In this episode, Neil and Jason talk to Philip Belcher about his career as one of Australia’s most successful, but possibly least recognised, technology sector CEOs. Philip’s behind-the-scenes stories and strategies when managing multi-national companies such as NEC and Cisco Systems makes riveting and relevant listening for sole traders, freelancers and small companies alike; as does his fascinating insight into steering the audacious sale of the legendary digital audio workstation company Fairlight, to fellow Australian media-tech company, Blackmagic Design.
Announcer Rosie:
You’re listening to the Apple and Biscuit Show with Jason Nicholas and Dr. Neil Hillman.
Neil Hillman:
Hello and a very warm welcome to this edition of the Apple and Biscuit Show. I’m Dr. Neil Hillman.
Jason Nicholas:
And I’m Jason Nicholas. We’re two professionals working in film and television sound and we’d like to discuss the many ways that sound is used in moving picture production to engage, entertain, educate and inform audiences. Our podcast covers a range of topics through interviews with industry insiders as well as academics and professionals in other fields who talk about the human understanding and perception of sound.
Neil Hillman:
Our guest today is Philip Belcher, who industry insiders will recognize as the former CEO of Fairlight, the Australian groundbreaking musical instrument company of the 1980s that became a world leader in audio post -production systems in the late 1990s and the man who not only revitalized the company following his appointment in 2014 but in 2016 steered their sale to Blackmagic Design in a surprising and audacious move that was almost textbook in the way it successfully married the Fairlight Digital Audio Workstation to the picture post -production software and hardware suite of Blackmagic’s DaVinci Resolve. It’s difficult to imagine a better outcome for both of these Australian companies, and indeed, together, they go from strength to strength. Now, we’ll get to talk about the legend and legacy of Fairlight later in the show, but before that, we’re taking the opportunity to talk with Philip about his extensive career as a senior executive in the technology sector and his work now as an executive coach.
Jason Nicholas:
Philip is the principal and founder of LSE Consulting, where he and his colleagues provide mentor and coaching services to corporate and individual clients. He’s a widely experienced, hands -on business leader and consultant who has successfully held several CEO, executive and non -executive directorships within prestigious multinational and Australian technology companies, such as Cisco Systems, where he was the director of the enterprise line of the businesses for the Asia -Pacific region, Storage Tech where he was the Australian managing director prior to its acquisition by Sun Microsystems and then later by Oracle, NEC Australia where he was the general manager of enterprise sales and of course Fairlight.
Neil Hillman:
Welcome Philip. Are you well and where do we find you today?
Philip Belcher:
Thank you very much.
It’s a pleasure to be here, and you find me in sunny downtown Sydney.
Neil Hillman:
Given your extensive experience of not only sitting at the top table of corporate management, but also at the cutting edge of technology, I’m sure that many of our listeners would be interested to hear the differences between the challenges you faced as a CEO of an organisation compared to the daily challenges we face as sole traders when we’re monetising our craft skills and selling our creativity.
What would you say the similarities and differences are?
Philip Belcher:
There’s a massive similarity between anyone that’s running an organization and it’s scalable from whether you’re a sole contributor in your own business all the way through to running a major organization.
One of the things that happens with people who are experts that go out and work for themselves is that they see themselves as offering their expertise as opposed to running a business.
And it’s very important that on the one hand, if you’re a single contributor and an expert in your field, and you are going to operate on your own, you also need to pay careful attention to the business. And I speak from experience here. I left my career in telecom then went out and started my own small business in telecommunications and found that whilst I was very, very good at what I did in that particular discipline, I then had to learn about how to run a business and make it viable. So there’s a major connection between what you do when you run an organization that’s got hundreds of people or whether you’re running it for yourself because at the bottom of it all, you’ve got to satisfy customers. And out of that satisfaction of customers, you’ve got to be profitable. And that means that your business has to be scalable and able to continue to create customers.
