Interview: James Cook from Jump Digital Transformation

We catch up with digital entrepreneur James Cook to talk about his business and advice for young entrepreneurs. 
jump-digital-transformation

What is the business?

Jump Digital Transformation, a digital marketing agency specialising in marketing automation, helping businesses generate more leads, more sales and gain more productivity. We are one of the most experienced and leading Infusionsoft certified Partner in the UK.

 

What are the plans for growth?

Running monthly Business Success Method workshops in London and Essex and shortly about to introduce a webinar version. Our monthly workshops are proving to be instrumental in our growth. We started them a few months ago and already we are attracting 30 to 40 new businesses each month with a sales conversion rate of 20 to 30%. We are also improving our marketing by fully automating the sales funnel and measuring engagement to determine the right time to offer consultation meetings and informing clients about the right solution based on the way they engage with our marketing. Our main further plans are to run weekly workshops to continue proving businesses with the strategies, know-how and tools to thrive using Digital Marketing, plus expand into Hertfordshire.

 

What are the challenges you have faced?

Brand awareness and on-boarding new members of staff have been our biggest challenges. As a new business, As strange as this may sound, especially coming from an online marketing agency, we have found it difficult to convert strangers into leads as the business had little online presence and brand awareness. We also inherited existing customers from existing businesses and therefore, trying to deliver to existing expectations whilst developing processes and training new staff was a huge challenge.

 

 

What advice would you give to young people or new entrepreneurs?

Whether you are hungry to start a business or discovered a gap in a particular market there are many pieces of advice I could write, however, based on my experience I have narrowed it down to four.

 

The first piece of advice I would give is to work on and record what your solution does to help your target audience avoid and achieve. Think about your solution as a ‘problem solver’, to satisfy a ‘need’ or feed a ‘want’. It is easy to get caught up on selling the features of your product(s) / Services(s) and forget about the benefits. There is almost competition in every market and unless you can truly demonstrate what your solution can do for your audience, you are going to spend an awful lot of money and time trying to win business and end up getting nowhere. Our Free Marketing Workshop covers this in more depth.

 

The second piece of advice is to test your marketing by spending a small proportion of your budget and keep testing against different strategies. Remember this, your business does not have an online traffic problem. The only problem you’re faced against is your lack of creatively and the patience to split test every lead generation and/or sale conversion tactic. The likelihood of your first sales and marketing campaign to work is very slim. Keep testing and only spend more once you start to see better results.

 

The third piece of advice is ensuring you have a defined customer fulfilment process in place. Looking to run a business or about to start your entrepreneurial journey is really exciting and fulfilling. If you haven’t designed and documented your customer fulfilment process, you are going to struggle to delegate work to others and face challenges with time. That dream of being your own boss will start to diminish quickly. What helped me overcome this challenge was from a recommendation to read a booked called ‘The E-myth, written by Michael Gerber. Michael breaks down the building blocks that are similar to the process and strategies MacDonalds follows and it transformed the way I went about my business and more importantly, how I run it today.

 

The fourth piece of advice is learning the art of delegation. To create a successful business you need to discover what you are excellent at delivering and what you are not. Don’t waste your time doing something you are not great at or slow at delivering when you could employ or outsource for the fraction of the cost compared to what you are worth per hour.
Starting, running and making a business successful is hard work. You will face many obstacles along the way. The important thing to remember when times can seem tough, is asking yourself why you got into what you do and why you are doing it, that is usually the key to bringing back the positivity.