00:06:55
Speaker
That's not the same for everyone. Different people like different things, but certainly suddenly tickles my fancy, so
The Dangers of Outsourcing without Internal Expertise
00:07:01
Speaker
to speak. Yes. So I suppose from a corporate perspective, if an organization, like you said, the one asked the question that led to the growth of Paste and Publish, is that if an organization...
00:07:15
Speaker
outsources the activity, it never insources the skill or the knowledge that always remains outside. If that organization then says, okay, we don't want that any anymore.
00:07:29
Speaker
We're saying goodbye to the service for whatever reason. It's also actually saying goodbye to the skill and the knowledge that actually delivered the results from the service.
00:07:40
Speaker
So one of the downsides, I suppose, of having something that is outsourced. o Yeah, that's a good way of it's ah a good way of putting it. ah and And I guess I've never thought of it with ah that specific terminology.
00:07:54
Speaker
Yes, you lose the knowledge and the skills. And yes, you can pick it back up in the future. You can rehire that vendor if they've got capacity and willingness or hire another vendor, but it's not going to be the same. It could be better. It could be worse.
00:08:06
Speaker
But I think the other the other point people don't always consider, and at least in the marketing context, is that, yes, you can outsource that skill or that capability, but you've still got to have someone competent within your business to manage that skill or capability.
00:08:21
Speaker
If you outsource, say, your blog writing to an agency, but you don't have someone that speaks their language and they're not able to, you know, you know you just say go off and do your job, but you don't actually give them what they need as far as information, availability, context, a relationship with someone with at least understanding of what they're doing.
00:08:44
Speaker
then you're doing a disservice to your contractor and they can't give you the best results for your company. So I think, yes, you can outsource the skill if you're in that relationship with the contractor or agency. Yeah, you do lose the capability.
00:08:59
Speaker
But... If you don't build the capability, at least at the very least, to manage the outsourced skill, you're doing wrong to everyone, including yourself, your employer, and your your contractors or agencies. Yes.
00:09:13
Speaker
You've reminded me about a case that I had as an HR professional with a client that asked me to come into their business and manage their recruitment process. They were going to use...
00:09:26
Speaker
recruitment agencies to recruit a senior management team prior to while looking for and an um investment, basically. The conversations that I then had with the recruitment consultants were then the feedback was, you understand our language, you understand what it is that we do.
00:09:45
Speaker
You're able to present what the organization needs in a better way for us to be able to understand, to then deliver better. And it's like you say, if you are going to outsource something,
00:09:58
Speaker
You still need to have the knowledge internally to actually understand what the outsourcer is doing and making sure that the outsourcer is doing what you need. Absolutely.
00:10:09
Speaker
and being someone who's run a marketing agency, who's been a contractor and a coach, I can tell you with... a high degree of certainty that when you have a client that has someone with knowledge and skill and time dedicated to managing you in the company, they're so much better to deal with.
00:10:28
Speaker
The results you can get are so much more and it's shown in the difference in results I've been able to deliver. But then when you have clients, I've got an example, I won't name names, but I had a client and they they basically said, here's the money, just do what you've got to do.
00:10:46
Speaker
But of course, there's things where you need to sign off or you need their input, or you at least need them to know what you're doing and why. They weren't answering phone calls or emails. They paid the bill every month, which is nice. But after a while you think, well,
00:11:00
Speaker
Yes, I'm getting you results, but I could get you triple or quadruple the results if you just came to answer the conversation or came with an open mind instead of saying, look, I'm not really interested in what you're doing. Just do what you're going do. So what you're saying, suppose, is yeah's like for an outsource operation to be successful,
00:11:20
Speaker
There is a limit to what you can outsource. You can't outsource the final decision making. You can't outsource the strategy. It's almost like ah you can what we want to achieve is is this.
00:11:33
Speaker
You can? You can, but you've just got to accept that if you put less input in, you're going to get less results. We agree with each other on that. And one um yeah what I'm thinking is that you can't not be involved. You've got to understand, you've got to be involved in the decision-making and the feedback.
00:11:52
Speaker
If you are just saying, do whatever you have to do, you know all sorts of things can happen. If you're just you just get the job done, just do whatever you have to do, all sorts of things can happen.
