Attracting, leading and keeping talent

November 13, 2008 by DrAlanRae

Here’s the next thrilling extract from 21 Business Stories

One of the difficulties that a growing company faces is attracting and keeping the staff it needs. For a company to grow past about 10 it needs a management team. In Mike Southon’s book “The Beermat Entrepreneur” he describes a cornerstone model in which you need visionary plus 4 cornerstones who are experts in sales and marketing, finance, operations and content. This would provide a core management team able to drive business growth up to about 70 employees when either the business will cash out or a middle management will need to be engaged.[1]

However, this is probably well beyond what most of us have in mind. However, there is one key point about engaging these core staff in Mike’s view and that is equal share holdings. I have to say we have only in one of our companies done that although the first one was quite close. Our current business is actually a family one with 4 shareholders which has to make provision for succession planning.

My experience teaches me that good people are attracted to working on good projects that will help them develop as individuals. This is particularly true in IT where it’s critical for people working in the field to keep their skills refreshed, but it’s also true in other areas where one’s career is often built on a portfolio of CV building projects. So if you have a compelling vision that promises a series of interesting work projects, then you will find it easier to attract the staff you want.

Don’t however forget the Values dimension. However cynical the media are, my experience is that the overwhelming majority of people want to work on things that are worthwhile – that have some meaning – that make them feel good about themselves.

There’s actually quite a shortage of this type of work, so if you can provide it you’ll have an advantage in attracting and keeping the staff that you want.

You can keep them also by providing them with things they can’t get elsewhere. When we were running our AutoCAD dealership, Ai Systems, we had a gang of young salesmen and techies. These guys defined themselves to their chums by their wheels. Most competing companies would give them a standard company car (it was a perk worth having in those days) but we had the bright idea of offering a bit more flexibility.

As in – here’s the company car – it’s a Renault 21. It costs us £300 a month in leasing. If you want something different you can have it – we’ll pay £300 a month and you find the difference. So we had BMWs, Renault hot hatches, and toy Jeeps in the fleet. The guy with the toy Jeep took his girlfriend out on the beach at Southport and got stuck with the tide coming in. He did manage to get it out in time but he was more scared of facing Isobel than drowning. The guy with the hot hatch clamped the steering wheel so some bright spark sawed it off (this was Merseyside after all). However they stayed with us to the end.

It’s important in a small company to develop a sense of community. This means that you have to be seen to be fair all the time and that you need to build in excuses to organise team celebrations. The celebrations are the easy bit. Work out an excuse for everyone to go out and get drunk together. About 3 times a year is enough. We had a rule that if the company sold £100,000 of kit in a month which generally happened 2 or 3 times a year we would have a company outing. Sometimes we went bowling; sometimes it was beer and pizza (we had a great pizza restaurant locally) once we went on one of those laser guns in smoke filled rooms jobs. Doesn’t matter. It just makes people feel involved.

Being fair is harder. But you have to do it – because then if someone is not performing you can let the logic of the situation speak for you. Look, you might say, I have a responsibility to keep all these people employed. The company can’t live with the level of sales you’re producing. How do we make it easy for you to find another job? People were generally glad I’d brought it to a head. After a few months, I often got referrals from people I’d had to sack. It’s not a good feeling but if you have behaved consistently previously it’s much easier. So it means that if someone is not pulling their weight you have to confront them out of fairness to the other people who are putting in the energy.

The final advice I would give is always look out for projects that will further the agenda of the individuals concerned.

I learned this during a stint as Regional Chair of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. We had to re-design the regional web site. My first thought was that I should do it – after all it’s within my expertise. My second thought was – No – if I do it myself I’ll just get in my own way and be the bottleneck on my own project. I know – I’ll ask Thom to do it – he’s just gone independent and needs the reference. He did a great job. Next I thought – what can I give the others to do. So I got Peter to develop a regional events programme and David to liaise with other professional bodies. Both things that suited their personal agenda. Result – I had nothing to do and won an award for Best Managed Region.

It just shows what you can get away with. If only I applied the same approach in my day job.

