We’re used to answering these ones! If you don’t find the answer you’re looking for, feel free to shoot us a note.

What types of people /businesses does JohnShepherd.com.au best serve?

For more than a decade, we’ve built our expertise working with ag related companies throughout NSW. Our clients include shearing contractors, Sheep studs, contract harvesting, sowing & spraying, ariel photography and small size family farmers.

We’re at our best with businesses that have deep expertise in their lines of business and want to sell commodities that they would happly consume themselves. You can look at our ideal client.

How did you develop a specialty in business growth in Agriculture?

We founded our business in 2011 and very quickly found that our best and favorite customers were businesses we once described as “blue-collar brands”. From the beginning, we liked working with people that woke up every day and got their hands dirty making things. Some of our earliest clients were small family farms in western NSW. As we grew and evolved, we continued to explore the agriculture sector and eventually honed our focus on new start ups. Though every client has been unique, we began identifying patterns – similar problems, challenges, and goals among these businesses and we developed a methodology for solving them.

What makes JohnShepherd.com.au different from the hundreds of other business consultants / accountants out there?

Three things make us different.

• First is our niche serving small start ups in the agriculture or ag related businesses – particularly those who possess deep willingness to pursue their dream of starting their own profitable business.
• Second, our work centers around helping our clients harness their enthusiasm and knowledge and then convert it into foundation of a new small business that addresses a  problems, and satisfies the owners desire, and
• Third, our success metric is your growth in high-margin sales from the right customers. If you’re not generating more sales (and at the right margin), we’re not doing our job. We’ll hold ourselves responsible for helping you integrate your marketing and sales initiatives into a business development unit that produces a significant and measurable ROI. Learn more about who we help and how.

How much do your services cost?

For a full-scale program with JohnShepherd.com.au, we recommend budgeting roughly $2,000/year.

That said, we like to eliminate as many barriers as possible to getting started, so each of the four parts of our framework (learn more on this page) can be implemented one step at a time, and at the right pace for your organization.

How will I know if my investment will be successful?

We’ll begin our engagement by focusing on your revenue and profitability targets, as well as any other business growth ideas you may have. Then we’ll work backward to set  achievable KPIs (key performance indicators) to guide both you & I. We’ll help you put any necessary software and processes in place. But measuring results will require a commitment from you as well.

How can you help me who knows nothing about my new business possibly create content that will resonate with our audience?

When it comes to producing content, our job is simple – to extract the knowledge of you and your business subject matter experts and translate it into well-organized, professionally-written content that will resonate with your audience. We’ll be the first to acknowledge that we’re not the experts on the content. You are. Our expertise lies in asking the right questions that pull the right insights out of your team’s brains, and supplementing those insights with research.

How much of our team’s time will be required for our engagement to be successful?

Although our clients hire us to fill a gap in their experience and skill sets, we can’t succeed without you. You possess the experience, not us. So in the early stages of our work together, we’ll need you to do some heavy lifting with us. We’ll apply our methodology to lead your executive, sales and marketing teams through a strategy development process as we develop an understanding of your ideal customer, your competitive space and the place you occupy in that marketplace.

Who on JohnShepherd.com.au team would I be working with?

Our first step with new clients takes the form of a strategy project like our Industrial Marketing Road Map. During this process, you’d work with John Shepherd. Should you hire us to implement the plan we create for you, you’d have a dedicated team made up of a founder, a marketing strategist and an account coordinator. And you’d have an in-house team of copywriters, designers and developers at your disposal, depending on the nature of the work required to achieve your desired results

You talk a lot about strategy, but what kind of work do you actually implement for your clients?

We always begin with a strategy/consulting engagement like our Business Growth Road Map But should you hire us to implement that plan, our work for you will consist of some combination of business knowhow, how many hours you will initially work in the business, website development and optimization, email, account-based marketing and sales enablement.

Am I required to start with training at mynewagbusinness.com.au, or can I jump straight into implementation?

We’re strong believers that initial training precede business establishment. Even if we jumped into a long-term engagement together, we’d spend our first few months learning about each other. So rather than requiring a 12-month+ contract, let’s start by completing the 9 modules that you and we are confident will get you to your desired future state. Let’s make sure there’s a good fit between the two of us. And let’s give our team the chance to earn your trust before you go all in.