What have Gorillas and Bananas got to do with marketing your business?
Interview With
Book Title
The Gorillas Want Bananas
First Published
Who is this book written for?
This book is written for the owners of small, expert businesses who want to get bigger results from their marketing efforts while simultaneously spending less time and money.
The types of businesses that benefit most are those that sell their time and expertise. Businesses such as management consultants, coaches, trainers, public speakers, writers, graphic designers, architects, therapists, dentists, cosmetic surgeons, hypnotherapists etc.
How much did you know about your subject before writing this book? In other words, what qualifies you to write this book?
The book applies Lean Manufacturing principles and manufacturing best practice from Japan and the USA to the process of marketing.
Although our background was not within Lean Manufacturing itself - we were lucky enough to be acting as marketing consultants for many of the UK's top management consultancies who applied Lean principles in their work and we picked up their tools and applied them to the process of marketing.
The business we were in when we wrote this book, was a marketing consultancy that used new technology to reduce marketing cost, increase marketing effectiveness and help our clients "make more money by spending less on marketing" - so applying Lean principles to our existing marketing models made perfect sense.
From the beginning of our business in 1997 we were very successful on behalf of our clients - helping many start-ups and growing firms develop into profitable big businesses with our help, guidance and support.
What makes your book different?
This book challenges conventional (and outdated) marketing wisdom and provides you new models and rules that have been tested to produce better results with less time, money and effort.
Why did you write this book?
The main reason we decided to write a book was to capture the knowledge behind the tools we were using and share them with more people who could benefit.
We also wanted to educate business owners better and to help them avoid overstretching themselves in areas they didn't have to.
Many of our rival advertising agencies and marketing consultants were encouraging their clients to spend more than necessary - which made good sense for the marketers but not for the business owners.
If you had read nearly any marketing textbook at the time we released our book, you would see that they were still using the same old theories that were developed 50 years ago. Textbook marketing was failing to deliver, but textbook marketers continued to sell what they had because they were still getting paid!
We didn't think that was fair - so we wrote The Gorillas Want Bananas, the antidote to text-book marketing.
In a way - the message of our book was - "spend less on marketing by making every action count". Of course, as our business model was selling time too then this book would be encouraging our clients to spend less time and money with us. We were prepared for that outcome and happy because we secretly planned to streamline our own business and remove ourselves from the process entirely so that clients could implement and action our knowledge for themselves.
What kind of research did you do for your book?
In addition to picking the brains of many exceptional Lean, Six Sigma and Manufacturing experts - we read some pretty hefty tomes on Lean Manufacturing tools and tested them on our own business and those of our clients.
The marketing side was covered already thanks to the fact that all the tools we included had been field tested and proven successful during a year-long series of Lean Marketing Masterclasses and working with our clients.
Despite the fact that our principles are based on Lean Manufacturing - we decided to make the tools and techniques more user friendly and named them more simply than many well known Lean Manufacturing terms.
Tell us the single most important thing we'll learn from your book...
You will immediately save money and time by eradicating wasteful marketing activity from your business and getting clear on what you need to do to turn a stranger into a client.
Once you've eliminated waste you can reuse some of the freed up time and money to focus on more effective "Lean" activities which can be automated to systemise your marketing process to product maximum results from minimum effort.
How would you describe yourself?
I can be quite bossy and am known by many people for being "dangerous". If somebody says a thing can't be done then I love to be the one to prove them wrong. Honesty, determination and a genuine will to pull your weight are qualities I admire in the people I work with.
I love starting new businesses but realise that any business should be a vehicle for a more enjoyable life and not an end in itself.
What's your greatest achievement so far?
Starting a publishing business from scratch, on the back of just one self-published title, and succeeding in publishing more than 30 books with 5 best-sellers! Being able to spend my time (mostly) as I like and live where I choose.
Who are your role models/influences and why?
What's the most exciting thing that's happened to you as a result of writing your book?
Our whole business changed from a service business - selling time at a ratio of 1:1 - to a product business selling time at a ratio of 1:many.
This has enabled us to live and work anywhere. Currently I live up a mountain in Spain, surrounded by olive and almond trees and Joe lives by the sea on the East Coast of England with plans to move his house in a picturesque Spanish town later in 2007.
What are you working on now?
Since the success of The Gorillas Want Bananas we decided to focus on publishing full time and stop selling time for a living. In addition to publishing 33 books between 2004 and 2006 - with 5 becoming best-sellers - we set up the www.bookshaker.com site as well as BookWorks™ dealing with Spain and Portugal. You can find out more about these projects at http://www.nativespain.com and http://www.nativeportugal.com
What else do you do?
Writing - especially about Spain
Painting - something that's a hobby at the moment
Walking my dogs along the Rambla at the bottom of our land
Cooking - especially for lots of visitors
Scuba Diving (or Sciving as we call it) with my husband Marcus
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