Posted by jpayne on February 8, 2009 under Business Coaching | 
Julia Comments: In this open and frank article, James Frost talks about the importance of seeking a business mentor who can provide a company with the necessary strategic direction
Coast Digital CEO James Frost sold price comparison website CompareandSave for more than £12 million, but he’s the first to admit it’s been a bumpy ride.
When I started my website design business in the 1990s, I quickly learnt that money doesn’t last very long. I got through all of it (about £20,000) in the first few months.
My approach was just to get the work so I could pay the bills and I had this unrealistic view that the bank would be falling over itself to lend me money. They made it quite clear they had been burnt from dotcom businesses before and would not view any application for funding favourably. I ended up having to draw money from my mortgage to get additional capital, which was around £50,000.
The experience taught me the importance of being able to take advice and support from people when it’s available, even though it can sometimes be easy to dismiss. After I got support from a business mentor everything became much more goal-oriented and the business started to find its direction.
‘My approach was to get the work so I could pay the bills’
Another lesson I learned is that you have to fight for things: they’re not just going to be given to you. Before I started out I was promised some contracts from old friends and colleagues from previous companies. However, once it came to the crunch, most of these offers evaporated. If they had followed through with their promises then that would have kept us going for longer in those first few months, but I may never have started the business if I had known they were going to change their minds. So, in a sense I suppose, they did me a favour.
Keep going
I started my current business, Coast Digital, in 2002. It was a 50:50 joint venture, and what caused me a lot of pain and anxiety was that when it came to needing more money, my partner was nowhere to be seen. So I had to make the decision to buy him out.
It made me realise that if you are going to embark on a joint venture, you need to have a clear outline of each other’s expectations first. Friendship and business don’t mix otherwise. By the time I set up Compareandsave.com with another partner in 2005, I learned my lesson. Falling out with a good friend has got to be my biggest regret in the last seven years.
In the early days of Compareandsave.com I was trying to do everything on a shoestring, but my partner pointed out that the company would never achieve its full potential that way. That was hard to accept at first, as we were running the company as a side operation and I didn’t want to lose him from working full-time at Coast Digital.
The problem was that I was consumed by the other business and didn’t want to get too caught up in a side project. It’s possible we may have made greater headway if we’d focused more on the new business, although it worked out well in the end.
The key thing to remember in business is that you have to be prepared to change, but also be open to suggestions from other people.
This article appeared on http://www.growthbusiness.co.uk
Julia Payne Associates provides consultancy and business coaching to SMEs and FTSE 500 companies. Contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on February 3, 2009 under Business Growth |
What Big Businesses Can Do Differently
10 Strategies for Business Growth
Strategy 3:
Short Sightedness
Let’s understand some basics about human nature in corporate culture.
By their very nature, short-sighted people are unable to see into the future and therefore must practice caution. Their lack of long-term thinking means they have more time to focus on immediate profits.
Short-term thinking about immediate profits is dangerous because it causes people to place less emphasis on the importance of customers and ignore the bigger picture of corporate longevity.
We all have ‘negative experience’ stories about wanting to return a product to a store only to get caught up in a battle of principles. Every shop has at one time or another lost future revenue due to their insistence of hanging onto a few present-day pennies.
This lack of long-term, big picture thinking is utter commercial suicide and it frequently spills over into other areas of business. Short-sightedness with regard to forming strategy, developing high performers, listening to differing opinions and opening channels to market are just a selection of what, I am sure, we have all experienced at some point in our career.
It’s important to remember that not everyone is good at seeing the bigger picture. If you can, start to try and encourage others to. It may be with small steps within your own department or function. When people see change occurring at grass roots level, it can quickly have an effect and open new avenues of thinking and ultimately, action.
Action:
Focus on long-term thinking. Eliminate short-sightedness. Remember the importance of the customer. Encourage others to see the bigger picture.
Julia Payne Associates provides consultancy and coaching to SME’s and FTSE 500 companies. Contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on January 28, 2009 under Business Growth |
What Businesses Can Do Differently
Strategies for Business Growth
Strategy 2:
Build Strong Client Relationships
It has always been essential to develop strong client relationships, but in today’s economic climate it is vital and could prove to be the difference to survival.
What can you do to build relationships?
1. Understand your client’s perspective.
In order to do this successfully, you need to listen to your clients. That means listening and not hearing what you want to hear or even worse, putting spin on their words to fit your own needs. Work to their agenda and ask questions that are going to forward your client’s position and not your own.
2. Speak your client’s language.
It is a myth that clients want to be wowed by your corporate language. To be honest, they’re just not interested. Their bottom line is that they want to understand what’s in it for them and how you are going to help them, in simple plain English. The best sales people will know that instinctively and will present in a language that is familiar and comfortable to their client.
