I originally studied to be an accountant, it seemed logical at the time.
My dad was sort of an accountant, taking over the family small business after he returned from the rumble in New Guinea in the ‘forties’. He was the only son, taking over the family business was the done thing, like it or not. He was a practical, objective bloke, and ran the business by the numbers.
It seems with hindsight that I had absorbed the pain and frustrations of his small business as a kid until the market changed radically in the sixties, and the business tanked, and Dad found himself in a job he hated for the next 25 years to keep food on the table.
Now I am that unusual marketer, one that not only understands the numbers, but who has a feeling for them, and advocates loudly that the numbers are the foundation of a business. You simply must know, understand and leverage them in order to be successful.
Wrapping up the marketing and financial management skills into one bag, there are a four elements that I regard as essential to success.
Logic and extrapolation are driven by assumptions. Accountants are black and white, debit or credit of the ledger. It is really easy to be seduced by the numbers spat out by a spreadsheet, but they are only as good as the assumptions about all sorts of things that make them worth the paper they are on. The greater the degree of interrogation of the assumptions driving the line of logic being employed, the better. I used to annoy the daylights out of my marketing teams by insisting that when delivering a business case, they came at the projections from at least 2 entirely different perspectives as a means to test the assumptions they were using.
Weight reason greater than passion. Often I have said that there is nothing so contagious as a dose of passion, and I stick to it, passion is great, irreplaceable, but not t the expense of reason. Passion should be build on a foundation of reason.
Greatly value the intuition of experience. Some things are just not quantitative. Have you ever felt that something was ‘just right’ without being able to articulate why? When I get that feeling in a domain where I have deep experience, usually I go with it, and the intuition usually pays off.
Accept that you are not always right. In business we are trying to be alchemist, to tell the future and allocate resources accordingly. Not easy, and no matter certain you are of the assumptions, your intuition, and the rosy picture pained by the numbers, shit can and does happen, and you just get it wrong. Accept it, cut your losses, learn form the experience and move on.
Experience is hard won, and in some cases can be turned into the wisdom to be passed on in the effort to better serve our customers.