Neil Hillman:
So where’s the value of mentoring and coaching for the CEO, which I get the impression can be a very lonely place in an organization. And how might that kind of support help a sole trader, which, well, let’s be honest, that can at the very lonely place.
Philip Belcher:
It is a very lonely place being a sole trader. And the value of mentoring and coaching, if you want, is that when you’re so busy in what you’re doing on a day -to -day basis, you tend to get consumed in what you’re doing. And the opportunity to talk with a mentor coach is that they will look at it from a third person point of view.
And they can have discussions with you about perhaps some of the upside that you might not be able to see or some of the downside that, again, you might be heading towards, but because you’re so focused on the here and now, you’re not looking at it in a future manner. So it is lonely whether you’re at the top of an organization with lots of people or whether you’re on your own because there are a lot of things that you can’t necessarily discuss internally with your people and if you are on your own well the question is who do you talk to and that’s where having someone who’s got experience and who has empathy with you and that’s very important has empathy with you that you can then talk to them and discuss some of the matters that either on your own, you wouldn’t have anybody to talk to, or when you’re in the midst of a very large organisation, because of all of the confidentiality, it’s very difficult to go and have those conversations.
Neil Hillman:
Do you get the impression that people are now more open to this? I mean, there’s a great emphasis on workplace mental health and what have you, and this definitely has to be part of a sort of a well -being package, doesn’t it? So do you think that people are more in tune with the idea that mentoring and coaching for those people in responsibility and even for a sole trader is a very healthy route to go?
Philip Belcher:
Neil, I do think that there’s been a very healthy change towards seeing individuals at any level of an organization as people, not just either the position or the job that they’re doing; and this idea of having mentorship and coaching is now being much more accepted because you mentioned the word there ‘loneliness’ before and that is a very personal thing.
And from a workplace health and safety point of view, it’s a very important matter. So yes, people are now looking to say, how can we avoid or manage this? Because believe me, you can’t totally avoid being in that situation of feeling lonely, but what you can do is manage it and then there is an acceptance of yes, there is a way to manage this and coaching and mentoring is one of the aspects of it.
Jason Nicholas:
I think one of the things that we’d like to sort of emphasize is that this is something that’s applicable whether you are a sole trader, whether you’re the freelancer who is turning up to a job and you’re in that lonely position, or whether you are that CEO. There are resources now available for that. There is mentoring and coaching.
There’s one side of it, and then of course there are all of the more formal aspects of it that go through the industry of health and support. Do you feel that feedback, that kind of critical feedback sometimes is different or easier or harder to give to an individual versus an organization. Like how does that differ between?
Philip Belcher:
What you’re really doing is talking to individuals whether they are in an organization or whether they are working for themselves or a sole contributor.
Giving feedback to an organization is extremely difficult in as much where it comes down to culture. So if you’ve got an organization that has an issue that can be identified by an external mentor or a coach or a business consultant, if you identify that there’s a cultural issue in that organization, you can’t really change that for the organization. What you can do is identify within the organization, the people that you can talk to, who are the influences in that culture. So we each as humans have a tendency towards a culture where we operate well, and whether you’re a sole contributor, you’ll have a way of working, or if you’re an expert in an organization, you’ll have a way that you to work within that organization and so this this aspect of helping an organization or an individual means that you then got to look at who are the individuals that you will talk to and how will you make that change now in a large organization then you get into the teams and the team dynamics etc which is different of course as to how you would you would work with an individual but having said that some of the individuals that I’ve worked with, I’ve encouraged them to form extra teams if you want, for them to have others that are like-minded, that clearly aren’t working for them or even with them for that matter, but they form if you want a team of supporting each other, which is very similar to what you would do in an organisation. You look of the teams that would work together and contribute. And for the individuals, it may be that they get together out of AIS and just discuss things, et cetera.
