Year 3 of the Never Stop Marketing Movement…

Last year, I shared with you the goals of Year 2 for my little consulting adventure.

I wanted to review them and use this same forum to start talking about Year 3.

I view the period between April 15-May 2nd as the “birth” of the company.

Here’s what I said I would do in last year’s post.

• develop logo and overhaul look and feel of website (thanks to my intern)
  • both of these are done—thank you, Nick!
• get my Blook published (think of it as a 'Greatest Hits' of posts from my Igniting the Revolution blog).
  • done. see: It’s All on the Blog, Don’t Buy the Book
• Improve the website/blog visitor experience (we will be launching the Disqus commenting system, for one to improve interaction (i have a tech guy working on this) and remove some of the dumb glitches
  • Done. Disqus is implemented and I think the experience is better.
• drive the CDM message farther and wider via more speaking engagements
  • Done. Close to 30% of my business is now speaking and I am represented by a speaker’s bureau. My presentations have been in front of close to 2500 people.

All in all, not too shabby.

Last year, I wrote
“Year 3, by the way, will be focused on Innovation. Go back and challenge the assumptions. Don't believe my own BS.”

I think I’ve got a bit of a head start on this in terms of some of the service offerings, but here’s what I’d really like to do this year.

1. Take the concepts that I laid out in Dandelion Marketing (PDF eBook) and work with 2-3 innovative, cutting-edge clients to help pilot and then seed a true Dandelion Marketing Culture (with the metrics and ROI to prove the value for them)
2. Extend and improve upon the various Assessment offerings (Customer Touchpoint Assessment, Marketing Anthropology Assessments, Made to Stick Assessments) and increase the impact and effectiveness of them. (with the hard metrics and ROI to demonstrate that it was really worth it)
3. write another eBook that continues the effort to “jump the innovation curve” as I prep for year 4.
4. and then innovate on the operations side….after getting ripped by my accountant, I am going to implement a financial accounting system. Excel is great, but it’s getting a bit ugly ;-)

And, as I said last year, there's NO way that the business could have evolved to even this small, but notable, point, without the  tremendous support of the FOJ community (and most importantly, the NFO). I love how people keep pushing me on all points and suggesting improvements, both large and small. It's like having a team of 1000.

Thank you.