Annette Salmon, 20Twenty Strategies

Annette Salmon, 20Twenty Strategies

She is much more than a marketing strategist. Annette Salmon, the woman behind the Mandeville-based 20Twenty Strategies, offers her clients rebranding, logo design, decor, training, public relations, and much more. Training has become a big component of her menu of offerings because she believes that if you train people to do something themselves, you will be improving their output for many years to come.

Salmon coined the name for her company from her understanding of the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule), the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity which states that, for many events, roughly 80 per cent of the effects come from 20 per cent of the causes.

Pareto developed both concepts in the context of the distribution of income and wealth among the population. You will always get more of your returns from 20 per cent of your customers. The other influence is the belief that perfect eyesight is 20/20 vision, Salmon says.

"I wanted to have an agency with insight and the foresight to delve into helping small businesses. That is my passion and it brought me back to Manchester in 2005, right after signing a contract to work with GraceKennedy as a trade manager," Salmon revealed.

She brings a wealth of knowledge in the field both locally and as far away as Japan, Korea and China where she established distributorships for her clients.

She walked away from a job where the money was great but she saw an ad in the paper for Jamaica Standard Products (JSP) - a coffee company in Manchester that wanted a marketing manager. Having always relished a challenge, Salmon viewed this as her perfect opportunity to learn more about a company she knew nothing about and return home.

 

Cushy job

 

"My thinking was that everyone knows the big corporate entity but no one knows this small, family-owned coffee company, so my impact would be good. I experienced trepidation in turning down the cushy job, but they understood my need to take the challenge, so I packed up my belongings and having got the JSP job, I was happy come home," she explains.

Her experience at JSP opened Salmon's eyes to many of the deficiencies in many similar small, family-owned companies and this led to an idea already germinating in her mind.

"I wanted to be a change agent to help them through those challenges," Salmon said.

She discussed her idea with her JSP bosses who understood her desire to launch out on her own. "So my employer became my first client and they are still with me 12 years later," the ebullient businesswoman reveals.

In 2006, Salmon when registered her company, she conceptualised initiatives such as Made in Manchester Women's Summit, Small Shops Big Businesses Forum and BrandStories among others. The latter is a platform provided during Global Entrepreneurship Week in November every year.

"This is a day filled with speakers talking to students from central Jamaica about how they began as entrepreneurs, the challenges, joys, stumbling blocks and stepping stones along the way. It is a great experience for the students who ask many questions of the speakers," she said.

But, with the bulk of her work coming from the island's capital, Salmon wanted to place some emphasis on where her company was domiciled - Manchester - so she formed a peer group to share knowledge with others.

"I thought about many entrepreneurs who were barely making it, raising their children, getting no recognition, but still keeping their families together and I wanted to acknowledge them," she said.

Salmon chose 2015 - the year Manchester celebrated its 200th year, to honour 200 businesswomen from the parish with a plaque. It was held at Cecil Charlton Hall and from that event, Made in Manchester Women's Expo was born.

Thirty of the women honoured, came on board for the first Made in Manchester Women's Expo, she said reminiscing on the event premised on main idea that the particular business owner must be located in Manchester. The expo is now a calendar event held on the Sunday before International Women's Day annually and the Summit is held on the day itself.

The expo has grown from year one with 30 exhibitors, 45 in year two, and 54 in year three. Salmon executes it on a shoestring budget.

"Advertising is minimal as we cannot afford it, but hopefully with sponsorship, I am aiming for 100 exhibitors next year," the Salmon says, adding that she wants it to become a membership club because people are hungry for the initiative in the parish.

Include men

There have been requests to include men in the expo but the ever upbeat Salmon insists that women helping each other, resonates strongly with her, so the expo will remain true to her original intent of women helping women and raising awareness of what they do to make life possible.

Small Shops Big Businesses brings together small business owners annually in June for a forum to learn marketing strategies for their businesses, thereby maximising their sales.

"This one day seminar is now in its third year. I will also present my Small Business Marketing Event bringing together suppliers of marketing services, products and skills geared towards marketing and sales and which can help business owners build their capacity and know where they can turn for support," Salmon says.

For the first two years it was held in Kingston but this November 14, during Global Entrepreneurship Week, it will be held in Mandeville.

Salmon continues to dream big as she shares that her overarching vision is the her company will become the number one small business marketing agency in Latin America and the Caribbean in terms of marketing services. I have already begun to learn Spanish and another language in preparation for that; the sky is the limit," Salmon says.