▸ About
I'm not just a
marketing coach.
I'm Niki Hutchison. I've spent 25+ years in marketing strategy, the last 14 also delivering sales for clients and my own businesses. This is how I got here, and why I work the way I do.
- 25+ years
- TBWA
- The Leith Agency
- PlayStation
- NatWest
- Scottish Government
- UK Space Agency
I started in strategy, and never left it.
I found marketing at 14, on work experience in the strategy department of an ad agency. I was hooked on the same thing I am now: working out what makes people tick, and what actually makes them act.
That took me to TBWA in London, on PlayStation and Strongbow, then home to Edinburgh, through agency after agency. Always on the same side of the business. The research, the positioning, the part where you work out what will make someone buy.
Then it stopped running in a straight line.
In 2009 I had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy. It was life-threatening, and it took months to recover from.
When I came back to work, my boss told me that the work I'd done the day I was rushed to hospital for an emergency operation to save my life was substandard. Not "welcome back". Not "take your time".
Substandard.
It destroyed my confidence so completely that I left the industry I had built my whole career in. I was away for years.
And the one thing I would go back and say to myself, standing in that office being told I wasn't good enough, is this:
Don't believe him. Believe in yourself.
So I built something of my own.
What got my confidence back was not another agency. It was building a business from nothing.
I started a children's hip hop dance company, Step It Up Dance. I am not a dancer. What I am is a strategist, and I had just spent two years researching, for the Scottish Government, what keeps children on a positive path. The answer was a strong role model and an activity they love. I thought: I can build that, and I can build it around my family.
We grew it to 40 staff and 3,000 customers across Scotland, on 8 revenue streams. I call it my business training ground, and it taught me the thing no agency ever did: I actually know how to do this.
The best thing I built there is the thing I still use today.
We kept losing teachers to bigger schools. After-school classes and weekend parties do not fill a working week, so good people left for full-time hours elsewhere. The fix was obvious: daytime work. And the daytime work was in nurseries.
But every nursery I approached already had a provider. The doors were closed. So instead of selling harder, I asked a better question:
What do nurseries actually need?
They were under pressure to deliver specific learning outcomes to the children in their care, every single day. So we took the national curriculum and the Early Years Foundation Stage, stripped them into individual outcomes, and built a hip hop curriculum that delivered those outcomes through dance. To this day I believe it is the only hip hop curriculum of its kind.
The doors opened, because we had stopped selling dance classes and started solving the nursery's actual problem. A whole new revenue stream came with them, and it kept my teachers.
I did not have a name for what I had done then. I do now. I call it Go Detective Mode™, and it runs through everything I do.
Then the pandemic, and the decision to go all in.
When the pandemic hit, the dance company's 8 revenue streams went to 1 overnight. We refunded £20,000 in a week. I closed the business in three months. It is the hardest thing I have ever done in business, and it is also what made me go all in on marketing.
By then, mums from the dance company had been watching me grow it and asking me to help with their businesses. They became my first clients. The first programme I built for them was Fully Booked Bootcamp®. The first launch made £36,000, because I was not teaching theory. I was teaching what I had already done, with my own money and my clients' results on the line.
That is the honest story of the method.
I did not sit down one day and invent The Inevitable Success Method™. I worked to these principles for years, across global brands and two businesses of my own, before I had words for them. Recently, I put them in order:
- 01 Position
- 02 Message
- 03 Amplify
- 04 Convert
- 05 Sell
The order is the part most people get wrong. It is also the part I learned the hard way, so you do not have to.
▸ One thing my clients say, that I am proud of
Niki is so qualified for the job she's doing. She asks questions and comes up with the most incredible ideas that I would never come up with myself. Working with Niki is especially good if you feel imposter syndrome, which I sometimes do. She really gives you confidence.
Who I am now.
I run my agency Enjoy Marketing with my husband John. It is the second six-figure business I have built. Past clients have included The NatWest Group, global whisky brands (we're under NDA, sorry we can't name them) and the UK Space Agency. Along the way I have won 4 gold and silver Marketing Society awards.
My favourite thing about myself is my ability to maintain delusional levels of optimism. It does not really matter what you throw at me. I will pick myself up and carry on. That, more than any framework, is what 25 years has actually taught me.
Want to know where to start?
The method only works in order, which means there is one stage holding everything else back. Take two minutes and find out which.
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