00:12:03
Speaker
And there is a risk that that isn't actually going to tie in with your organization's values. Exactly. And your vendors represent partners in your business at some degree, depending on how large the scope is and how long and deep the relationship is and how important it is.
00:12:18
Speaker
But no matter what it is, in a marketing context, that vendor is creating content or running advertising or some kind of communication on your behalf, on part of your brand. ah Regardless of what industry you're in and what vendor it is, they are essentially representing your business in some way or another.
00:12:36
Speaker
To not be present and to not manage it is like hiring an employee and then just never talking to them, right? It's the same thing except you're just outsourcing it.
00:12:47
Speaker
Oh, let me tell you, Callum, it's surprising how many employers don't talk to their employees. Really? And he's one of the it's one of the big sort of challenges as someone in HR is that employees don't get feedback from their managers as to whether they're doing a good job or not.
00:13:06
Speaker
and People don't get good objectives, for clear objectives as to what they are supposed to do because it's difficult to tell somebody what to do. Sometimes you have managers, it's easier to do it myself than it is to explain how to do it to someone else.
Balancing Internal and External Marketing Functions
00:13:21
Speaker
But that's a completely different topic and we can come back and discuss that another day. It is crazy, but it's one of those things that happens. What you're talking about in terms of what you do now as a marketing coach rather than a marketing consultant is that you're giving people that knowledge and expertise in order to have the conversation with a marketing person or indeed to do the marketing themselves.
00:13:51
Speaker
Yeah, yeah that's that's about right. And the specifics of that vary widely depending on the client and depending on the industry, their goals, where they're at. And there's a lot of things that can influence how their marketing program and their relationships might develop.
00:14:06
Speaker
um For one company, they might want to take over their industry. The next might just want to have a few staff and you know spend less time at work and more time with their family. yeah It can depend on what you're offering is, who your audience is,
00:14:20
Speaker
what resources you have to invest into growth and how active the leadership want to be. So like we said before, you do need to manage someone, but for some companies, the leadership wants to be active in the marketing and that's great.
00:14:32
Speaker
For others, they want to hire a marketing manager and then just hire me as the coach to train them up and to look after them and say, okay, aside from the meetings internally within our team, we don't have to think about it.
00:14:43
Speaker
So there's a a lot of factors, but But what you're talking about, I think, is that you're helping people through their through the coaching to identify what their priorities are.
00:14:55
Speaker
Yeah. And then be able to decide what type of consultant or what type of employee that they need. at that point in time, which route to go down internal or external.
00:15:08
Speaker
And actually, like you said, actually have a stronger marketing function that is likely to deliver better results because they've made the sort of strategic decisions before they've started the operational actions.
00:15:22
Speaker
And they can't make the strategic decisions until they've understood what but they need to be considering before they make a decision. Yeah. It's about education, but it's it's about people finding out for themselves rather than being told. Absolutely. I think the key word you said there is priority.
00:15:39
Speaker
And priority depends on context. So what I find is that a lot of marketers go straight into, here's the tactic, you need to use AI and you need to run ads on this platform with this call to action. And they get very granular before fully understanding the context.
00:15:54
Speaker
And I find that this is the same with quite often with businesses, with leaders and businesses when it comes to sales and marketing. The ultimate outcome is that you get customers who bring you income that generates profit, that grows the value of your company and your equity value, which depending on whether it's privately or publicly held, essentially it gives you returns, so which allows you to attract and retain good staff and keep and grow your business.
00:16:17
Speaker
That's why you do sales and marketing. But a lot of marketers and probably led by the priorities of a lot of business leaders go straight to, all right, show me the profit, show me the numbers, let's convert it. And every single communication becomes a sales pitch.
00:16:31
Speaker
And quite often the foundational questions haven't been asked. who is our ideal you know Who is our ideal customer? What is their problem? What do we want our ideal marketing function to look like? Do we want to have a big internal team and own the capabilities or do we want to outsource it and just keep it lean?
00:16:46
Speaker
Do we want quick results that stop when we stop putting money in like ads or do we want to take a bit longer to get the results but have them last for longer and and ramp up over time like search engine optimization?
00:16:57
Speaker
Yeah, do we want to outsource all of it or are certain functions available like certain execution functions good in-house. So maybe we outsource the ads management and the content writing, but maybe we keep the the design and the strategy and, um you know, the emails in-house.
