“I’m working full time and it’s all your fault!”

This is what Michelle told me at one of our regular marketing meetings. We get together every two months to review the marketing we’ve done for her in that time and to plan what we’re going to do next.

Last summer, one of Michelle’s clients asked her to work on a project for them, for which they’re paying her £20,000. She’s an Organisational Development (OD) specialist who works with companies that are going through change. She had done some work already for this client, but they’d gone quiet. When we started to look at her marketing, we suggested that she begin by making contact with her ‘inactive’ clients to see what they were up to. Michelle really liked the idea of taking some of her past clients out for lunch!

To help Michelle keep in touch with all her contacts, we also started to write and publish an email newsletter every two months. We fill it with useful advice and ideas that her contacts can put into practice. Or they could ask Michelle to do it for them! Each time we publish her newsletter, we tell people about it through LinkedIn. Every Thursday we send an email to Michelle asking her what she’s up to in the next week; she tells us a bit about who she’ll be working with and what she’ll be doing for them. From this information we create short updates to put onto LinkedIn.

Recently we carried out a review of Michelle’s website. We came up with a list of recommended changes, to make the site more user friendly and easier to find. Michelle gave the entire list of suggestions the OK, so we set to work, to make the changes.

All this work is something that Michelle could do … except that she’s an OD specialist, not a marketing expert. She’s busy looking after her clients – who keep asking her to do even more work for them – so she doesn’t have time to keep doing regular marketing. She could wait until she has more time, to do her marketing herself, but when will that be? And in the meantime, where will the new work come from? Michelle appreciates that while she might be an expert in all things OD, she’s not a marketing expert. So she asks for help with her marketing, so that it keeps working for her, bringing in new business and so that she can focus on looking after her clients. Even if they do give her so much business that she has to work full time! Sorry Michelle!!