The Marketing Director

ABOUT US

• Starting a new business?
• Business is not doing as well as it could do?
• Time to review and renew your strategy?
• Need someone to facilitate a meeting or to speak at an event?
• 25 years experience in developing and training entrepreneurs Columnist for Entrepreneur magazine since 2010
• Frequent contributor in national magazines and talk radio shows Sought after public and corporate speaker on marketing, entrepreneurship, pricing, cost of quality, intellectual property issues etc

Ed Hatton launched The Marketing Director in 1990 to provide advice and guidance to small / medium businesses in the fields of strategy, marketing and sales and general business consulting. Initially it focussed on technology companies and then expanded to mentoring organisations from many sectors including services, manufacturing, retail, professions and non-profit.

This service was set up to fill a need for knowledgeable and experienced assistance in strategy marketing and sales in entrepreneurial organisations where the entrepreneur often has little experience of developing and implementing winning strategies and effective marketing with limited budgets. That need remains to this day. Consulting assignments have been mainly in South Africa but have also been undertaken in Australia, the Middle East and elsewhere in Africa.

The business has developed an increasing number of services for start-up and early stage entrepreneurial businesses. Ed is vitally interested and deeply passionate about the need for more successful entrepreneurial businesses as the key to economic growth in South Africa.

Ed Hatton

Ed has devoted the last 25 years to developing and training entrepreneurs and is a passionate believer that economic and employment issues can best be address by many successful entrepreneurial businesses of all sizes. He is a columnist and writer having co-authored a textbook on entrepreneurship, writing a regular column for Entrepreneur magazine for the last five years and being a frequent contributor to a range of media from Strategic Marketing to New Age, from Kaya FM to Talk Radio 702 and many others. Ed is a senior Business partners mentor.

He is a sought after public and corporate speaker addressing marketing, entrepreneurship, pricing, the cost of quality, intellectual property issues among others.

Ed and his wife Lal recently celebrated their 40th anniversary, Ed is a LifeLine counsellor, enjoys classic car rallying and photography and loves breaks in game reserves or the mountains. Expertise

• Business Start-ups
• Business Improvement
• Strategy Planning/Review
• Facilitation and Speaking

SERVICES

Business Start-up coaching

Starting a new venture is a difficult and risky time. Many entrepreneurs make basic and avoidable mistakes which contribute to the very high number of early failures of new businesses. Ed is known as a skilled and knowledgeable mentor to start ups, to such a degree that he writes the regular My Mentor column for Entrepreneur magazine, with the title of their Start up Coach.

Start-Up mentoring can range from having an available sounding board for an hour or two a month to assistance with the development of a business plan and finding the right funds and resources to launch.

Performance Improvement

Many businesses make limited profits, not reaching anywhere near their potential. The entrepreneur typically works too hard and is frustrated by his or her lack of success in increasing performance and continually worried about cash flow limitations.

Ed works with the entrepreneur to analyse where the opportunities for improvement are and advises on strategies and actions to correct problems and exploit opportunities. This is not ivory tower advice; Ed will assist in the implementation of these solutions and train the entrepreneur and staff to improve. This is done by theoretical and practical in the field coaching. This process takes a few months and results can be spectacular, although there are no guarantees. Ed has mentored a broad sweep of more than 100 clients and has gained depth of skill and know-how.

Strategy Planning

Cynics would say there are two rules of strategy for entrepreneurial businesses:

• Strategy is only in the head of the entrepreneur and can be variable and inexact.
• A strategic review will make great decisions but little will change.

The Marketing Director has developed a number of tools to address both these issues:

• The structured MarkStrat review in which the understanding of key marketing strategies by each individual in the executive team is gathered by pre-work. Differences between executives are debated in a facilitated process leading to consensus or at least acceptance. Priorities and task responsibilities are allocated and agreed across the management team. This is an intense one day exercise which can be done on a weekend. A follow up review is held as a half-day intervention one month after the initial meeting to run a sensibility check and test actions to date, and another half-day session in held after a further two months to plan how to take the actions and interventions out of project mode and integrate them into normal management processes.
• Interactive techniques to facilitate a strategy planning and review think tank drawn from conventional strategy review tools (look back – look forward, SWOT, Balance of Consequences, positioning mapping, BCG Matrix, scenario planning etc.) supplemented by tools drawn from continuous improvement programs in manufacturing.

Events/Public Speaking

Ed is a trained facilitator, capable and experienced of working with groups of four to twenty people to address key company issues. He is able to draw out the quiet ones and ensure that extroverted or senior group members do not dominate the group. The best facilitated sessions are those where the group believes that the ideas and decisions came from within them rather than being imposed on them, and everybody has had the opportunity to express themselves.

Typical facilitations include team building events, business planning seminars, customer account management, organisational reviews, product development brainstorms, personal and inter-departmental development and similar issues.

Ed is a respected speaker at conventions and events, able to inform, motivate and challenge staff and partners to stimulate thought and creativity.