About Colin Stickland
I’m Colin Stickland. After a career in marketing and sales, and building, scaling and selling my own healthcare business, I now help SMEs achieve similar success with The Marketing Centre.
We provide experienced, proven marketing directors, who design and deliver growth plans that drive revenue and profit, improve marketing efficiency and increase enterprise value. And because we work on a part-time basis, you get top-tier expertise for a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire.
We asked Colin to look back and reflect on his younger self…
Q&As
How would you describe yourself at 18?
Ambitious? Planned? I’d just secured a sponsored place at university, which meant I got practical experience alongside the theory. I spent my first month working in the machine shop, learning to use a metal lathe.
What inspired you to start your own business?
I figured that if I was any good as a marketer, I could build my own business using everything I’d learnt in my first 15 years working for great blue-chip companies, and from the training they’d given me. I knew I’d have to create clear differentiation from competitors to win and keep the right customers.
If you could go back knowing what you know now, what three things would you tell yourself to do when you first became a business owner?
- Get an external office as soon as you can afford it to create separation between home and work.
- Don’t be afraid to use external support early on; it took me a while to realise my time was the biggest growth constraint.
- Start with the end in mind. I always assumed I’d sell the business and built it with that goal in mind, driving decisions. As a result, we were approached by a larger related business that saw how easy we were to acquire, rather than having to hawk the business around potential buyers. That structure helped me secure a solid valuation at exit.
What are the biggest lessons you have learnt professionally?
If you’re looking to exit, it’s important to have consistent growth and to invest in that growth before taking large dividends. When I sold my business, the due diligence process was stressful, but it would have been ten times harder if we couldn’t demonstrate we had processes in place to generate consistent growth, and proven results to match.
When you start out it’s critical to know exactly who your target customer is, understand their pain points, and align your offer and messaging to address them.
How did you deal with a big mistake, and what did you learn from the experience?
I learnt early in my career to accept and own up to mistakes, and to focus on the future and solutions, rather than dwell on mistakes and blame. We all make mistakes, and no one deliberately messes up.
What are your ambitions for the future?
To continue helping other business owners achieve the best for their business, by using the skills and experience of my team of fractional marketing directors.
What does the future have in store for you personally?
Good question. I enjoy what I do, so hopefully more of the same. I’d also like to get back into trading the odd classic car when I have the time. I did a bit of that in the early days of my business, which helped financially while I was reinvesting profits rather than taking a wage.