Neil Hillman:
It seems that technology companies, such as those that we see in film and television industry, are now not just competing for market share in what might be their established core area of expertise, but they’re caught up in a rapidly evolving technology sector that forces them along a path they might not have otherwise ventured into. Let’s use the example of a hardware manufacturer that gets taken down the road of also providing a purely software alternative. How do large organizations steer their way through such demands? And at what point does a company start to compete against itself with the features it might offer in its hardware compared to its software solution?
Philip Belcher:
If you’re going to be successful in any business endeavour, you’ve got to take yourself out of what you’re doing and look at the market and then the individual customers that you’re going to satisfy or create.
Now, there are ample examples. There’s Harvard Business Review articles on this going all the way back and looking at industries where if you are going to survive as an organization, you need to change before you have to. So there’s no point saying, oh, we are a strictly hardware company. And then the market is demanding an integrated solution.
They will go and find someone else that can provide that for you. Now, you do have to look inside and say, what is our core competence? What are we really good at?
And if that now begins to become irrelevant in the marketplace, you’ve got to take decisive action. I’ll give an example.
There’s a wonderful article that I would refer your readers to called Marketing Myopia. It was written by a gentleman by the name of Theodore Levitt. And he in there talks about the buggy whip industry around the turn of the 18 to 1900s.
And on the, for transport, referring to the USA, back then people used horses and buggies. And there was a whole support industry around the horses and buggies and there was the buggy whip manufacturers and they all competed with each other and thought they were doing very well until they is that their sales were decreasing and they couldn’t work out why.
And what had happened was, is that everybody transferred from horses and carts to cars. So who needs a buggy whip? So to get very specific about your answer there is, is that if technology moves from being hardware based to then needing an integrated solution and then going to a cloud solution, which is purely as a service, As a business leader, you’ve got to work with your experts and work out how you’re going to fit in that and you’ve then got to innovate to become part of what’s the future rather than looking in the rearview mirror and saying, “No, we’re just a particular something and we’ll withstand the market.”
I can tell you the road out there is littered with companies who operate in that way. If you offer a solution to a marketplace that requires ongoing development and ongoing innovation and expansion, if you only sell and receive revenue from that once, you’ve got to ask the question, that innovation and development and research and development be funded.
So if there is a model where you do a one -up sale and then receive no revenue from the users on an ongoing basis, it’s going to be very, very difficult to fund and stay competitive in the marketplace.
So how does a company go about balancing its resources for that holy trinity of research and development, marketing and sales? You look for the opportunities in the marketplace where there’s clear space. Where can you be different? How can you differentiate yourself?
Now, again, I’ll point your listeners to another luminary out of Harvard and that was Michael Porter. He looked at the competitive structures in industries and he looked at how you can be successful and you’ve either got to be highly differentiated or you’ve got to be the lowest cost producer.
If you try and be both of those, you will get stuck in the middle. So you focus, so you look for who are the customers or what is the market that you can address very, very well and compete if you can’t compete, if you can’t win, don’t compete. So, you look at where you sit, what you can do that is different, or better, and charge a premium for it. If you’re going to be the lowest cost producer, well, that’s a different strategy altogether. That’s saying that you can, on a massive basis, outcompete because no one else can produce that cheaply if you like.
Now, there are ample examples, which we haven’t got time to go into here, but just look around and you can, you know, there’s the big name brand, fashion brands, for instance, that charge thousands of dollars for a handbag. Meanwhile, you can walk down to any of the local department stores and buy something that’ll do the same job for, you know, a thousandth of the price. Each have their own market. Someone wants something that’s just a utility. The other wants something to be seen to improve their ego, for instance. So you work out where you’re at.
So to balance that whole entity, Neil, if you are going to offer unique solutions, you’ve got to be able to fund your research and development. But having research and development for its own purpose, without having a market that will end up remunerating you for it, well, that’s not going to be a sustainable business proposition. So you’ve got to look for it. So marketing is the holy grail.