[1] Link to Mike’s book here http://www.howtodobusiness.com/Publications.aspx?cat=F

Posted in Barriers to Business, Business growth issues, Strategic Thinking, small business marketing | 2 Comments »

Getting the right price

November 7, 2008 by DrAlanRae

One of my current projects is teaching a couple of modules on a Digital Marketing MSc for London School of Business and Finance.

This week we were talking about Business planning and metrics and I came across a couple of methods for working out what price to charge for your products or services. This is traditionally one of the hardest things to get right.

So - method one.

This depends on knowing the Maximum Reservation Price. What this means in English is the price at which the Last Fool says - for pity’s sake I’m not paying that. i.e it’s the highest price that anyone would ever pay.

So add your total variable costs of producing the item to the MRP and divide by 2.

As if by magic you have your optimal selling price at which to sell your product. As you get better at what you’re doing by going down the learning curve, your variable costs go down and so does your optimal selling price.

This is based on a linear view that for a fixed change in price you get a fixed change in volume. This is called price elasticity by economics wonks.

If like ‘er indoors you think this is a bit simplistic you might prefer method number 2 which depends on measuring the price elasticity.

It’s simple. The optimal price is  - (1/elasticity)

It’s negative because as the price goes up the volume goes down. (I know you can sometimes get more business by increasing your day rate but I suppose that the more product-like the offering the more this optimal pricing stuff is likely to work)

So how do you get at that I hear you cry.

Well I guess our friend Mr Google can help us with that. You could run 3 ads in parallel all offering the same product for slightly different prices and see how much the price affected the sales. That gives you the elasticity - and you’re away for slates.

Can’t wait to try it.

Posted in Marketing Offers, innovation, marketing strategy, small business marketing | 1 Comment »

Motivation - how other people think and feel

October 20, 2008 by DrAlanRae

One of the real challenges of managing your team is that not everyone sees the world the way you do. Dudley Lynch author of “Strategy of the Dolphin” for instance says “We don’t see the world the way it is – we see it the way we think”. This is important, particularly as the human brain is a tool for taking 2 and 2 and making 5.

We have to come to terms with the fact that the human nervous system didn’t evolve under evolutionary pressure to solve logical problems. Its purpose is to get us out of trouble fast. This means it’s always trying to save processing power by making snap decisions and it’s always going to over-react to novelty and things that move fast. Finally it constantly tries to make patterns to explain what it sees. Usually these patterns are nonsense which accounts for the persistence of superstition in what is supposed to be an evidence based, scientific society. A good account of what these behaviours mean in practice is given in Robert Cialdini’s “Influence – Science and Practice” which I would strongly recommend to the aspiring copywriter,[1]

As a business aspirant, you need to be able to attract engage and motivate 2 classes of people with your visions – customers who might want what you have to offer and staff who have to fulfil their needs, In practice we find that if we present our ideas to them in language that reflects the way they see the world, we’re more likely to get a result than if we don’t. This means that while being authentic and true to your own vision you need to learn how to flex your message to express it so it resonates with the thinking styles and values of those you want to reach.

I’ve always found the tools developed by Dudley Lynch to be really helpful. Described in his book the Strategy of the Dolphin, they are the Brain Map and his MindMaker 6 tool which lets you chart your positioning on the Graves Spiral. I like them because these models are powerful enough o be useful but simple enough to be mastered quickly and applied in a day to day situation.[2]

The Brain map assumes that we all show a blend of instinctive vs. rational behaviour and of left brain (convergent, results orientated) vs right brain (pattern orientation) perception. These result in 4 predominant modes of thinking – visionary (right, front, thinking, pattern), analytic (left front, thinking detail) entrepreneurial (left, rear, instinctive, results) and team players (right, rear, instinctive, relationships). You can see how these are related in the picture. The pure forms have characteristic ways of thinking and behaving and they see the world – and in each other in quite specific ways. The BrainMap lets you analyse yourself within this framework and gives you a lot of information about how the pure types think. I use it primarily as an aid to developing marketing stories.

clip_image002

The Mindmaker6 tool takes this a bit further and looks at the evolution of value systems, in people, organisations and societies. It works on the premise that values are either predominantly self (i.e. results) focused or group (relationships) focused and that as individuals or organisations develop they move between these focuses. As they develop they are capable of including more complexity. At a certain point of development they become conscious of the choices they can make between adopting different values appropriate for different purposes. This comes with the ability to integrate systems thinking with people skills which is the hallmark of a successfully growing organisation in today’s networked economy.