This may be far removed from the way their organisation talks about the same subject, but what is more important - the sale, or corporate-speak? Which one pays the bills?
3. Go that extra mile.
How often have you done something for your client just because? Everyone will bend over backwards to help a client if a sale is imminent, but what about building the relationship? Do you as an organisation know what your standard service is and do you know what your ‘extras’ are or should be? Do you know when you should be employing those extras?
Not knowing may allow your competitors an entry point. It is the responsibility of everyone within your organisation to be providing A1 client service. However, it is the responsibility of the management team to ensure that client service is part of the culture and not something that is wheeled out when a sale is on the horizon.
The words ‘corporate humility’ are becoming more familiar to organisations nowadays, especially larger organisations. We are all reliant on our clients, but it is time to start treating them as one of our most valuable resources.
Action:
Listen. Speak your client’s language. Go that extra mile. Value your clients
Julia Payne Associates provides consultancy and coaching to SME’s and FTSE 500 companies. Contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on January 26, 2009 under Business Growth |
What Businesses Can Do Differently
Strategies for Business Growth
Strategy 1:
Build a Complimentary Team and Organisation
Look around your organisation. How many people are there from the same university, the same MBA class and at a senior executive level, the same club? Does this approach truly benefit your company or is it limiting the scope of growth and progression?
Adopting this more traditional approach is what I call the ‘chummy mentality’. Recruiting people in your own image, who evidence a similar educational background, hold a similar viewpoint and come from a similar background.
Whilst this approach may provide continuity and a pleasant working environment, is it really benefitting today’s leading companies?
Recent events would seem to suggest that a like-mindedness is not what is required. Consider the integrity of some of our largest corporations. Highly intelligent people at the helm, but also at the centre of every controversy. We must ask ourselves were those voicing a differing opinion listened to? Where was the challenge? Where was the compromise?
Fresh ideas and values, people not afraid to express their views and a new way of doing things are essential and to be encouraged if the creativity and objectivity of an organisation are not to be diluted. Diversity is to be celebrated not sidelined.
The prized ceos will surround themselves with people who compliment their skill set, not those who match it. They will seek to be challenged. There is a line of thinking which says that the ceo should be the stupidest person in the room. Whilst this may sound bizarre, in essence it is sound common sense. No one person can have all the ideas or be abreast of the latest thinking . A smart executive will recognise this and build a team that has an individual yet complimentary skill set.
Action:
Build a complimentary team. Look for different skill sets and fresh ideas. Embrace challenge.
Julia Payne Associates provides consultancy and coaching to SME’s and FTSE 500 companies. Contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on January 16, 2009 under Credit Crunch Strategy, Strategic Planning |
Julia comments: A great article which provides practical and down to earth advice. The advice is applicable to owner managed businesses and corporate alike.
The First-Time CEO’s Recession Survival Guide
by Glenn Kelman
This article is written by Glenn Kelman , the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate broker . His industry went into recession a year ago, so he’s had a little more time than most startup CEOs to think about how to deal with the current downturn. Below is his advice to his fellow entrepreneurs.
Startups can be the most conservative organisations in the world. We spend so much energy nurturing our delicate egos against naysayers and self-doubt that we can hardly admit mistakes. This is especially true of first-time CEOs. Thousands of new web companies were born in the last few years, and many of us just got the job.
We set off with the same directions: tackle a big problem, listen to customers, work hard, pinch pennies, hire slow, fire fast. Still good advice. But I think we’ll have different advice for one another once we’ve come through this downturn, about how we had to change to survive. Since real estate crashed before the overall market, Redfin (my online real estate company) has had a year’s head-start sorting out which changes seem to be working for us.
Not that we don’t still have a long way to go. We’re still on track for our first profits in 2009, but we’re going to have to fight to make it.
The time we have left to succeed or fail is really just the measure of how long it took to adapt to our downturn. If I had been more experienced, we’d have adapted faster. Here’s the survival guide I’d give my former self, the one just starting to face the storm:
1. Compete With Your Successor
I often think about what my replacement will do after I’m fired. She won’t have emotional commitments to decisions that I already regret. She’ll look at everything as an outsider-as a customer-refusing to tolerate problems that have lasted so long I’ve forgotten they’re there, re-considering initiatives we already passed over for want of imagination or energy. And she’ll have nine or even twelve months of leeway to build the business, so she can think long-term. Worst of all, she’ll get credit for turning Redfin into a successful, thriving business. I think, “I hate her! I hate her!” And then I try to be her.
2. Act Like an Owner
You’ve probably spent most of your life hating your boss, pleasing others (so you can blame them later) and spending other people’s money. These are hard habits to break. When I was still settling into being a CEO, I wasted a lot of time driving initiatives designed to please others, acting as if someone wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do with Redfin. My moment of clarity came when a board member said, “as far as I’m concerned, you’re the owner of this business.” And he was right: you won’t own all the proceeds if the company succeeds, but you’ll certainly own a failure in its entirety. This sparked several reptilian impulses:
- “I can’t blame anyone else if this sucker goes down.” This made me feel powerful and savage, like Arnold at the end of “Predator.”