What’s the market? Who’s gonna pay for what you’re doing? Where am I gonna position myself? What’s the competition? Where am I gonna position myself? And then how are we gonna sustain this? I’m not gonna go anywhere.
Jason Nicholas:
So with a small company, and I’m sort of including, I’m sort of thinking of Fairlight, because I think basically all the pro audio companies they’re effectively niche in that they aren’t consumer electronics companies, they’re not like Panasonic, you know, that are making masses of home stereos or something. But considering all the R &D that has to go into a product, there must be a lot of balancing out of those decisions on what can be. So if you look at something like the modular synth world where most of the big companies might only have six or ten employees, because that’s an even more niche market, but even a small company with a big name such as Moog in the States can sometimes take greater risks with their offerings than a much larger manufacturer, what kinds of discussions are had about how big a company can become before It’s too big to be sustainable for these kinds of products.
Philip Belcher:
Again, it comes down to the term specificity.
So, if you can come up with a unique musical instrument, for instance, and there are people out there who will pay a premium for it, then you build your organization around that, that you’ve got to be careful to look at and say, “Well, is this just a unique instance in time where there are a few individuals that will pay a lot of money or is this a sustainable market that that we can see will be ongoing so you make those decisions internally.
A lot of organizations in technology and I can talk about this whether it’s audio whether it’s information technology, communications technology, a lot of people get caught up in generating another feature and another feature and another feature. And I would suggest to you that just have a look at your smartphone.
How many of the features that it can provide do you really use? And whoever uses those, whether it’s the musical instrument or whether it’s the smartphone, etc.
The answer will be different from different people. So they will rely on a particular feature. So to balance what you’re doing there in terms of being a highly specialized organization versus what we will focus on, again it comes back to that what will be sustainable for us in a business sense and allow us to remain viable and profitable.
So to get back to scaling an organization, if with six people you can satisfy a market and have a sustainable business, you’ve got to ask the question, why would you want to make it 60 people? Now, the only reason you’d want to make it 60 people is because there’s a market out there that would support it and be profitable.
A lot of people get a little bit confused. The only reason a business exists is to provide a return to its owner. Now, multinational corporations, the only reason those organisations exist is because they provide a return to their shareholders.
Or where there’s investors and it’s private, the only reason those investors keep their money in there is because they get a return. So lovely that you have these devices and software, etc. but it’s got to be sustainable.
Neil Hillman:
That’s so interesting, the point that you make about features. I felt for some time now that in the film and television industry, it’s the manufacturers who now dictate workflow, as opposed to the industry presenting a problem and manufacturers responding by delivering a solution. Now, I know that that’s normal in IT and we’ve got used to it in computing, I suppose. But why do you think this has become so prevalent in film production equipment? To use a silly example, the Nagra quarter-inch tape machine was the film industry standard sound recorder for years, and the Arri Flex camera was standard for taking the pictures. What changed and when and why?
Philip Belcher:
Well, I can’t talk to the specific technologies. What I can talk to is that when there’s a new innovation in a marketplace, where you go from not having moving pictures to having moving pictures, people will explore and they’ll invent and they’ll come up with different things. But then after a while, there will be adoption of certain ones of them and there’ll be, the others will fall away and some of them will be fantastic, but they just may not be viable. So, what’s happened that I’ve observed is that the technology has really enabled a whole lot of different methods, if you like, in the entertainment industry and therefore people are exploring and using the options in the technology and creating even new entertainment out of them.
So really what’s changed is that once you get to a stage where now you have produced that technology, and again, you’ve got to make it sustainable, then the users might be saying, “Oh, we need this, and we need this, and we need this.” But they’re probably the edge dwellers. So when you run an organization, it’s a standard bell curve.
You really need to focus on the majority, if you want, and all of these small areas that are outliers, the bigger you get, the less you can satisfy those. Which is great because that enables niche providers to come in and satisfy some of those people with those demands.
