Posted by jpayne on May 10, 2009 under Business - In The Press, Business Growth | 
Julia Payne In The Press
Ambition Magazine May/June 2009
A recession provides five key growth opportunities that clear-thinking firms should look to exploit. By Julia Payne of Julia Payne Associates
Recessionary times normally ’surprise’ most business people; it’s like the bad times have crept up on them without warning. Very few find themselves financially and strategically set for a recesiion before it arrives. Fear dominates. Everyone hangs onto everything they have for fear of there not being enough to go around. Scarcity kicks in and with no money moving around the system, things start to grind to a halt.
It’s important to remember that these business cycles have been repeated several times in the past decades. If this one follows suit, markets will recover and grow. While it goes without saying that the immediate concern is survival, you also need to ensure that you plan for future recovery and your future growth.
It stands to reason therefore, that these times present huge opportunities for business to fill the gaps that their competitors are not taking advantage of. Perhaps as a business you don’t have much, if any, cash to invest, but thinking strategically costs nothing. It can have both immediate and long-term benefits, allowing you to look at different ways of doing things and placing you ahead of the competition when the upturn arrives.
if you try thinking, ‘what are the opportunities’, rather than ‘how can I survive’, you can engender a new and positive mindset not only for your business, but also for yourself, allowing you to open your eyes to the opportunities available.
So what are the five key growth opportunities in a recession?
1. Product Innovation
Are you still selling the same product in the same way and with the same pricing structure as you were one or two years ago? If so, you could be selling what was a boom product in a recessionary market. It’s just not going to fly.
The key to this strategy is to know how to innovate your product, when to introduce your ‘recessionary products’ and when to ditch them in favour of your innovated growth product.
Are there underperforming products you can drop? Can you add features that will increase the value of your product? Can you repackage your existing technology or product to suit a new business need? Can you make a small incremental change to an existing product to give you a new one? Focus on ‘need’ products, rather than ‘want’ products.
In addition, the downturn could be the best period to reposition your business. It is far harder to do this at the height of the market when your focus is elsewhere. Make sure your marketing matches oth your products and your positioning and look at different media to promote your business. For example, with the rise of social networking, consider how you can build new communities, and with them, relationships.
Research has shown that businesses that innovate their product during a downturn always do well during the next boom.
2. Channels to Market
If a business does not have enough revenue coming through during a recession then it is probable that whatever channels to market the business was using pre-recession, were either not sufficiently established or not the correct ones to see them through all parts of a business cycle.
Now is the time to look at other ways to take your existing or newly innovated products to market. You may be able to increase your sales and market share significantly by using different ot additional routes. Have you considered piggy-backing other businesses’ customer bases, joint ventures, agents or partnerships? To know how best to get to market, it is essential that you know your customer base and their buying methods. If you haven’t invested in this to date, then now is the time. Customers don’t stop buying during a recession - they just buy more cleverly. Not only will developing deeper customer relationships provide you with ideas for new products and how to package them, it will bring you closer to your customer base - essential for both short and long-term growth.
If it takes a business too long to establish new channels to market, then it can miss a large chunk of uplift readily available in the next growth cycle.
3. Functional Structure
Question: What is one of the key things that can stop a business owner or manager from finding the time to develop their product and explore different channels to market? Answer: being dragged into the daliy management of the business.
During a downturn, management tend to get dragged back into the everyday detail of the business. This means that there is a misalignment of the micro strategies needed to run a business and the macro strategies, such as mergers, acquisitions and new markets which will allow you to grow. If you have been drafted back in to run the day to day operations, how are you going to find the time to discover or undertake growth initiatives/ You need to do both. Otherwise you may come out of the recession in one piece but not aligned with your growth strategies. If this is the case, then in reality you may miss the boat, as you struggle to play catch-up and align the business for growth, while the market is already surging ahead - taking your competitors with it.
4. Skills.
During times of economic uncertainty, it is unsurprising that companies focus on the short term, but it also means that it is easy to ignore the development of skills that are critical to the day to day delivery of the business.
Now is the time to be developing the skillset of your employees and to be looking around for new talent. Can you tell who is rising to the challenge and who is burying their head in the sand? Are you employing people who do not really add anything and in truth, haven’t for years? Are you as the leader, having to bear all the responsibility, or is your team playing an active part?
There is widespread consensus that investing in both your skills and those of your team can play a major part in surviving the recession and building a greater skills set post recession. Fully understand the competencies that the business needs to deliver its strategy now and in the future, and then undertake an audit of skills within the business to ensure you have the necessary skill sets.
The same can be said of your infrastructure. Make sure it matches but does not exceed your current needs and ensure it is also the bedrock for future growth. A fast-moving business coming out of a recession builds its capability to match the speed of the market and not trail behind it.
