In hindsight, I massively screwed up my finances between 2012 and 2022. I invested a huge sum in my business, Mill Hill Music Complex, the plan being to get it to a point that I could sit back and let my team do the work, whilst sitting back, working part time as an executive director. We had big plans for expansion. It was all going swimmingly. Then the pandemic hit. Just keeping the business going turned a highly profitable business into one on life support. Cash reserves built up for expansion were used to keep the show on the road. As they say, Man makes plans and God laughs. God certainly laughed at our plans.
We are now five years on from the pandemic descending. The pandemic destroyed our core business of old, fat blokes turning up with all their mates to play rock and roll and drink lager. Some died, some moved away, some just got out of a the 30 year habit and became hermits! In 2022, as we emerged from the pandemic, my assumption was that this core business would come back. It didn't. Of course we have plenty of the old customers, but whereas it was 75% of our turnover pre pandemic, now it is nearer 25%, we needed to build a completely new customer base, to replace the one we'd spent 40 years developing that melted away during Covid. It was clear that our marketing strategy and growth plans had gone the way of the dinosaurs. At the start of last year, we took a long hard look at the business and what we found was quite shocking. Everything was wrong. Nothing was working properly. Our website was out of date, our pricing policy didn't work for the post covid world. Our marketing budget was all being wasted. We'd lost four years. It is hard to spot such trends, without the data, but by early 2024, it was clear and the data was there, not least in the bank balance.
So where to start? Well the first thing we needed to do was upgrade our website. This had been built in 2013 and was old hat. There is no point chasing new business when it doesn't work properly and is not fit for purpose. We wanted something that new customers would see and think "Yeah, this is looks like a pretty good studio". That took six months to get right. The next thing was our pricing policy. If you get this wrong, you lose customers. You have to tread carefully. We pride ourselves on being economical and good value. We could charge our premium customers a lot more and make more money, but that was never why we started the business. We want to take our customers with us. We did a lot of research and worked out how to restructure our charges whilst keeping our existing customer onside. When we put our prices up in January, we emailed our customers to explain why some would see a huge hike in costs. The response. Almost all were understanding and none complained. Having addressed the two biggest issues, we are now looking at our marketing budget. We have spent almost nothing on marketing since last March.
We'd been spending around £3-6K a year with Google on Adwords since we rebuilt our website in 2013. We had got lazy and whilst it was bringing in customers, was it the best way to spend the money? This was a fascinating question. When it comes to advertising and actually working out whether things like social media engagement actually works, it is a very difficult thing to do. I sat down with the team and we came up with a radical idea. What is our biggest asset as a business? Our customers. We had a radical idea. Rather than give the likes of google our marketing cash, why not give it to our customers? Let them spread the message and pay them for their efforts? Having hit them with a big increase in some of our charges, we can give some of it back. Musicians have friends, many of whom are musicians, so why not give them a discount if they plug us on their own social networks. It is a great way to get highly targetted advertising. We did our first campaign in February and it was a success. Like everything, it needs some refinement, but it caused a buzz, got a good response and we are seeing more customers coming through the door.
So how has it worked? Well for the period in question, we saw around a 20% increase in new customers registering on the system. We need around 25 new customers a week to keep the business stable. We have been well in excess of this for the period. It got me thinking, how many other businesses are switched on to this fact. It is a win/win. We cut the hit on our cashflow from paying multinationals, we generate goodwill with our customers and we get new business. Most businesses who have their customer details bombard them with offers, but far fewer actually get their customers to advertise their businesses for them. Let me give you an example. We are members of the Virgin Gym in Mill Hill. They are always bombarding us with offers, asking us to introduce a friend and giving us a free month if they do. But they haven't switched on to the fact that getting members to post on Instagram and TikTok how good they gym has been for them is worth a reward. Our little campaign in February was an experiment. It worked way beyond our expectations. This time last year, I was seriously considering joining my friends on the beach. At sixty two I am feeling re-energised. Maybe I should start a new, part time career advertising designing campaigns for other companies that are based on customer engagement. I have a great team here and it works.
Here are a few examples of our customers great work!
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