Does that answer your question?
Neil Hillman:
Yeah. Yeah. I think it does. I think the question really was about, it was the change of emphasis between industry coming to a manufacturer with an issue and manufacturers actually coming to the industry and saying, “Have we got a solution for you!” And there is a, I think there’s a, there’s a thought often that when we see a new version of something, or a new piece of equipment, it’s like, well, this is fantastic because we’ve got a solution for a problem that we didn’t know that we had.
Philip Belcher:
Yes, it’s interesting. Henry Ford said that if I’d have asked the market what type of transport they’d like, they would have asked for a better horse. He gave them a car. car. Yeah, it’s a good point. Industry will have people there who look at opportunity to say,
well, if we gave them this, they don’t know it yet. But if we gave them this, they could use that. Great. So they go ahead and do that.
Similarly, there are users out there saying, why don’t they provide this? And this is where the smart marketing organizations get that aligned. If you’ve got a bunch of boffins sitting there and they’re generating all of these wonderful technologies that one day someone might use, if you have enough of those sitting around, unfortunately, you could go broke. Similarly, if you try and satisfy everybody and you try and, you know, give them all of those different things they ask for, you may again create a whole lot of things that individuals might use, but in a general marketplace, someone who just says, “Look, we’re not going to worry about these outliers. We’re going to focus on the majority of people.”
And yet, we won’t have everything for them, but we’ll provide to them smoothly, great execution, and these people can use it and do roughly what they need to do.
Then you can out-engineer yourself and become because this other competitor has come through and they can compete on better pricing, better capability, better serviceability.
Jason Nicholas:
And I think we touched on this in our last podcast, when we were talking about the application of technology and how far it’s evolved in the film industry; in that 30 years ago, when you would have had to purchase an Arriflex camera to go out and make, you know, very few people could have purchased a $100,000 camera, whereas now you can go out and with a $5 000 camera, do far more, and the industry can make many more of these, many more of these can be sold. A given person 30 years ago wouldn’t have thought, “Well, I need a film camera that can make something that can go on a blockbuster film screen that I can put in my pocket.” That wouldn’t have been in anyone’s head.
Philip Belcher:
Exactly. And yet, what I think, and I’ve seen this all the way through my lengthy career in technology, I started out with telephones that you used to use your finger to turn the dial. And a lot of people listening to this won’t even remember that, but that’s, that’s, you watch all of that evolution that’s come through. And generally, what happens is a little bit of the ‘Field of Dreams’, “build it and they will come”.
So to provide those cameras at that price, that no one could believe that they’d have access to that quality at that price, enables a whole lot of creative people to then go and try new things.
I think back to what it was a movie called ‘The Blair Witch Project’ and I seem to remember – and you guys could probably tell me different – but I seem to remember they purposely did that with relatively cheap cameras and made it look as if it was a real enactment.
And they pushed the edges using affordable equipment. And I think that creativity, this development of the technology enables people to be more creative.
I don’t think it’s going to stop anytime soon. Really what you’ve seen is the confluence, if you want, of the technologies that are being used in the information communications technology area that are coming into the arts.
And the artists are saying, great, we’ll do something fantastic with this. And what I’m saying, they definitely are. And I listened to your podcast, and those people are doing fantastic things by the sound of it.
I haven’t seen the production, but I’m looking forward to it.
Neil Hillman:
I can’t not bring up the topic of Fairlight because many of our listeners will be interested to hear about the background to that story.
So, Fairlight’s incorporation into Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve, caught many of us in the pro audio sector by surprise. But I think it’s proven to be an absolutely inspired development. Without doubt, there were teething issues as Blackmagic’s video engineers attempted to understand the needs and priorities of audio post production professionals, but without a shadow of a doubt, we Fairlight users once again have a world -class solution at our fingertips. I’m interested to know, was it intentional or important to make the sale of Fairlight to another Australian company?
