Meet Nic

Hi,

My name is Nicholas Windley, but you can call me Nic. Like you I come from a professional and skilled world where people work hard to earn demanding qualifications and gain the knowledge and experience to develop their career in a rapidly changing world.

Engineering and science is a lot of fun but from an early point in my career I found myself drawn to the mysterious world of business where I developed a burning desire to make the move into sales and marketing and one day run my own company.

As engineers and scientists were considered respectable and trustworthy individuals with a lot of know-how so this move seemed like a pretty simple transition that anybody with bit of brains or common sense should be able to handle – right ?

But something changes when your career develops like this and you move into more entrepreneurial roles such as sales, marketing and business development.

All of a sudden that hard earned respect and trust just seemed to melt away and counted for absolutely nothing and I slowly became the shunned outsider. Now, your just like everybody else, a small boat bobbing around in this huge business ocean of noise and clutter.

So I decided that I needed to learn how to overcome that isolation, much the same way I earned my qualifications.

Incidentally, you can find some of the books that I’ve found useful over the years on my business book recommendations page.

I went on training courses and development programmes but all this stuff seemed to do very little for me and at times actually pushed away more customers and turned my products, services and personal profile into a commodity without me knowing it was actually happening. It was frustrating, so I stopped doing it and just became myself again.

Gradually I noticed a small change but I admit I was not totally conscious of what was happening.  It seemed that a more “real” or “personal” approach combined with my newly found school of hard knocks business experience was starting to make a difference but I didn’t understand exactly how or why, it was an accident.

This started me on a whole new path of sales and marketing that has quite literally changed my life.

The more I learned and dug deeper into this new world the more I became conscious that a lot of what I had been taught or learned about selling and marketing, which was much the same that everybody else was doing, was just all DEAD WRONG as these businesses were following each other because that was the way it was supposed to be done, but nobody actually knew why!

It was this real world selling and marketing, most of which just flies completely in the face of conventional wisdom taught by those so called esteemed Business Schools and leading training providers, that was finally making a difference and I started to get excited because it felt like I was on the brink of major breakthrough.

Since using these ideas I’ve gone from graduate engineer to successful international commercial manager and continually sought and fought for positive, constructive and accountable change even when the businesses I often worked for were at times blind or resistant to the need.

This was born out of a genuine care for the customers I was serving and a belief in the positive power of business.

Over my career I’ve personally sold millions of pounds worth of products and services, operated internationally and experienced both the highs, where everything worked and the lows, where nothing seemed to worked at all.

The image below is just so that you know that I’ve actually earned a good living as an employee selling and marketing while I learned and developed and used some of these ideas which are now part of the business development programmes I use to help other hi-tech and knowledge led businesses get the kind of lift off they deserve.

Now a business owner and consultant, since going self employed at 29, I’ve been involved directly in building a number of businesses, and made plenty of my own mistakes during the early years which were the eventual trigger for conscious recognition and development of the principles found on this site.

You learn the most from your losses and mistakes and as a result I’ve created a series of business development tools for analysing opportunities, uncovering hidden value and releasing more from existing sales and marketing assets to improve the odds of creating a successful outcome.

One such example was a promotional merchandise compa2ny, which was started in an established market he had no prior knowledge and from scratch it generated over £70K worth of profitable business single handed in its first year without having to cold call a single person, in a highly competitive and commodity like market with almost zero running costs.  It was one of many experiments.

As a consultant I’ve helped customers like Aardvark Engineering reshape their business from an undervalued general engineering company into a leading automation specialist which as of January 2010 generated more in profitable sales in a single month than it had done in the whole of its previous year’s sales, which equated to a 150% increase in turnover and with better profit margins.  All this during the biggest recession of the last 50 years and in the beleaguered UK manufacturing sector. These principles work.

You can find more about my story on the blog here;

More about Nic – Part 1 – The Trigger (coming soon)
More about Nic – Part 2 – The Mistakes

Today I’ve pulled together these direct experiences and consolidated what I’ve learned into a replicable system that can enable even the smallest of companies to generate predictable growth results and even the big boys could learn a thing or two as well. It’s this knowledge which can help growth conscious businesses with great products and services evolve their sales and marketing strategies to help them achieve continued success.

Just to give you some idea of the types of products and services I’ve been involved with;

  • Electronic data interchange (EDI) – involving bar-coding and databases to track and manage inventories and sales.
  • Electronic design and automation (EDA) – involves the design simulation and test of micro-processors and circuits to produce the most cost effective or highest performance designs.
  • Plastics processing technology (CAE & PE) – involves the simulation of designs and the control of manufacturing process to produce the most efficient plastic components.
  • ICT convergence technology – the merging of data, voice and video and associated applications onto a single unified network for lowering operating costs and improving business communications.
  • Internet marketing -  digital and on-line marketing and sales.

Places we can meet online:

Our associates include web development, copywriters, graphical designers, IT specialist, hosting providers, video and audio experts, mobile and integration specialists, fulfilment services, targeted data and list resources, sales trainers, finance partners and investors.

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