There is a reasonable overlap between the 2 models and it has become possible to map the behaviour of different types of  organisation in this way.

clip_image004

Understanding this is important for writing effective copy for organisations in the public or voluntary sectors that respond to different imperatives to the commercial sector,

The traditional salesman’s view of customer motivation is that they are motivated by fear, greed or fashion, Experience in business to business sales and marketing suggests to me that fear is usually the stronger motivator, However in the consumer world it can be a bit more complex. Individuals ARE motivated by altruism. And they are also strongly motivated by dissatisfaction with their existing situation.

Faith Popcorn in her book “Clicking” identified 17 MegaTrends that were apparent in people’s behaviour. As a New York fashion Diva they had strange North American names. However, they boiled down to two overarching principles.

1) I’m fed up of this so I’ll buy myself a lollipop (could be a BMW of course)

2) I’m fed up of this so I’ll buy more control of my living environment.

Number 2 is interesting. I think its one of the drivers which cause people to set up in business. The overwhelming evidence is that people set up businesses to gain control over their work environment. So if you’re selling to first time business people – remember they’re buying a lifestyle.

So what we’ve covered here is all about understanding how your audience thinks and feels and then telling your story in the language that they would use to describe it to themselves. Otherwise you end up only being able to sell to people like you – and as we know only too well – there’s a limited supply of those.

I once had a job in a public sector organisation after about 15 years of being Managing Director of a 10 man company. I was always getting into trouble for using the wrong language and focusing on the wrong issues. You see – it seemed natural to me that the most important thing was to get the results I was tasked with. However I had no feeling for the sheer political complexity of the organisation and what was considered appropriate in terms of maintaining the cohesion of the group. After about 18 months of pain which I somehow survived by being too competent to fire I eventually developed a quite unexpected flair for organisational politics and achieved some good things that I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t learned to play the game.

Mind you I still get caught out. I got into trouble for referring to man-days in a recent bid where consultant days would be considered gender neutral. I also got told off for referring to market research as research – because research on people trips out a whole dimension of ethical considerations.

It’s all nonsense of course – but it just demonstrates how important it is to understand these value systems.

As a rule of thumb – don’t use “me” language with “we” people or they’ll resent you and try to cut you down to size. And don’t use “we” language with “me” people or they’ll see you as weak and try and take you out.

And above all don’t try to use charm on accountants.

[1]http://www.howtodobusiness.com/Publications.aspx?cat=I

[2] http://www.howtodobusiness.com/BrainTechnologies.htm

Posted in Business growth issues, Strategic Thinking, Vision and Branding, innovation, marketing, small business marketing | 6 Comments »

Telling it Face to Face

October 13, 2008 by DrAlanRae

 

The next extract from the e-book “21 Business Stories”.

A key part of your strategy will be about how you are going to tell what you do in person. There are several ways of going about this – networking, traditional selling, exhibiting, running workshops.

The main difference between selling and networking is that one is a systematic process aimed at closing an actual customer while the other is about developing contacts and advocates who can introduce or refer you to clients. If successful it has a much higher entry point into the sales process.

Traditional lead generation and selling should be a highly structured activity with well defined ratios at every step in the process. Your networking should be just as structured if not so rigid.

You need to know who your market is and who they take notice of. Then you need to meet these advisers in an environment that’s conducive to them – where they can interact with their peers and maybe learn something that’s useful to them. Or else just have a good time. You need to be aware of the different types of influencers – some like being subject experts (or mavens) some are connectors, some are salesmen. Some are motivated by their reputation, some are motivated by money.

