The Marketing Director
Business Advertising in Benoni

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. The business has developed an increasing number of services for start-up and early stage entrepreneurial businesses. 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. Frequent contributor in national magazines and talk radio shows. 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. 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. Differences between executives are debated in a facilitated process leading to consensus or at least acceptance. 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. supplemented by tools drawn from continuous improvement programs in manufacturing. 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.