As the year winds down, I have had a chance to reflect upon what I have accomplished in my short time with BannerView.com. I joined the company in April of 2011, just seven months ago. The subject of an early blog of mine, “Hiring a Voice of Experience Makes Good Business Sense,” focused on how too many companies in today’s economic climate are throwing over experienced talent for inexperience for the sake of saving money. Big mistake. I wrote a formula for proving the mistake:

Experience = Marketing on Demand + Honed Critical Thinking:

I wrote back then, “I started as Chief Marketing Officer at BannerView on April 4. There was and is much work to be done. Frankly, an entire plan and marketing strategy have to be developed but simultaneously, immediate actions need to be taken on a variety of levels--from sales support to lead generation; from repositioning the company to developing portals for its messaging. All are time sensitive and have to hit the mark on the first try. There’s no margin for error and you can’t afford to make a mistake when you are in a time sensitive mode and have budgeted your resources. This is multi-tasking at its highest form. A young MBA with two years business experience would not be prepared given my challenge.”

Status of Initiatives:

Marketing strategy and plan DONE and IN PROGRESS
Immediate actions: sales collateral materials and support initiatives DONE and IN PROGRESS
Lead generation program: DONE and IN PROGRESS
Developing portals for messaging DONE and IN PROGRESS
There are a host of subsidiary programs in play under each one of these objectives and additional objectives have since been formulated and now are in play. I am far from done.

What’s the Point:

The point is that it was seasoned experience that enabled me to work quickly and effectively in this short period of time. Truly, Experience = Marketing on Demand + Honed Critical Thinking.

As I said in that early blog,

“Using the voice of experience allows a company to save an enormous amount of time and money in the pursuit of making money. Investing in experience will reap returns that far exceed the perceived savings and actual loss of money when hiring the inexperienced. You get what you pay for in this world.”

So for all those employers and managers who are looking to cut corners by hiring inexperience and for all those who think that cutting your marketing budget should be the first defense in saving your bottom line in these challenging times, I say, “Proof positive...think twice before you do so...for you’re being ‘penny wise and pound foolish.’”