What started with a simple idea and a conversation over red wine has led to over half a million sales of a cookbook. The authors of 4 Ingredients have found the recipe for small business success.
The story began when entrepreneur and motivational speaker, Rachael Bermingham gave her first book Read My Lips, about marketing and motivation for women, to her friend Kim McCosker.
"Kim was raving about it," says Bermingham. "I said, everybody's got a goodbook in them, and after a few red wines that same day she said, I've got a good idea for a book. She told me that it was a recipe book with [each recipe using] only four ingredients. I said, that's brilliant I would buy that, and my friend next to me said, I would buy that too."
Bermingham, a motivational speaker, kept asking McCosker, a financial planner, about the book's progress until she finally decided to give it a go, on the agreement that Bermingham would co-author it.
"Her idea and my motivation kicked us both into gear. We said we'll give ourselves 12 months. We had the book on her door step at 10 months. We wrote it during our children's sleep times," Bermingham says.
"None of the publishers wanted to know us. `Are you famous, are you a chef?'. `No'. They wouldn't even talk to us, we couldn't get past the secretary in most cases."
So the Sunshine Coast pair decided to appoint their own editor and printer and self-publish, with $20,000 seed funding from McCosker.
4 Ingredients was published in March last year and has since sold 575,000 copies in Australia and New Zealand, with agreements underway from other international distributors. After considering a variety of television proposals, they recently signed a deal with the Lifestyle Channel to present their own cooking show, which will air from September.
Bermingham says there were four key ingredients to the book's success that can be applied to any business: "Idea. Plan. Action. Marketing".
"I've marketed many other companies before and it's still those same four ingredients. You do it a little bit differently to suit the company you are marketing, but it's just the language that changes, not the process," she says.
"There are a lot of people out there with fantastic ideas but they just don't do anything. You need to first of all do something with it, take some action, then marketing is definitely the oxygen.
"I wrote up a press release and sent it out to all the media and press and print entities in Australia. Kim and I both followed up with phone calls and we got on the phones to the book stores too. We keep doing it, we still do it every single week. Just this week alone Lifestyle was filming in my house and I called my local paper to let them know."
Bermingham has no formal training but decades of experience in marketing. She has run many small business, including a travel agency, a speakers' booking agency and a consultancy practice called "Marketing to Success" where she provided advice to women over the phone on how to market their business with a zero budget.
"Whether you are the director of a child care centre or an insurance broker, every single person needs to market their business in some way. I always say if you market properly you don't ever need to sell, your marketing should do that for you."
A positive approach to marketing is important, Bermingham says.
"I think everybody has a problem with selling because they are fearful of rejection, that is a normal human quality. Whatever I'm doing, I come at it from, `How am I benefiting other people'."
Bermingham says excellent customer service and a clearly defined target market are also important for success.
"A lot of people in business don't know who their market is. You need to know what language to use. If my market is women, I'm not going to speak in a male language, because they'll miss the point."
The original target market for 4 Ingredients was busy mothers between the ages of 25 and 55.
"But our market has grown now and we have changed our marketing to capture more of the market because our biggest online buyers now are actually men," says Bermingham.
"Single men may be wanting to wow their partners, and there are a lot of widowed men out there too. You can evolve [your target market] but you need to start somewhere."
Bermingham and McCosker are in the final stage of production of their second cookbook.
They will be self-publishing their second book, despite offers from publishers around the country.