00:17:15
Speaker
So there's a lot of questions we can ask, but I think, yeah, to answer your question is essentially we start off with what is the priority? We start off with why are you doing it this way? Is this the right way? Is this going to get you to the outcome you want?
00:17:30
Speaker
And once we've answered that question, we can then move into what are the next stages to set up your marketing right? What are the next stages to to test it, to improve it, to get results and to double down?
00:17:41
Speaker
And every business is at a different stage in that journey. Yes. You are someone that has done this at the sharp end as an entrepreneur. and you understand, think, the how the priorities change as organization develops.
00:17:56
Speaker
You don't increase business revenue by 500% in months unless you're getting these sorts of things right. Yeah, yeah I guess so. Yeah. <unk>re You're going to be all modest on me now, aren't you, Callum? That's what we do as Kiwis.
00:18:08
Speaker
We don't take credit for ourselves.
00:18:12
Speaker
Oh, you're very British in some ways, I suppose. But if you're going to increase the revenue of a business by 500%, less than $5,000 New Zealand dollars investment, yeah you've got to make sure that the the money itself is targeted on the right type of activities. How did you do that? How do you, know, what sort of thing, what's the scenario?
00:18:34
Speaker
How did it work?
Case Study: Launching The Boho Store
00:18:35
Speaker
Okay, you're talking about the re retail store, the Boho store that I built. Well, ah I partnered with someone and we built it together. we We were selling natural wellness products like cold processed soaps that were made from really high quality ingredients and skin cares and sprays and crystals and candles and various homely stuff.
00:18:57
Speaker
When you talk about natural ingredients, you're talking about natural ingredients from New Zealand. Some of it was. a lot of it was imported. i actually left the company because I ended up exiting because I got in it to create demand for native plant extracts, which is ah along my purpose. And we were more just selling skincare and crystals and it wasn't.
00:19:17
Speaker
But that was a year or so after I'd grown the business. But the question you asked was, how do we grow it? so fast and so much with so little money the first thing was you finding gaps where solving our problem can be the solution to someone else's problem before i joined the company she was going to weekend markets and selling she had a ah few stalls quite a large stall at markets every weekend and the odd expo and she would sell her products there She was probably one of the most successful people in the markets and she was doing well, but it was very vulnerable. If there was a rainy day, you didn't make any income.
00:19:54
Speaker
So the first question was, can we get a shop that, but without spending lots and lots of money on it? And we found that in the city where we're in, in Tauranga, there was a ah big problem with the main street.
00:20:08
Speaker
ah Essentially, the council had been very slow at redeveloping the central city. And so a lot of the retail shops had left because there were so many empty vacancies along the main street.
00:20:19
Speaker
We were able to negotiate one of the best rentals on the main street, one of the best leases, and only pay a percentage of revenue for our income and only a percentage of revenue for sales we made while we were in the store. So online sales, whilst we had the store to process it, weren't part of our rent.
00:20:35
Speaker
And so we were able to get the rent for just like a fraction of the cost. I'd say probably 20 to 30% of the retail price. And if we didn't sell much one day, well, we didn't have much rent to pay. So that was the first thing.
00:20:47
Speaker
And then ah the the, I guess the economic development agency for that main street, They really promoted us because we were becoming one of their success stories.
00:20:58
Speaker
So I marketed it as let's make Tauranga City the destination. Let's give them another people another reason to come here because if we have more consumers here, then all the other shops will benefit and that's going to make you look good and and you performing at your job.
00:21:14
Speaker
So that was the first thing. Secondly was let's get the website looking better. So we did a website overhaul. I had my marketing agency at the time, so I got my team in. And we we made that look good within a budget, of course, but just going from tacky, not tacky is not the right word, but a website that was whipped up in a day to a website that looks quite professional with proper design and all those important elements.
00:21:40
Speaker
We rebranded it from, it was Boho Body Care to The Boho Store. So it was a bit more distinctive. And then from that foundation of the store, we then went and ran ah Facebook ads.
00:21:53
Speaker
So because our products were quite catchy and you know they they were quite attractive looking, but basically we were posting regular posts saying, look at this soap, look at this crystal, just putting posts out there that we know we knew our audience liked.
00:22:09
Speaker
And then I just boosted them and I just promoted them to people within our city. And then... retargeted. So once you do that, if you set up your analytics and you're tracking right, you can make an audience of people that have clicked on your ads and visited your website but haven't purchased.
