We’ve been spending more time looking at the energy that drives successful marketing (see “Is this the magic link between strategy and implementation?“). In particular, talking to businesses we know to better understand how to get from marketing vision to strategy to successful implementation. It’s teaching us loads and we’re looking forward to sharing what we learn with our clients.
Meanwhile I am stuck with the old-fashioned thought that you cannot be growing a successful business AND doing some form of good. Surely business is all about discipline: analysing the data and being good at doing the things that ought to be done, rather than the things that just feel right?
So it was with great delight that I met up with an old friend, yoga guru and spiritual teacher, Angus Ford-Robertson. As outfits go, Battersea Yoga is clearly out there at the extreme end of the spectrum, following the founder’s bliss, driven by a powerful mojo and success being measured by calm acceptance and enjoyment of the now. Not got a lot to do with your IT business or legal practice, right? About as far removed from making things and being driven by the accountant’s view of profit and loss as you can get, right? What can “real” businesses learn from this?
The surprise – and the joy – is that while this is clearly a business driven by good intent, under the hood it looks just like any other business we work with. You’d recognise the P&L sheet. You’d recognise and appreciate the marketing that’s being done. You’d applaud the growth from 5 pupils in a church hall to employing 20 people and hosting 2,000 budding yogis per month. And you might even wish you had as succinct and useful a business dashboard as this one does (the image accompanying this article is the sort of thing that shows Angus how the yoga studio is doing).
Time for me to drop the old-fashioned thinking? Understanding the good that your business does feels like a surefire way of finding the magic link between your ideas (vision and strategy) and getting good at doing successful marketing. It’s not one or the other, it’s both.
by Paul Griffith