Philip Belcher:
I won’t talk about any particular specifics of either of those organisations, but I will talk about how it all came about and why it ended up where it ended up.
And that was Fairlight had a wonderful reputation of technology excellence with the audio production houses and people that I personally spoke to around the world.
It had got to the stage where I said earlier that you need a volume for viability of business. And Fairlight had got into the situation where with a relatively small team in Australia, we were taking on some pretty large organizations around the world. And you’ve got to be from a strategic point of view, you’ve always got to keep an eye on, can we absolutely compete here? And if you are going to compete and you are going to have excellence in what you’re producing, then you have to be able to sustain that.
So I got to the stage where, looking at the marketplace, looking at Fairlight, looking at what we were doing, we needed to do something different, just doing this saying that doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. And I don’t know who said that, but it does make a lot of sense. So we were working on a lot of areas in the business in improving. But to make another step change meant that we had to do something significant.
So, it became apparent that we needed to take what we had and put it into a larger, more capable solution offering.
And in the discussions with the team there, I discussed it with the team – and we, every day, the culture in that organization was we would just talk to each other – it didn’t matter whether you were in R &D production, whether you were me or who it was. We just talked about where we were going and what we were doing and with Blackmagic and their capability of expansion, and just seeing them at the trade shows and how wonderful it was that this Australian organization out of Elizabeth’s Bay was taking it to the world, thought, how could we get these things together?
And when DaVinci was taken into Black Magic, we looked at it and said, well, that’s video, what about audio? So the discussions began. And the idea was to say, let’s pull this together so that there’s an offering to the market that’s got excellence and it was really important in the end result to say we’ve got to take care of our people and we are Australian and if we can do this with another Australian organisation that will be fantastic, and I’m very pleased to say that it worked; and here we are and I’m very pleased that experts such as you were saying that the output of that has proven that it was a good idea.
Neil Hillman:
Well, I’ve been a Fairlight owner and operator since 1999, so I’m somewhat of a fan. And I’ve always felt that if there was a criticism that could be levelled at Fairlight over the years, it’s that it was a brilliant research and development company, but somehow commercially, and I think you hinted at that, it never fulfilled its promise. And because of that, it lost its market share to, in my opinion, a clunkier and cruder audio workstation that somehow managed to promote and leverage itself to be an industry standard.
And they managed to do that with, for some considerable time, a poorer feature set. How much of that sleeping giant that Fairlight was, was recognized by Blackmagic Design? Or do you think that only became apparent to them after they’d added Fairlight to DaVinci Resolve?
Philip Belcher:
The, the, the folks at Blackmagic are extremely astute.
I believe they saw that there was opportunity with what Fairlight had. And remember that Fairlight, in our own right, or in its own right, had some very prestigious customers around the world. So to look at it from a commercial point of view, and from a marketing point of view, and say, wow, here’s this organization with this excellence in the areas of technology that it had, if we take that on and apply our capability on top of that, we could really do even more with it. So I think, yes, it made sense that it was two Australian companies, but really underneath it all, if they couldn’t have seen that with their capability into what Fairlight had, that would never have gone ahead. So no, Grant and his people are very astute people and they saw the benefit there. Now, did they know exactly what it was gonna be and how it was going to turn out?
Maybe not, I haven’t had that conversation, but I’m confident in the conversations that I had with them that they saw, there was a synergy here, and I don’t mean to pardon the pun, there was definitely, you know, I’ll use the term before a confluence of the organizations to say, we’ve got a similar culture. And that’s very important. You’re going to put organizations together, you’ve got to have similar, or you’ve got to understand the cultures and how they’re going to work together. And where you’ve got these organizations that are hell-bent on technology excellence and satisfying customers, and we both were at that stage, then I think you’ve got the outcome that you’ve got.