5. Succession Planning
Many businesses forget staffing succession during downturns. They rely on people staying out of fear that they will not get another job. However, post recession, if cultural difficulties have not been addressed, staff will leave. This creates a recruitment problem for businesses at what could be a crucial time. While other businesses are starting to grow during the upturn, many businesses will spend their time re-staffing and outlaying valuable investment monies on recruitment costs.
As well as building skill sets, start to consider who internally could ascend to key positions within your business. Begin the process of gaining senior management support, standardise employee evaluations, target key positions for succession and define attributes and behaviours. Encourage and communicate with your high-potential staff to ensure that they are truly committed to your business. Show them the opportunities available for career advancement. This in turn will breed confidence and encourage them to see their long term future with your company. you don’t have to succumb to the doom and gloom.
Be aware of the opportunities and seize them.
Posted by jpayne on under Business - In The Press, Business Growth |
Julia Payne In The Press
Ambition Magazine March/April 2009
Could your lack of a structured business growth strategy be costing you a fortune? By Julia Payne of Julia Payne Associates
Businesses today operate in very competitive environments and being able to respond to market changes is vital in achieving profitable growth or even survival throughout 2009. However, how often do you find yourself fire-fighting? How often do you find yourself handling day to day tasks that should be handled by someone other than you? If your business’ growth strategy is something that is fitted in on a weekend around family commitments, what chance do you think you are giving you or your business of success and more importantly, what can you do about it?
Take a moment and think how your business has grown. Have you been able to structure it as you wish in a manner that’s best for business growth, or have you simply reacted and hired staff to cope with your expansion? If it’s the latter, you could have a structure that resembles spaghetti , with those departments that shouted the loudest having the most staff, perhaps even being over-resourced, leaving others feeling there’s not enough time in the day . This type of structure normally results in duplication of effort, excessive management time being taken to make decisions, staff frustration about not being able to work efficiently, management selected for tasks which do not match their skills and no clearly defined lines of communication.
Businesses do not grow uniformly, but in chunks and the key to your success is how you manage those chunks. Resourcing a business should be a strategic function, not one that is dictated from the bottom up.
Your starting point is to identify the best functional structure for your business.
A functional structure is a means of strategically managing resources or activities within a business. All activities within an organisation fall into one of three groups, Infrastructure, Revenue (Sales) and Strategy. These can then be colour coded by red, blue or black - extremely simple but highly effective.
Red activities support the infrastructure and are non- revenue generating, for example, HR, IT, Legal, Accounting and Administration
Blue activities include all revenue generating functions and are client related, marketing, advertising, and relationship management are good examples
Black activities are the strategic functions related to business growth such as positioning, new product development strategies, joint ventures, or merger activities
Red and blue activities create growth in revenue, whilst black creates growth in capacity which in turn delivers business growth. When capacity growth comes into play, companies see a longer-term increase in margins which lifts profit and in turn, increases the valuation of the business. All too often though management will say, ‘we’re not getting enough growth’, or ‘our profit isn’t high enough’. The answer translates as too little resources employed in the strategic or black areas of their business. Similarly, an MD who says, ‘there’s not enough time in the day’, is probably doing too many red activities.
Too often companies are busy handling red and blue activities to the detriment of black. Think how many times during the course of the day you have to deal with matters such as sorting out IT, handling a stock problem or a client issue. Are these adding to the growth of the company or are you shouldering the responsibility which should lie elsewhere? If you’re not sure, then try this very simple exercise. Have a look at your diary and highlight each meeting or activity over the course of a week in red, blue or black. Does that tell you what you need to know? Alternatively, keep a kind of ‘diet diary’ and write down everything you do during the course of a week. A picture will very quickly emerge as to where you spend your time. Try the exercise across your entire management team or your sales team. Are they focusing on pure sales related activities or are they spending a high proportion of their time on administrative tasks to support the sales process? Is this the best use of their time?
In determining the functional structure, it is important to consider two further key areas:
1. The percentage split across red, blue and black for the entire business. Theoretically, each hour of each day for every staff member could be colour coded. Whilst initially it will not be necessary to delve into such detail, it is essential to understand the percentage split necessary for the effective and efficient running and growth of the business. Over resourced in red will increase costs which hits both the P & L and profit, whilst under resourcing will not provide a strong enough infrastructure to service the business and its clients. Too much blue will provide much needed work, but does the business have the infrastructure to support it? Too little and cash flow will be poor. Following this to its conclusion, over resourcing in black will mean future growth but no cash flow this year, whilst under resourcing could mean no growth in future years.
