Do what you enjoy and the rest will come
Never do what you don’t enjoy; if the work you do brings you pleasure, success will follow automatically.
Ed Hatton spoke about the lessons he learned during his life in business, at the A-Round Ten Business Clusters (ARTBC) meeting, hosted by Gryphon Enterprise Development, recently.
The ARTBC is a business breakfast forum, featuring guest speakers who share their stories of success and what they learnt along the way.
The breakfast was recently held at the Marechelle Country Estate, in Kempton Park.
Hatton, who works as a business coach called The Marketing Director, dropped out of university and went into the early information technology industry.
“I worked on computers which would have filled half this room,” he said in the conference hall.
Hatton soon progressed into a sales position.
“I wasn’t great at it, and I was a bit lazy,” he said.
“While working in Pretoria, I realised there were many lawyers, so I decided to design a system for them.”
The young salesman discovered attorneys had a common problem which could be tackled by computers.
He applied the solution to his sales strategy and made “a lot of money and had a lot of fun”.
“There I learned my first lesson: sell to fulfil the customers’ needs,” Hatton said.
He soon moved into the marketing division of his company, running one of the first media campaigns for computers in South Africa.
Eventually his manager transferred Hatton to another division, saying he didn’t fit the marketing role well.
“I then learned to always push the limits, until you fail. Failure is how we learn,” Hatton said.
Ed’s next venture was at a company which had a strong brand for selling computers.
“Your brand is what people in your market think of your product and that comes from its quality,” he said.
Hatton eventually left and started The Marketing Director.
He helped small and medium enterprises with marketing strategies.
It went well, but in the early 2000s the death of two friends and his wife’s diagnosis with cancer halted his career.
“We got through it with fortitude and humour,” the businessman recalled.
“When I was diagnosed with cancer, we did the same, and we’re both survivors today.”
Another lesson Hatton learned, was that one must never do what one doesn’t enjoy.
He returned to being The Marketing Director, and hopes to go on for some time.
For more information on the ARTBC, contact Bonnie Chimanikire on 011 849 9481.
Also read:
Business always has something new to teach you
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