Jason Nicholas:
Was there much public knowledge or interest in the sale? Because Fairlight was a major player in the music industry in the ’80s, and then post -production in the ’90s and 2000s. And this is all kind of known canon history now, but how much of that legacy was recognized at the time, and how much of that weighed on you as the CEO?
Philip Belcher:
You’re CEO. It’s an interesting thing. When you take a brand that has this loyalty, such as Fairlight and a lot of the loyalty went back to an instrument that was no longer, we weren’t selling those instruments, you then, very often, as all of the conversations that you have, have to go through a little bit of a re-education for people to say, “This is what we do, and this is where we’re focused. This is what we’re doing.” I can talk about another one.
I was CEO of AWA for a period of time. And we were a computer services business at that stage, but everybody remembered the AWA radio they had on their grandma’s mantle piece.
And so when you’ve got that sort of brand recognition, it can at times get in your way. So what we did, and successfully did, was in the conversations that we had and where the organization was going to go, look for people who really got what Fairlight did now, not what it did in the past. The brand recognition is nice, but as I say, you’ve got to be a little bit careful with that because people then start to expect that well nothing’s changed or not even expect they just say well that that’s old company that did that, and they don’t do that anymore, and so you’ve got to be a little bit careful with your brain.
Jason Nicholas:
Yeah, because I’m into electronic music and I know there’s a whole sort of world of people that don’t even have any idea that Fairlight did post -production here, they only know the CMI from the 80s!
Were there other suitors to the purchase or did it was that were rejected for other reasons or who approached whom between Black Magic and Fairlight? Did they come to you?
Philip Belcher:
We looked at and had discussions with various people. There were interested parties. There were definitely interested parties, but the opportunity to put Fairlight and Blackmagic together was clearly the strongest and it has turned out to be the best option.
We did have various discussions with other people. When you are as specialist as we were, that then means that you’re not selling on the corner store here, you’re talking to just a few people, but we ended up where I think was the right outcome.
Neil Hillman:
In the end, Philip, how much of a company’s assets are tangible and how much of the value of a company are the ideas it contains in the name it has given to the industry?
Philip Belcher:
Which is more value in the end? There are accounting practices around value of brand recognition, etc., and whether they are actually an asset on the balance sheet or not.
What’s more important of any organization, and this was Fairlight as well, but I’ll just talk about it in generic terms, is that if you’ve got a brand recognition for a particular discipline or a particular service, then you’ve got to be true to that and you’ve got to capitalize on it. For instance, if you’ve got a brand and everyone thinks that it’s a keyboard, but your major business is actually post -production, well, you gotta manage that. And the question is, do you go out and try and do a PR program and an advertising program and marketing to change the everybody’s perception?
Or do you say, you know what, they can all think what they like. Really, we only need to have just a few people who value what we’re doing. And when I say just a few people, a specific market segment that values what we’re doing, and then work on that and make sure that that’s sustainable. So what’s more important?
It’s a system. It all has to go together. And it all comes down to having a very clear strategy of what you’re doing and where you’re going from a marketing point of view. And I would say that I would give that advice and I do give that advice to people who are experts in their own right, working in their own small businesses. Ask yourself the question, does it matter whether everybody knows you and what you’re doing versus making sure there’s a few people who it does matter to that you do what you are doing and that you do it well for them and that they’ll compensate you appropriately.
The short answer is I’d rather go for no one knowing who I am in general, not having my name on the front of the newspaper but having me involved underneath at the back end of people who are highly successful, and they need me to be there.
Neil Hillman:
Philip, it’s been absolutely fascinating to hear from the other side of the fence, as it were because as users of creative technologies, few of us get to appreciate what goes on behind the scenes to get the great products to market that make our lives so much easier or our sound tracks so much clearer.
So thank you so much for being our guest today.
Philip Belcher:
It’s been my pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you.
Neil Hillman:
Philip’s book, ‘Top Secrets for Sales Success, 101 Secrets that Sold Millions’, is a great read and details of this and his website are available in today’s show notes.