- “If it were all my money, I’d invest it in Redfin today - but there’d be some big changes around here.” We’re making those changes now. (This is about focusing on the part of the business that you really believe in.)
- “If we had to get our wallet out every week for that expense, would we?” (This is about focusing on the part of the business you don’t believe in.)
3. Get a Board You Connect With (Not Just One With Connections)
Startups have so much size anxiety that nothing can stop us from recruiting big shots onto our boards. But first-time CEOs need someone we can talk to about practical details, too. So in our case, Redfin chairman Paul Goodrich recruited Marc Singer for his experience with businesses run out of the cash register: restaurant chains, bean-bag manufacturers, installers of electronic animal fences. I used to be dubious that we had anything to learn from these companies. Not anymore.
Now I catch myself gazing at a parking-lot coffee cart and thinking, “what a great business” (it’s more profitable than most venture-funded startups). Marc has cultivated a nuts-and-bolts, make-money-now execution focus at our company. But there’s another benefit to working with him: it was easier from day one to think out loud with someone I wasn’t so anxious to impress.
Where I’d always imagined my board conversations would be like Richard Gere’s in “Pretty Woman” or even Willem Dafoe’s in “Spiderman” - conversations with Marc were more like telling a guy on a Greyhound bus about a bad breakup, where it all just came pouring out. In tough times, you need a board you connect with more than a board with connections.
4. Run Weekly Revenue Meetings
A job applicant from Amazon suggested holding a weekly revenue meeting, which has been an immediate hit. We focus on what we can do to drive revenue from week to week-tactical stuff, like hiring another field agent or changing a call to action on our site. We catch glitches that could otherwise last all month.
5. Automate Bad News
Bad news travels slowly-or sometimes just sits in your stomach-unless you pump reports straight out to the board, on revenues, traffic, customer service. Add spin if you like, but in a separate note so you don’t hold things up. This helps you avoid the-dog-ate-it board meetings.
6. (Just Ask to) Meet Your Peers
My natural tendency is to avoid meeting people outside of Redfin. I tend to measure my own work in keystrokes, and I begin to miss my computer after I’m away for 30 minutes. In hard times especially, it’s easy for a startup to become like a teenager’s basement bedroom: insular, stale, reeking of dude. Yet there are very few hours that have raised Redfin’s value as much as meetings with other entrepreneurs. A year before our cash-evaporation date, one CEO told me to start raising money. Another told us to get on the stick about our Google search rank. For someone wary of most consultants and experts, these meetings are one of my only sources of new information. And it’s important to gather new information: line managers have to focus on the jobs in front of them, but executives should be awake to what’s happening in the larger world. Anyone will meet you if you just ask for her help.
7. Create Simplicity
When Obama first heard the proposed slogan “yes we can,” his reaction was: “too simple .” But a leader’s job is to create simplicity. Over the past year, our real-estate executives slogged through ambiguous data on conversion rates, close rates, tour fulfillment. Decisive meetings felt like a math test where we ran out of time. Yet it never occurred to me to stop, step back and be precise and insistent about what we needed to know to make a decision. When something is hard to explain, you don’t understand it and you make mistakes. It’s a cliché to “keep it simple, stupid,” but the real challenge is to make it simple, mastering complexity instead of ignoring it. Entrepreneurs instinctively want to speed things up. What’s really hard is knowing when you have to slow them down.
8. Go on the Attack
Your competitors are hurting too. Be the aggressor, not the victim.
9. Be a Roman
What disgusted the ancient Romans about barbarians was their lack of discipline. Oxford Professor Peter Heather writes , “As far as a Roman was concerned, you could easily tell a barbarian by how he reacted to fortune. Give him one little stroke of luck, and he would think he had conquered the world. But, equally, the slightest setback would find him in deepest despair…” This is why, 2,000 miles from home, several hundred Romans could slaughter several thousand barbarians.
Startups are founded by barbarians. But to survive the ups and downs, you have to make yourself into a Roman. The most talented entrepreneur I know nearly self-destructs on the 18-month birthday of each of his ventures. By that point a startup isn’t brand-new anymore, and it isn’t Google either. The closer you get to becoming a real company, the less glamorous reality seems: you’re grimy from clawing for money and breathing hard now from exertion, which would be fine if you could convince yourself you’re not the only one struggling. Everyone struggles . Keep fighting.