In any case your goal should be to meet and get to know the most influential individuals in your industry network. They need to get to know you, trust you and like you before they will start referring you into business where it’s important for their own reputation that they only put forward people who are reliable. An introduction to these ideas can be found in Malcolm Gladwell’s “The tipping point” and it is elaborated in Seth Godin’s “Unleashing the Ideavirus”[1]

Because the truth is that real world networking is quite like the online world. It is lumpy – some people (or blogs) are very much more influential and connected than others. Your aim is to be known and recommended by these super connected few since it will help you leverage your connection most effectively. We discuss this in more detail later on.

Most industries are in practice surprisingly small. Most of the players already know each other; your task is to build a trusted niche for yourself as part of the local ecosystem. That’s where the power of networking and reputation comes into play. If you have a recommendation from a high prestige player in your local area, then your selling overhead can be dramatically slashed. Not least because you will have effectively outsourced a good chunk of the sales and marketing budget.

You will have saved having to manage a lot of recalcitrant salesmen when you could be delivering, creating or counting the money.

So your task is to identify BY NAME the influencers that matter in your particular pond and find ways to hang out with them.

Who these are will to some extend depend on how big you are and what is the company sector that you are trying to connect with.

How you go about this depends on your business size and aims – what part of the food chain do you want to belong to.

Obviously your needs as a 1 man band are different from being the owner of a 10 man company. Their networking needs may be as much aimed at finding partners and suppliers as at sales. People who are running globally active businesses have different requirements from those who can fulfil all their needs by local contacts. Finally the needs of individuals in the corporate or public sectors must be considered. They may not be able to effect much delivery directly, but their ability to develop influence depends on their ability to build a strong network of people who take them seriously.

There are different tools available that suit the needs of different people. Some are membership organisations that meet regularly once a week – for example BNI or BRX. Some have strict codes of conduct about acting as advocates for each other and meeting weekly on pain of being chucked out. Others take the view that individuals self select who they associate with and are more relaxed about it. Some have a strong online component – Facebook and linked-in are particularly structured while small platforms such as Ecademy allow a combined approach on line and off line marketing.

In our previous projects we have established that the most successful practitioners combine off line and online activity. I think this is because they are effectively preparing the groundwork for their own sales activity. The question for you is which combination makes the most sense. We are currently running a research project into what works best. Look out for a future e-book. (If you want to take part you can do so here)

[1] The internet resources page including Godin’s book is here http://www.howtodobusiness.com/Publications.aspx?cat=I

Posted in small business marketing | 4 Comments »

The Black Swan on Newsnight

October 11, 2008 by DrAlanRae

Well that was a turn up for the book. I’ve just watched Nicholas Taleb jousting with a couple of economists on Newsnight.

Suddenly you start to see where this crisis is all coming from. The economists believe that there is a rational way out of this. Partly this is because they live in the “real” world and they know that the official channels - like politicians - have to pretend to be in charge.

Taleb is a trader. He KNOWS in every fibre of his being that the world in general and markets in particular are non rational and can end up in dead ends.

This means that you have to operate to minimise your downside risks so that if catastrophe occurs you’re not wiped out.

Which means not going with the herd, remaining cool and abandoning a non sustainable position in time.

Doesn’t go with evidence based seeking to be in control.

Which is why he looked a touch unhinged compared to the conventional wisdom of the economists.

However,  I know who my money would go on.

Fascinating.

If you haven’t read his books, The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness you really should. Even though it’s probably too late for this iteration

Alan

Posted in small business marketing | No Comments »

A truly organic birthday

September 15, 2008 by DrAlanRae

I don’t usually talk much in here about our company’s trading activity but today we have something to celebrate.

When we set this business up, getting on for 5 years ago, we decided that we would have a consultancy arm and a trading arm – because as well as writing and advising on e-business topics we wanted to do some as well.

