Getting started is tough.

The “journey of a thousand miles” may “begin with a single step” but working out exactly where it’s safe to put your feet can be daunting.

We’ve all been through it.

Some get the help of professionals from the word go, others stumble around for bit looking for their sandals. In the not so distant past, if you needed to know about building a business, you had to buy or borrow armfuls of text books & tapes, enlist the services of an army of professional advisors and talk very nicely to the bank.

These days things are somewhat different.

The basic knowledge is pretty much the same but it’s so much easier and cheaper to find. In fact the challenge is working out whether what you are reading is fact or the ramblings of a marketer with too little time on their hands. So…

Step up to the plate Social Media!

I decided to move my consultancy business in the direction of social media.

I know how the technology works, and having been immersed in the world of social media for the last 10 years, building social networks and communities, I believe that I can offer my clients the right sort of help with building their businesses using the free, open source, pay per use services that are available. I’m aiming to do this for the minimum possible cost, both in my overheads and the fees that I charge them.

I’m in a position to access agile scale-able solutions to help businesses grow. This is where the “Lean & Agile” bit comes in.  Social media provides a wonderful networking tool which connects businesses to the online marketplace.

Why Social Media matters

For a data management geek the ability to fit content connections into a few shortened links in a social media update makes for a very compact and efficient system.

For the marketing professional it unlocks the door to a world of market research, analytics, monetisation.

For the prospective business owner it holds the promise of being able to make a reasonable assessment of the value of advice based on the reputation of the author as attested by likes, favourites, social shares, followers, friends, position on Google and so on.

The facilities available to modern business start-ups are vast.

The technology is available to buy by the yard and pay as you go. In the past you would have invested in an office network of interlinked computers, pay for webservers, employ programmers and support staff or buy software, these days it is a matter of Googling a few services, reading some reviews and signing up for, in most cases, the free get you started service offering.

So what’s with the Cheetahs then?

Well they are Lean & Agile, they’re social animals, but I also took a lot of pictures of them a few years ago in Kenya so I don’t have to pay royalties for them!

A penny saved is a penny earned!

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