10. The Journey is the Destination
Startups alternate between nostalgia for the garage and millennial longing for a lucrative exit. But what I always keep in mind is how disconnected and purposeless I felt before Redfin or my earlier startup, Plumtree. All I ever wanted was to get into a situation where I could win. Everybody has that dream. Even though you’re a second-string Little Leaguer, you dream that you’ll find a way into the World Series, that, with the game on the line, you’ll manage to hit just one major-league pitch. And if you do hit it, I promise you won’t be as happy as you were the moment before you swung. If you’re still playing, you can still win. And playing’s the thing. Enjoy it.
Julia Payne Associates have been providing consultancy and business coaching to SME’s and FTSE 500 companies for the past 20 years. Why don’t you contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on January 15, 2009 under Strategic Planning |
I’m not one for making people work too hard for the answer, especially when you’ve clicked on to read an article – to be honest, life’s too short.
However, I think this will help you to really understand what strategy is all about.
Take a moment and think what strategy means to your business. It doesn’t matter what size your company is, whether you’re an owner managed business or a FTSE corporate, the answer is the same.
In your mind, list the top 3 things you think your strategy achieves. If you’ve got a piece of paper to hand, write them down, that sometimes helps to clarify thinking.
Ok finished? Now if this word does not feature in your list, then it may be time to rethink your strategy…….and the word is, “customer”.
To create sustainable, long term success, an organisation must understand and relate to its customers on a very fundamental level.
Very few companies though think of their customers when it comes to setting their strategy. Rather, they think of their competitors and therefore concentrate their strategic efforts on constantly improving the goods and services they offer.
In doing this, they focus on temporary success and obscure the thinking and emphasis that leads to sustained success. Increasing the value of one single offering can distract the organisation from the larger questions of bigger picture strategy and objectives.
Having said this, it must be remembered that objectives themselves are not the end game in achieving lasting success. The more specific an objective the further it may potentially lead the company from its bigger picture.
So what is the end game? The end game is your strategy.
So how should companies focus their strategy? It should not rely too heavily on objectives or too strongly on competition. Rather, at its heart, should be your customers. That is what you’re in business for. It is the ongoing encouragement of a customer-led strategy based on neither competition or time led objectives which must be at the heart of any real strategy. From that your objectives, the right objectives, will flow.
Julia Payne Associates have been providing consultancy and business coaching to SME’s and FTSE 500 companies for the past 20 years. Why don’t you contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.
Posted by jpayne on January 13, 2009 under Strategic Planning |
Read any Strategic Planning book and by the end, you will have come up with some thoughts which will help define your company’s strategy. Read a couple of books and you will have even more thoughts and if you read several, you can blow your mind. The point is, there are so many different strategies your company can follow.
Which one is right for your company though?
Consider these positions:
Are you offering outstanding customer service, such as Singapore Airlines?
Are you positioning yourself as the low-price leader, such as ASDA?
Are you positioning yourself in a specific market sector, for example SAGA?
To provide the answer, the question you should be asking is; what should your business strategy do for your company?
In essence, it should define your company’s intent. It defines what your company intends to deliver to its customers and clients. Strategy itself though is just the first step in the process. The journey to profitability is dependent on whether you can execute your strategy to achieve business goals.
Companies throughout the world, invest huge amounts of time and money into identifying opportunities and developing the perfect strategy to maximise them. Typically though, the majority of these resources are wasted.
Why is this? Well it’s not because the strategy that is at fault, it’s not even because the ideas are flawed, rather it is the company’s ability to implement their plan.
Research has shown that less than 10% of all actions from strategic planning sessions are effectively implemented and this should start to ring alarm bells for management teams and functional heads alike.
What can you do about it?
1. Delivery. Recognise what your organisation can realistically deliver. To do this, it is important to know the capacity of your organisation, what resources you have available and the capabilities of your team. Demanding too much, too soon can overstretch many crucial areas of the business. Small incremental changes are preferable to whole-scale transformation, unless you are prepared for it.
2. Communication. It is essential that your strategy is communicated throughout the whole organisation and repeated as frequently as possible. Unless employees can understand how the strategy applies to them and importantly, to their jobs, then you will never achieve total buy in and execution will be far from effective.
3. Infrastructure. Do you have the appropriate infrastructure to support your strategy? You wouldn’t put a Ferrari engine into a mini, so why expect processes that were put in place years ago to support your new strategy. Now may be the time to review those essential systems.
4. Alignment. Business goals, performance metrics and rewards need to be aligned with your strategy. What may have previously passed muster may not be appropriate now. To be effective, rewards must drive behaviour, which in turn must support your strategy.
Too many times, both business strategy and its implementation is nothing more than a fancy powerpoint presentation or workflow. It needs to be living and breathing, used, referred to and communicated each and every day. You may have defined the route, but have you defined how you are going to make the journey?
Julia Payne Associates have been implementing and providing business coaching and strategic planning to SME’s to FTSE 500 companies for the past 20 years. Why don’t you contact us to discuss solutions that make a clear difference.