Is it Business or a Hobby?

In the last four or five years, I have met more entrepreneurs than the previous two decades. Some is through my work and some is the time spent on the social web.

We can get intoxicated by the numbers and paralyzed by the activity. Many have confided that they have spent a lot of time trying to build their online presence yet business isn’t where it needs to be and it’s time to get serious. Building business takes time and hard work. Building a strong online presence for your business can seem like an endless climb.

Collaboration: Working together to achieve a goal, a process where two or more people work together to realize shared goals.

I was speaking with a colleague recently about how to do a better job articulating offers and reaching prospective clients. She said, "It’s time to sell the hobby farm”. Of course it wasn't a shot at farming, which is an essential part of our survival but rather a metaphor that relates to figuring out how much time we are spending building a business versus how much we spend messing about and calling it business. Think of the wasted meetings and busy work compared to time spent actually growing your people and the company.

It would be easy to say this is only a concern of small business owners but this type of mentality can infiltrate leadership within all sizes of enterprise. Large organizations can fall victim of the activity verses progress conundrum. We can stay busy or we can help each other inside our organizations and across industries and the social web.

Let's Connect Not Collect

Kneale Mann

image credit: lego 

Selling the Hobby Farm

Collaboration: Working together to achieve a goal, a process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals.


In the last four or five years, I seem to have met more entrepreneurs than the previous two decades. Some is through my work and some is the time spent on the social web.

We can get intoxicated by the numbers and paralyzed by the activity. Many have confided that they have spent a lot of time trying to build their online presence yet business isn’t where it needs to be and it’s time to get serious. Building business takes time and hard work. Building a strong online presence for your business can seem like an endless climb.

Focus Focus Focus

I was speaking with a colleague a few weeks ago and we were discussing how to do a better job articulating offers and reaching prospective clients. She said, "It’s time to sell the hobby farm”. It was a metaphor that relates to figuring out how much time we are spending building a business versus how much we are spending messing about and calling it business.

Contact someone and offer to help. Contact someone and ask for help. Let's actually collaborate and sell the hobby farm.

Let's Connect, Not Collect

Kneale Mann

image credit: freefoto

How Do We Provide Value?

Try the value menu. Take a value home today. Your friendship is valuable to me. We value your opinion. Your local choice for value. We stand for real value.

We hear and see the word value used all day.

Every offering, every product, every company offers us value. The word is used like it's some magically field leveler. Yet it feels like a discarded gum wrapper.

The exchange of money or goods or services that is considered to be a fair equivalent for something else.

We marketing strategists often try and find clients’ value proposition. It looks great when you write it up in a proposal or internal collateral. But is value not similar to branding where the decision is up to the customer?

An ideal accepted by some individual or group.
Homemade, all natural, locally grown, owned and operated, quality assured,
new and improved, limited time offer.

These are extraneous words we all may be guilty in using to not necessary fool people but rather to enhance the offer.

One way to differentiate is to remember the core of our unique selling proposition is our abilities that no one else can offer.

Kneale Mann

image credit: istock
original post: December 2010

What's In It For You

How Can I Help?

I have spent 27 privileged years working in marketing and media. The people I’ve met and learned from, the projects I’ve overseen and worked on along with the invaluable experience I’ve gained has certainly not felt like work. It is my passion.

CMO for Hire

In short, I help business do business better. I work closely with business owners and managers and stakeholders on the improvement of marketing efforts and results.

My first task is to simply get a sense of the current situation. Then together we work on solutions. There are no preconceived or prepackaged solutions. Everything is customized to each situation.

Strategist. Writer. Speaker. Consultant.

We all want our companies to grow. The common shared wish is for the process to be painless and swift but we know that is not reality. Growing your business takes work, time and patience along with precious resources. And that’s where I can help.

From the highest level, I am a business consultant who specializes in marketing with a finer focus on digital media. Through careful analysis, I can outline affordable options for you to see more results from your outbound marketing.

Analyze. Plan. Implement.

It may include overseeing the redesign of your website or training your team to navigate the social web. It may be taking a closer look at your current marketing efforts to suggest a more effective way to reach your targets. It is up to your situation, not my past experience that will determine how we will work together.

I can create workshops for your team to ensure they are equipped with the necessary tools to embrace these additional activities.

The result is that you and your team will have a repeatable process you can integrate with your current and future activities. Your return on investment is the implementation of a refreshed plan focused solely on your revenue goals.

I’m always happy to talk about how I can help. Let’s do that.

Kneale Mann

image credit: demitrineyt

Finding Value

Try the value menu. Take a value home today. Your friendship is valuable to me. We value your opinion. Your local choice for value. We stand for real value.

We hear and see the word value used all day.

Every offering, every product, every company offers us value. The word is used like it's some magically field leveler. Yet it feels like a discarded gum wrapper.

The exchange of money or goods or services that is considered to be a fair equivalent for something else.

We marketing strategists often try and find clients’ value proposition. It looks great when you write it up in a proposal or internal collateral. But is value not similar to branding where the decision is up to the customer?

An ideal accepted by some individual or group.
Homemade, all natural, locally grown, owned and operated, quality assured,
new and improved, limited time offer.

These are extraneous words we all may be guilty in using to not necessary fool people but rather to enhance the offer. The question remains, if we all use a version of the same claim, how do we differentiate?

How do you measure value?  

knealemann | email


image credit: istock