I’m a digital marketing consultant who designs marketing plans for small businesses, teaches the fundamentals of entrepreneurship through my online membership site and live workshops, as well as lectures at universities and other spaces on the small business experience in the Caribbean.
How I Came To This
I got interested in search engine optimization, a branch of Internet Marketing, in 2003, a little more than two years after leaving college. And I did so because I couldn’t get my first website to rank well in the search engines. This interest morphed into a desire to understand Internet Marketing on the whole, then all things marketing.
Experiences
- I’ve conceptualized and overseen the creation of at least 40 business and software applications in the business planning, marketing, aquaculture and stock/forex trading markets
- Built the backbone of 4 of my clients’ businesses
- Presided over the A to Z details of the online launches of 3 small business projects
- Created, directed and produced a complete tutorial series for two online businesses
- Wrote and published a book designed to market a business partner
- Directed the design of an assortment of logos, websites, Facebook pages and ads for both my clients and myself
My Skill or Superpower
Because I’ve had to supervise the nitty-gritty details that go into starting up a number of small businesses, as well as conceptualize the over-arching master plan to move them forward, I’ve become very adept at what we call, STRATEGY.
In simpler terms, my experiences have made me into someone who can figure out at least one successful approach (the essence of strategy) you and your business can take in order to become recognized in the marketplace. As an added bonus, I can also come up with the step by step plan needed for executing your small business strategy.
My Approach to This Work
It’s been described as irreverent, unorthodox, too frank and just about all the possibilities in between. My guess is that all of it can be true, depending on your perspective. The bottom line is I try to pull no punches so I can tell it like it is. And I attribute this to the fact that I believe that the fastest path to getting a business moving forward is to get to the truth of what ails the business.
For all businesses, their problem is either bad product, bad marketing or a bad system that runs everything. For some businesses, it’s two of the aforementioned, while for others, it’s some combination of all three. To get to the truth quickly you need to go in a straight line. And that straight line is straight talk.
My own story in the world of business is littered with false messiahs, many roads paved with good intentions by the well-meaning, and outright con-men. I can only suppose that the combination of a life-long commitment to straight-talk, regardless of the consequences, as well as those early setbacks, may account for the approach.
Whatever the reasons, if we work together, you can be sure that you will be the recipient of 17 years of hard-nosed training about what is really expected of you in order to compete. If this can work for you, we’ll work well together.
Some accomplishments
- Lectured on marketing a number of times at the University of the West Indies and University of the Southern Caribbean.
- Created the first membership site in Tobago devoted to helping small business get their fundamentals down pat before thinking about expanding and competing.
- Created my own mini launch method called the Tobago FB Rollout, a process used to give new local businesses exposure and media attention so they get out the starting gate with some momentum.
- Created my own suite of problem-solving tools (over 40 at last count) geared towards tackling the issues I saw repeatedly come up in my consultations with over 60 entrepreneurs in Tobago, Trinidad and the US. Of note is the Ideal Product Mix Calculator, a tool that helps business people compare the rewards of focusing on one set of products and services versus another, within their product/service catalog.