00:22:26
Speaker
And so for those people that hadn't purchased, I just retargeted them, showing them the ads ads for the products they had viewed with testimonials from happy customers. And we just updated that constantly. And then when they landed on the website, we gave away, ah can't remember, it might have been like $20 or $50 voucher each week.
00:22:44
Speaker
I think it was $20 voucher each week if you signed up with your email address so that we could get emails without having to give discounts for the email address like a lot of retailers do. And then we essentially built this email list, I think, within a few months leading up to that Christmas. We had like 2,000 people or one and a half, 2,000 people on that email list.
00:23:03
Speaker
And then every time we had a promotion, we could email those 2000 people that we knew lived locally and yeah, just offer them what we've got. So then we had, basically we had the retail shop, we had the online store with the email list and then the markets going.
00:23:17
Speaker
And so that added a few different income streams, which meant if it was a rainy day or people weren't in town, we had other reasons for them to buy. And there were there was a lot ah lot of other stuff going on, which we did, of course, as with any business. But I guess if I think about that specific example, that that was the basics of what we did.
00:23:35
Speaker
I can see why you weren't spending an awful lot of money on the marketing. Because when you said the solution to your problem has to be the solution to someone else's problem, You've got a development agency that wants to develop the the area that you've got your shop in.
00:23:51
Speaker
So your success as a shop makes you a destination. And every shopping mall, shopping center needs to have that anchor tenant. Once you've got the anchor tenant, then the other smaller tenants will come because they want to be associated with that big, successful, cool type of shop as well.
00:24:11
Speaker
So the solution to your problem was to tell the development agency about your success so that they could then promote you ah somewhere to go to. And then other people would come along as well and open up other shops.
00:24:26
Speaker
And yet that's actually cost you nothing. Yeah. You've got the development agency doing your marketing for you. Yeah, I mean, thanks to the council. I appreciate taxpayer money.
00:24:37
Speaker
and And I've got to give a shout out to the landlords. They were good landlords. um Yeah, they're a family that had, I think, about 10 or so commercial properties and others were making good money off large corporates and this one wasn't. So, you know, they were quite patient with it. They could have said, look, we don't...
00:24:53
Speaker
um we're going to try and take as much from you as you can, as we can, but they didn't. So um if it wasn't, I the economic development agency was good, but also the landlords realized that we can either have no money or we can have a fraction of the income we would have got, but we're kind of we're not going to sell this building. We're going sit on it for the long term.
00:25:14
Speaker
So yeah, being modest, I have to take my hat off to them. That was largely thanks to them as well. Yeah, blow your own trumpet every so often, you know. Modesty is great, but my blow your own trumpet as well.
00:25:25
Speaker
But what you're saying is like this key aspect of your marketing is to work out how you can solve your problem by solving someone else's problem.
00:25:39
Speaker
Whether that's a customer who needs to buy from you. because your product will solve their problem. But you solved a problem for the development agency. You solved a problem for the landlord.
00:25:51
Speaker
it It's... You're a problem solver, but it works out that by helping someone else, you actually can help yourself as well. Exactly. You put it really well.
00:26:03
Speaker
It's leading with generosity. It's leading with problem solving. That's correct. And I think it's just looking for the low-hanging fruit. It's looking for where can you add value in a way that's appreciated.
00:26:14
Speaker
So ah as another example, so so in early 2020, we started this charity called the Reforestation Fund. And it was ah basically a way that I found it was hard for my skincare business, Manuka Essentials, which sold, I no longer own, but at the time we were giving,
00:26:33
Speaker
50 cents from each product sold where we're trying to help community conservation and help people to help the environment. And that was, um it was actually quite challenging by the time you vet all the projects, you avoid greenwashing, you manage the recording of income, you give the money and then you actually market it in a way that grows your business instead of being a deadweight cost was a hassle.
Rebranding for Charity Success
00:26:54
Speaker
So we started of this charity, the Reforestation Fund, with the idea that we could make it easy for for other brands to give per per item sold and fund charity. And I thought that was really cool. This is going to solve a problem.
