Mike Saunders is a small business marketing consultant who helps small business owners align their messaging so that all of their marketing resonates with their target audience both online and on social media. Mike worked in the banking industry for 15 years before earning his MBA in marketing. When the market crashed in 2007, he made the decision to go back to school, and since he spent most of his personal time reading business books decided that an MBA was the way to go. It was about following something that he genuinely liked.

Mike feels that his MBA degree allows him to take an academic and strategic approach to marketing, and if before his MBA he was a fan of marketing, he is now a fanatic. Mike is fascinated with the strategy behind the tactics, and this led him to write his first book, The P.R.I.S.M. Salvation: A 3-Step Solution to Social Media Domination for Busy Business Owners, which was published on Amazon.

He also created the system “CA-TA-SA,” which stands for Competitive Advantage – Target Audience – Strategic Alliances. He takes a business through this model during a two hour-long session, and what he loves about the process is that it is different for every person/business. The work remains interesting to him because it is not monotonous. Each client needs something different, so he spends his time building different strategies based on the need of that client.

Working with small businesses fell into place for Mike because during his degree he had to think of a hypothetical company that he wanted to build. He created a marketing plan for a marketing company, and then just ran with it and turned it into an actual company. He never had a desire to work for a Madison Avenue type company, because he believes that the small business engine is so important to the economy. Mike interviewed various people at the SBDC for that class as well, which led to him eventually consulting for the SBDC.

Another outworking from his MBA is that he began to teach marketing at four different online universities. He got the advice that if you want to teach then you need 18 hours in whatever discipline you will be teaching, so before he graduated he made sure to take one more class so that he had the required 18 hours. Teaching online and night classes have been another way for Mike to connect with the marketing field and give back to those who are learning or just getting started. In the end, he deeply believes that God put him on the earth to help motivate people, which he is thrilled to do through coaching and consulting.