Drew Williams

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My name is Drew Williams. I’m an author and marketing entrepreneur. “A what?”, you say. I call someone who’s passionate about building businesses a marketing entrepreneur. So that’s me.

I’ve started and run six businesses, and was lucky enough to sell business number 4 for 8 figures to a Boston-based software firm which had some big-wig investors behind it.

The “marketing” part of “marketing entrepreneur” is my contribution to the world (although, not as highly ranked as my two amazing sons). I have successfully marketed everything from television to high-tech to financial services to chocolate, as head of marketing for a $10 billion company, a $100 million company, a $10 million dollar company, and a bunch of $1 million companies. Together with Jonathan Verney (see Jonathan’s profile below), we’ve written a book on B2B marketing for entrepreneurs (entitled Feed The Startup Beast: A 7-Step Guide to Big, Hairy, Outrageous Sales Growth), which has been picked-up by McGraw-Hill, and is due out in bookstores in Spring 2013. Very exciting!

Over my 30-year career, I’ve seen a lot of marketing, and I’ve seen it from the unusual perspective of sometimes being a creative guy, sometimes being a strategic guy. Here’s what I found out: the smallest marketing efforts can produce outsized sales results, if you focus on the right things. Believe me, there’s a world of wrong things you can focus on, all of them tempting you like Sirens on the rocks of sales curve upset. I know because I’ve worked my way through most of them.

If you’re an entrepreneur who is interested in learning more about navigating rocks and Sirens and feeding your beast, I invite you to explore our blog, to follow me on Twitter @FeedYourBeast, and to maybe shave the following words on the back of your head:

Never stop trying.

Drew Williams is managing partner at nuRevenue Partners. / Google+

Jonathan Verney

I’m Jonathan Verney. I’m a lucky man because I get to write for a living, but also because I have the opportunity to work with Drew to help entrepreneurs grow their businesses. I believe small and medium sized businesses are the lifeblood of our economic growth, but too many fail before their dreams can be realized. And lack of marketing focus is the biggest culprit.

My passion for marketing began during my university days because I’ve always believed it’s the engine that drives capitalism, and innovative marketing thinking has made North American entrepreneurs, as a group, the best and most competitive in the world. My visual perspective and years of experience simplifying complex subjects will help keep Feed the Beast accessible to a time-starved entrepreneurial audience that needs to dig deep but can’t afford to get buried in marketing jargon. (With all due respect to Drew.)

I began my business career as an auditor at PriceWaterhouseCoopers before becoming a systems analyst and writer at a communications company run by Richard Maran (of maranGraphics fame). I then moved on to become an advertising copywriter, creative director and ultimately − like Drew − an entrepreneur, having founded and sold my interest in a leading Toronto-based communications agency in the 1990s. I’ve also had the great privilege of co-authoring two business books with Patricia Lovett-Reid, one of the country’s leading financial commentators and host of the Pattie Lovett-Reid show.

Jonathan Verney is practice lead for content strategy at nuRevenue Partners (www.nurevenue.com) and president of The Corporate Storyteller Inc. (www.corporatestoryteller.ca)