It is important for a business to know and discuss the business variables that affect these percentages. These could include: business size, structure and plan, exit strategy, funding, capability and economy etc. However once agreed upon, it is management critical to know these percentages in order to maximise business benefit. A business needs a working system that will provide them with the management information on these percentages every month.
2. The fears of implementing a functional structure. Functionality is a discipline and a structure. It is not ego-based, meaning no roles are more important than others. It is a tool to create clarity. It is therefore important to put aside the fear of having not having got the balance right in the past and the fear of not wanting others to find this out. It really is not important. What is important is to place the business on a sound footing for future growth. Similarly there may be fears around creating additional work in training and education. However, fear encourages prevarication and this will do nothing but stunt what may prove to the key to your future success.
Now picture your future success.
Picture your company having clear priorities, the right people in the right roles, an external focus and your senior management focusing on strategic activity to drive both profit and build equity. Add to this picture another, where your staff are taking personal responsibility for their actions, have improved communication, improved job satisfaction and an increased connection to your company and your clients.
This does not just have to be a picture, it can become a reality. Your reality.
In these straightened times, putting the correct functional structure in place can yield major business benefits, not only in commercial terms with a honed, efficient and effective organisation increasing profits and building equity, but also in developing a culture where employees feel valued and fulfilled.
Remember, it’s your reality, why risk making it your competitors’?
Posted by jpayne on under Business - In The Press |
Julia Payne In The Press
The Guardian
For many contestants on The Apprentice, getting the boot was the best thing that ever happened to them. Hazel Davis tracks down the ‘losers’ who excelled after leaving the show.
‘You haven’t got a bloody clue”, “This was a total disaster”, “You can’t take cheese to France”, “You’re fired!” Words most of us can only dream of hearing from the far-from-saccharine lips of Sir Alan Sugar. For more than 60 contestants over four series, The Apprentice has been their chance to prove to tycoon Sugar, the rest of the nation and themselves, that they have what it takes to deserve a £100,000-a-year contract working for Britain’s most belligerent boss. But for every lucky winner, there is a whole load of “losers”. Syed Ahmed is one of them. Billing himself on his website as an “entrepreneur, TV presenter, media personality and an accomplished speaker”, Ahmed obviously doesn’t view himself as unsuccessful, despite Sugar’s dismissive pronouncement. It would be missing a trick for a former reality-TV contestant not to capitalise on his celebrity with the odd nightclub appearance and Ivy lunch, but it’s fair to say that Ahmed has made a significant corporate success since he was fired in week 10 of series two.
Since the show, Ahmed has launched two business ventures. Get Launched, an online video communication marketing service, and SA Vortex, specialising in developing internet protocol-based environmental technology. “I went on the show to compete with the best minds in the UK,” says Ahmed. “The most important lessons I learned were how to find solutions to problems and making sure to look at the bigger picture.” The reason he didn’t win, says Ahmed, “was that I was too moulded. I had certain opinions which put me outside the Apprentice mould.” But not winning, he says, has been a blessing in disguise: “I haven’t stopped creating opportunities,” he says, “and there is no way I would have been able to go off and do all this had I won.”
Perhaps the most famous Apprentice “loser” of all is Ruth “The Badger” Badger. Badger was a dead-cert to win series two of The Apprentice in 2006. Or so we all thought. During the series she gained a reputation for straight-talking and impressive sales skills.
Despite losing out to Michelle Dewberry, The Badger has gone on to set up Ruth Badger Consultancy, through which she aims to help businesses increase productivity and profitability and help individuals fulfil their personal financial goals. Now turning over “more than £1m”, Badger’s business appears to have flourished without Sugar’s help. She says, “The one thing I learned when I came out of the show was how to capitalise on the short fame and use it to launch my businesses.”
Naomi Lay is head of online display advertising at Trader Media Group, owner of Auto Trader. She appeared on series three of The Apprentice, being booted off after 10 gruelling weeks.
Originally from Cornwall, Lay studied in London and Paris and worked her way up the advertising industry ladder. When she joined The Apprentice she had already worked as an English-language teacher, a tour guide and a photographer before becoming a strategic sales director. Lay now manages an advertising sales team of 12 “and a pretty large budget” for the AutoTrader website. Says Lay, “I’m responsible for managing my team to generate revenue, hit and exceed targets. There is a lot of relationship-building, strategy and it’s pretty fast-paced, which is great.”
Working on AutoTrader might not be every Apprentice candidate’s ultimate aim, but Lay says it’s ideal for her.
“I essentially manage all the display advertising outside of the classified listings you see on the site - so more than one billion ad impressions every month - and it can get pretty crazy.
“It suits me because it’s always a challenge,” she says. “The targets are tough and managing people is probably the hardest element of it. I get involved in so many aspects of our business and our clients’ businesses and I love it!”