00:27:05
Speaker
But when we started talking to more customers, like a lot of people were either... doing good and they were already helping the environment and their question was hey what why should we help you instead of these other groups and i was like well you probably shouldn't because you're doing good i don't want to take your money away from other people you're doing a good job but then there were a big bunch of businesses on the other end that were like oh this isn't a priority for me this is just on the charity merry-go-round you're costing us money what what what's in it for me and there's again there's more to it than that um and we did get some success and we did plant some trees and that was cool but it was an uphill battle so my partner and i decided that the problem was that to make helping the environment mainstream it was funding and awareness with the problems or other problems and but we were going straight for the funding and asking people for money but we didn't realize that awareness precedes funding before you can care enough to put your money on the line or your time on the line
00:28:04
Speaker
You have to be actually aware to care. And so we rebranded our charity to a Conservation Amplified. And then we went out to the market and said, hey, we're running a podcast, the People Helping Nature podcast.
00:28:15
Speaker
And on this podcast, we're telling the stories of people that are helping nature. And a lot of these massive names in our industry, like nationwide bodies of environmental groups, which we would never...
00:28:28
Speaker
have had a chance to talk to in the past. Like their CEOs have been coming on our podcast, like people that we look up to that we've dreamed of meeting one day are like being our guests and um businesses that weren't interested in partnering before now want us to promote them. So um it just shows we were trying to pick the fruit at the top of the tree, didn't you know the funding um without getting the awareness right.
00:28:52
Speaker
And when we just looked at what are we trying to achieve? We want to make conservation mainstream. And we said, what's the low hanging fruit? It was actually building the awareness and creating content. And by doing that, now we've got so many people knocking down our door that we've got like three or four months of booked out of podcasts and we've got another half a dozen people asking us to be on there and we don't, you know, we can't keep up with it. I know many more examples like that.
00:29:17
Speaker
Yeah. I think solving a problem that solves yours is what's in it for them. If that's what's also what's in it for you, then you're probably onto a winner. Yes, it's a win-win situation for everyone. Yeah, definitely.
00:29:28
Speaker
Yeah. Today has been a win-win situation, I like to think. I've certainly learned an awful lot. I like the idea that if you're going to outsource something, you can't outsource it without and understanding what it is that you're asking the outsourcer to do.
00:29:46
Speaker
And is this all his idea that you can achieve a lot in terms of marketing your business.
Reflecting on Marketing Strategies
00:29:52
Speaker
If you solve your problem by solving someone else's problem, you are going to market your business much more effectively than just like you say, telling people how wonderful you are.
00:30:03
Speaker
And the operation with the charity sort demonstrates actually understanding where the low hanging fruit are um can actually create a bigger impact than trying to solve or trying to deal with the big fruit at the top of the tree.
00:30:18
Speaker
The low-hanging fruit is easier, simpler, and can have just as big an impact if you actually take the time, like with the outsourcing, to understand the issue that low-hanging fruit represent and the solution that you can provide for it.
00:30:34
Speaker
Colin, it has been so interesting. Thank you very much. really appreciate your time. Thank you for having me, Michael. It's been a great chat and I've learned a lot from you as well. Thank you. Thank you. am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abusida, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Callum Armstrong, who is a bit more than a marketing coach.
00:30:55
Speaker
You can find out more about him at pasteandpublish.com and also at the Abbasida website, abbasida.co.uk. There are links in the description, along with links to the brands and and the charity that have been mentioned in this episode of The Independent Minds.
00:31:14
Speaker
I must remember to thank the team at matchmaker.fm for introducing me to Callum. If you are a podcaster looking for interesting guests, or if like Callum, you have something very interesting to say, matchmaker.fm is where matches of great hosts and great guests are made.
00:31:32
Speaker
There is a link to matchmaker.fm and an offer code in the description. If you're listening to the independent minds on your smartphone, you may like to know that 3.0 has the UK's fastest 5G network with unlimited data.
00:31:46
Speaker
So listening on 3.0 means you can wave goodbye to buffering. There is a link in the description that will take you to more information about business and personal telecom solutions from 3.0 and the special offers available when you quote my referral code.
00:32:02
Speaker
That description is well worth reading. I am sure you have liked this episode of The Independent Minds, so why not give it a like and download it so you can listen anytime, anywhere.
00:32:14
Speaker
To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. And remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Abbasida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think.
00:32:26
Speaker
All that remains for me to say today, or if you're in New Zealand tomorrow, is until the next episode of The Independent Minds. Thank you for listening and goodbye.