Business strategy is your blueprint, it’s your methodology – Talk Marketing 033 – Ketan Makwana

Ketan has advised governments on business strategy and here he is talking to us, we are truly blessed.

If you are interested to have a better business Ketan would argue that you need a better business strategy and in this conversation

Martin Henley 0:14
Hello there, my name is Martin Henley, this is The Effective Marketing YouTube channel and if you’ve spent any time here at all, you will know that I am on a mission to give you everything you could possibly need through this channel to be more successful in your business. Now, as far as I’m aware, the only way to be more successful in your business is through your sales and marketing. So not only am I giving you everything I know about sales and marketing on this channel, I am also bringing in anyone I can find and extracting their knowledge for you also.

Martin Henley 0:43
Today’s guest has sales experience going all the way back to 1998. I’m sure he won’t mind me letting you know that is at least 24 years of sales experience. He actually has 44 experiences on his LinkedIn profile, and 14 of those are current. So this might be the busiest person that we’ve spoken to so far on this channel, that includes a number of committee and board memberships. He was almost a Master Chef quarter finalist way back in 2008. He is the chief disrupter, today’s guest is Ketan Makwana. How did I do Ketan the second time with the introduction. Let’s just check that we are recording, we are recording. How are you man?

Martin Henley 4:44
How are you qualified to talk to us about business strategy?

Ketan Makwana 4:47
Well, look, you know, I didn’t start off in business. It was from 1998 onwards. It was it was more kind of being employed. I have a background or career in IT electronics, healthcare, all of those roles have been in commercial or strategic positioning. So everything from being seconded to Apple to look at supply chain management for the launch of Imacs, right the way through to building the self check-in systems, and core systems that GP surgeries use in the UK, and doing clinical trials with the world’s smallest dialysis machine here in the UK. All of these areas have always had this level of being strategic, being commercially driven, understanding how to undertake projects. After losing my, my job in 2008 during the economic recession, I went self employed, I started a consultancy, which was looking at building all of these kinds of commercial contracts within healthcare and corporate healthcare. So where there were job freezes, and they had resource issues, I was primarily coming in and filling in the gaps as an interim. As you will understand, when it comes to sales, sales and marketing strategy, sometimes your mouth writes cheques that your body can’t cash and that’s what happened to me.

Essentially, I went out and I got so much business, which was great in theory, but you know, actually being able to roll it all out was going to be a challenge. So rather than actually giving up I then kind of started to employ others on an outsourcing model to come in and, and start to deploy the the the entities of those projects. That helped me build my first business, which was an outsourcing agency. I went on to sell that agency 18 months later, as recruitment freezes started to lift to an ex-dragon from Dragon’s Den. From there on in, I’ve had a few dabbles in brand marketing with my own agency, again, the same model, build up projects, outsource the work, you know, keep a royalty, or, or a profit or margin. From there on in my confidence started to really kind of increase to then build things like enterprise Lab, which is now over 11 years old, works across 26 countries, recruits over 250 experts to deliver programming for us. In between all of this, I’ve not only worked from a service base, where we offer this kind of business strategy, business growth, type of service to our clients, but I’ve been an advisor. I was a special adviser to David Cameron during his reign as the UK Prime Minister, as a Special Advisor on youth policy. I’ve done a number of other government advisory roles outside of the UK Government. Essentially, for me, everything boils down to strategy.

The key message I want to give here right now, is strategy doesn’t need to be complex, it doesn’t need to be complicated. Most people think that you need to have a really deep, robust, strong strategy, the more simpler it is, the easier it is to follow, the easier it is for you to be able to achieve the things that you want to do. So throughout the years, I’ve built a lot of different programming to help entrepreneurs, business owners, business leaders, corporates, redesign, redefine their strategies using techniques like reverse engineering and things like that. So I think, you know, over the years, as I’ve started to refine myself and all of my experiences in the business world allow me to sort of be an expert in these kind of areas.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?