Being on the show, says Lay, gave her confidence. “It taught me to speak out,” she says, “There is nothing more annoying than wishing you’ve said something after the event. I learned that my opinions count and that I should voice them.
“It also taught me how to take the emotion out of my decision-making without coming across as a bitch. I think this is one of the hardest challenges for young businesswomen.”
Lay believes The Apprentice and its ilk are encouraging bravery in today’s workforce. “I think it has made it more acceptable to be an entrepreneur and it has encouraged people to be brave and to take risks,” she says. “I love the fact that several of the Apprentice candidates have gone bust at some point or another. It’s really important, especially in this climate, to let people know that it’s OK to try and if you fail, you just start all over again.”
Johannesburg-born Claire “Whatever’s in my way I will mow it down” Young was fired in the final episode of the fourth series. Prior to the show she had been a Club 18-30 rep and a category buying manager at Superdrug. She now runs Elegant Venues, a wedding hospitality service, and mentors young business students.
“The Apprentice did change my life,” says Young, “It’s given me a platform and opened many doors which I would never have had opened before.
“It really is an intense business bootcamp,” Young adds, “I learned about myself. I never realised how much I talked and my approach at times didn’t get the best out of people.”
Young, who was offered a job at Birmingham City Football Club before deciding to strike out on her own, says, “If I had won, I wouldn’t have my own business. I really enjoy my autonomy and the freedom to make my own decisions,” she says.
Some would argue that the notion of battling it out to work for someone else does nothing for the idea of enterprise.
As Ruth Badger says, “We weren’t entrepreneurs. If we were, we would have been busy running our own businesses.” But, says Young, “11 million people watched series four, and a significant number of those were under 21. Anything which gives young people the inspiration or idea for what they could do with their future is brilliant. There is a huge amount which goes on behind the scenes which makes it 100 times harder in reality than it looks.”
Business consultant Julia Payne runs Julia Payne Associates and Incisive Edge [solutions], advising senior business people. She says our notion of success is skewed by programmes such as The Apprentice: “Is the most successful person the person who wins the series, or the one who goes on to a long-lasting business career or even TV career?” she says.
“The Apprentice depicts the reality of how companies currently reward success, and what individuals believe constitutes success in business.
“Much of this is based around individual rather than team success, and even more is based on the ‘look at me I’m fantastic’ aspects of success,” Payne says. What The Apprentice doesn’t show so clearly is the value of working as a team, she argues. This is something that is “still not as valued by companies as it should be - even though they constantly talk about it.
“Teamwork isn’t the celebrity face of business, and it doesn’t necessarily make good TV. It isn’t sexy, but it is the backbone of successful businesses.
“It may be in the edit, but what The Apprentice shows is actually today’s business reality,” she says.
“Success now is more about banging your own drum and creating the illusion of success, rather than actually working together to deliver the goods.”
Posted by jpayne on under Business - In The Press, Credit Crunch Strategy |
Julia Payne In The Press
Click Liverpool
Women are weathering the economic storm better than men because they are more adaptable to change, it is being claimed.
Figures from The Office for National Statistics have revealed the female of the speices is faring significantly better during the economic downturn.
In the final quarter of 2008, the rate for redundancy among men escalated at more than double that of women.
Experts say the main explanation for the phenomenon is the tendency for women to work in areas such as healthcare, education and the public sector - areas less sharply affected by the downturn.
Business consultant, Julia Payne says the dominance of women in these sectors has a big influence on the figures.
Employment consultant Julia, of Julia Payne Associates and Incisive Edge [solutions], says women possess key qualities essential for surviving the recession that employers are looking for.
Julia said: “Women are used to juggling families and careers so multi-tasking and working to a schedule comes as second nature.
“They understand the need for a clear process and how to make every minute count moving swiftly from one task to another which makes them fantastic at implementation.
“They also possess a high level of empathy which makes them very good at delegating and better in team situations.
“These are all attributes which employers need when trying to keep their businesses afloat.
“Men often concern themselves with job titles and with what others are doing rather than focusing on the job at hand.
“Job losses in female-driven employment have been small in comparison to men.
“The crisis started with the collapse of the housing market and as a consequence, the male-dominated industries have suffered.”
Solicitor Gina Simpson, who runs the Aegis Law firm in Merseyside, said many women posess talents that are in demand by employers.
Gina said: “We need to take time to listen and being sympathetic and caring in our approach is important to our clients and many women are good at that.
“Generally women have lower expectations from employment and in a recession they are more flexible when it comes to accepting things like short-time working.
“In practice it means they are better placed to adjust to the recession and are less vulnerable to redundancy.”