166: Mark Evans - Sharing Your Story

"Be as true to yourself to be as successful as possible." Mark Evans

About: Mark Evans- Founder of ME Consulting

Overview: Mark is a long-time tech journalist who dove into the entrepreneurial world unexpectedly in the early 2000's. He shares how he started his consulting company, and what you can do as a company to set yourself apart and boost your companies' success.

Highlights:

Background: By training, Mark is a technology journalist. He spent 20 years working for some of the biggest journalist companies in Canada. During the dot com boom, he started working for some startup companies, and eventually decided to start his own company. Despite the fact that Mark had a great job, a mortgage, and a daughter, he caught the startup bug and was determined to do his own thing.

What is ME Consulting: Mark helps startups tell better stories. He's a hands-on and engaged collaborator who provides startup entrepreneurs with strategic insight and tactical execution to accelerate their marketing activities. Mark helps those startups with telling the world what they do in a great way, showing the value of their products (what’s in it for me, the customer?), identifying target audiences, and helping each company be clear about how they're unique.

Traits of Successful Entrepreneurs: Mark has found that the most important thing when it comes to marketing is having a great product. A product that actually fits a need.

Storytelling for Startups: (This book will be launching April 2015) This is a guidebook for startups written by Mark Evans. It starts out by explaining the history of storytelling and the value of it. It also takes the reader through the types of stories you need to share with your audience, and then how and where to share that story. This book also provides startups with tools and ideas on how to achieve the best story for their company.

Biggest Challenge as a Consultant: It's hard to get people to understand what you do and the value you provide as a consultant. Making people see that what you do is real so what Mark has done is create documents that explain exactly what he does and how he does it. Mark shares that another tough aspect is that he's on all the time meaning he is constantly trying to be available for his clients and it can be difficult to turn things off.

Time with Clients: On average, Mark works with a company for about 3 months at which point the company who has applied his tools can now manage things on their own. During that 3 months, Mark will work with each company for about 2 full days a week. He also tries to make himself available outside of normal hours to answer any questions or concerns his clients may have. Mark takes about 2-3 clients on at a time, anything more than that is too much simply because each client has a very intense and time-consuming relationship.

Long-Term Goal: Mark is not trying to build an agency. He'd like to stay independent and work with other independents. He would like to use the book as a platform, possibly get into selling e-books. His ultimate goal is to create ways to have recurring revenue.

Advice for Entrepreneurs: Being an entrepreneur is a journey, enjoy the ride and be the master of your own destiny. There is risk involved, but there is also lots of opportunity and you never know where that opportunity is going to lead you. For a lot of young entrepreneurs, the reality is you have about 45 years to work- the world is your oyster.

Connect with Mark:

Website | @MarkEvans | Google+ | Facebook

If you enjoy Outlier On Air, please Subscribe & Review on iTunes or Stitcher

Sponsors:

Blogging: The Master Class with Chris Brogan is a 12 Week program dedicated to helping you improve your writing, create better content, find the time to get it all done, and more.