The dairy of a grumpy business owner.
Reading time: 2 minutes
This story covers our grumpy B2B hero Mr Lefoufu – frustrated, grumpy and disruptive. His business stands still, despite the attempts to generate meaningful leads. Our protagonist (Lefoufu) can’t keep up with market trends and new technologies. He’s desperate and running out of options, going nowhere, but worse still, he can’t afford to pay someone to help him out full-time.
Lefoufu’s private life is also getting worse. Working long hours, seven long years pass him by, and he can’t afford to pay for his family holidays anymore. He feels like he’s letting everyone down.
His social life is taking a bad turn too. Lefoufu’s true friends do not understand why he is trying to hide from them.
Yet, he declines their calls because his self-esteem is lower than ever. The only companion in his life is its favourite French friend – the dark, silent and smooth Madiran.
Lefoufu likes to drink an uplifting red wine from the South of France, pouring some hope into his life when he gets home to his South East London house late every night. This is a great wine from a vineyard in South West France in the village of Madiran, Gascony.
Why?
After long hours in his small rectangular office, Mr Lefoufu isnt’t happy with the results. Yet, what upsets him and makes him grumpy is the unforgiving sense of team under achievement. He works hard to be a good and strong leader, but doesn’t like failure. He also thinks that he’s lacking skills in some areas such as lead generation.
Mr Lefoufu is simply bored with his daily routine – searching for new opportunities/leads, morning networking … trying to fit all in. He realised that running a business is tough and you don’t make money if there is no qualified leads in place. Lefoufu wanted to cry out for help. All in all, Lefoufou was feeling tired and sorry for himself. He thought, I need some Madiran time.
As he sits sipping his favorite red wine, and finally feeling more relaxed, he come up with this great idea. He writes it down.
Lefoufu leaves the confortable chair walking off into his bedroom. Slipping into bed and laying down his tired body, he falls into a deep sleep, dreaming about sun, wine and hot women.
The next morning Mr Lefoufu woke up with a real spring in his step. This was the first time, he hasn’t dreamt about work for weeks. He remembered the gorgeous brunette who’d been lying next to him on the carribean beach. He laughed.
Lefoufu trusted his new idea and drove off.
He rushes into the office, gets his diary out and writes “find a consultant to help me with lead generation”. After that he runs through his daily to-do list and circles down chunkable bite-sized bits. Lefoufu knew that his list was growing bigger everyday. The business priorities were there, but he didn’t know where to start. He gave it a try and wrote priority one: lead generation/creation at the top.
He then added audience segmentation, content marketing, user journey mapping, website optimisation, etc.
A few days later.
After being on the phone with five expert consultants, he finally schedules a meeting. When all seems lost, I have someone to help, he thought.
48 hours later, Lefoufu hires Colin, the person he thinks would do the job. They both agree on terms and conditions. It’s a simple agreement – Based on a small fee up front and percentage at the end of the project.
He described the strategy and tactics to put in place. He explained “this could take up to 100 -120 days before we see any results”. He felt safe and reasssured.
But then Colin asks him – Will you allow your busines to become digital?
Next episode soon.