Ian Nicklin – Founder of the IN Business Ninjas
People fascinate me, I feel like my life up to this point has been about learning how people might think or behave.
A master practitioner in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and an Academy of High Achievers Belief change practioner, Ian Nicklin has made it his business to know how people make decisions. With more than twenty years of business coaching, experience in retail management and helping to turn around a failing business, Ian has honed his skills which has led him to starting his own niche business.
“Of all the tools and strategies we taught people through coaching, the most misunderstood and underused platform was LinkedIn. It’s untapped potential as far as I’m concerned. It was set up mainly for recruitment, it’s like Facebook for business and most people have at least a profile on there, but few understand its marketing potential.
Ian started IN Business Ninjas four years ago in a work space in Manchester, he sat down to work out how LinkedIN could help find and connect audiences, and six months later had created a business model that would work with the limitations and opportunities of LinkedIN’s platform.
“I believe we all make decisions at an emotional level, and IN Business Ninjas is built on the idea that we have to have an emotional connection with people in business as well as our personal lives. LinkedIN is just a platform, a structure, it is up to us to make the human connections work.”
IN Business Ninjas mainly works with small businesses that are still using traditional marketing tools such as telesales to offer training on how to use LinkedIN to achieve marketing goals.
“The type of business we work with are those that want to generate sales leads, or find new markets for their products and services. We have worked a lot in the past with recruitment, marketing companies and also hospitality. The pandemic had a huge impact on all of those sectors, which in turn affected us. Since then we’ve grown stronger and started to work with new industries, such as insurance.”
As our client base grew, more and more people started to ask if we could manage LinkedIN for them. As soon as clients start to get genuine connections who are interested in buying from them, they want to continue this activity with a consistent approach, something they don’t have time for when they are running a small business. That’s why we call ourselves the ninjas because we literally fly in and out of our client’s profiles to do the work for them.
Ian’s business is now operating internationally, with UK clients asking for support in overseas offices. He is now recruiting for more staff to compliment his team of seven people and he plans to achieve significant growth in the next few years.
Related Tales from the City
Katie Hall – Digital Media Manager at Badger & Combes
“Northern spirit bursts out of MediaCity and you can’t not be inspired by being here. I’ve achieved so much already but I still feel like it’s the beginning. There’s so much opportunity here.”
Nicole Timmerman – Film Production graduate
“I liked the idea of studying next door to ITV, the BBC.”
Vishal Mistry – tech student
“The intersection of technology and other fields: that’s how we’re going to fix the world.”