So we (mainly my business partner to be honest) started selling plants on line as www.plants4presents.co.uk . This business took off quite well and after a couple of years trading, we had got to the point where we needed to look for some premises. We actually needed about 5000 square feet to store and pack the plants. And it had to be within 15 minutes of a railway station with a good connection into London so as not to impact the consultancy side of the business.

glasshouse small web

So – it turned out that the only way to get what we wanted was to take on a derelict nursery – with 2 acres of glasshouse. So 2 years ago – on 13th September we emigrated to Sussex.

Gulp. What are we going to do with this lot we thought? There’s no point heating them because that’s what finished off the last incumbents. What can we grow in a cold house. I know – organic vegetables. So we have been following the tortuous route of becoming certified organic growers. We’ve been inspected, received tonnes of chicken poo, steadily reclaimed about ¾ of the acreage, got soaked on farmers markets, gone cold calling in person and now we have an additional business which is employing local staff and producing good quality veg to local shops.

Because the glasshouses had been unused for years, the Soil Association backdated the start of our conversion period to the day we bought the place. So today - We are Organic – the land is organic, plants we raise are organic, our perennial flowers are organic and anything we plant from today will be organic too. So look out for some organic Pak Choi around the end of October with leaves to follow.

So – we always said we wanted to earn a living more in tune with the environment – and blow me it’s happened. If you want to know a little bit more you can find us at www.fletchingglasshouses.co.uk or www.squidoo.com/theglasshouses

 

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Business Start-up issues, Business growth issues, The Business Story, fun or inspirational stuff, small business, small business marketing | 2 Comments »

Telling it on-line

September 11, 2008 by DrAlanRae

Telling your story online is about condensing your story for people with short attention span – the attention bankrupt as someone said to me this morning.

People don’t read online – they scan. So the view is that you should use short sentences, bullet point and don’t use flowery language. People often get seduced by the theatricality of the technology and forget that a web page is just a step in a sales process. It needs to end up with a call to action and a result. That could be a direct sale as in our http://www.plants4presents.co.uk business, it could be a download of a white paper or a free planning tool as we do with http://www.howtodobusiness.com or it could be a direct phone call or email.

In any event, you need to make the site easy to navigate and easy for people to give you the result you want.

But that’s after they get there. On line marketing is mainly about being found. There are various ways to engineer this. It could be achieved by links from other people’s sites, by buying traffic using pay per click or by people just knowing you so well they type in your company name. Or you can be found by a search for you or your product using Google or Yahoo.

They can’t see pictures. They are in the business of delivering accurately searched information. This means they scan a page to see what it’s about to decide whether it should be served up as an answer to a search – something that someone types into that little box on the Google front page.

So to find the best match it can it looks at the copy on your page to see how closely it matches what was asked for. It tends to work by analysing phrases known as keywords and you can use these to leverage your on line performance.

To be systematic about this you need to be clear about what your story is and then you need to break them down into keywords. These are the phrases that Google uses when it’s searching. Once you’ve got these, then you can test them.

The cheapest form of market research known to man is Google ad-words. Because you can use it to ask the audience what it wants. Put simply, Google lets you bet on a phrase – let’s say business plan or marketing plan. You can say that if someone uses this phrase I want you to show my advert and if the ad is clicked on I will pay you up to 20p or whatever you think the lead is worth.

So you brainstorm the phrases you want. There’s a tool in Google that lets you generate more of the same – so you can test several hundred phrases at the same time. Then you create an ad. It’s quite tight. You have 25 characters for a headline and 2 x 35 characters for the body. So doing this will improve your copy writing skills.

You set your budget at something modest - £3 a day will cost you £100 in month, £5 a day will cost you £500 over 3 months – and let the campaign run. By testing the words against the ads you can home in quite quickly on the best keywords for you. The full details of how to do this are in our PunchaboveYourWeight workbook.

Having got these you can put them in various key places. Links on other people’s sites. In your autosignature on blogging spaces like Ecademy. And in any other on-line spaces you control. Like blogs, you-tube channels, Squidoo lenses etc.

Let’s be clear about what we’re doing here. This is like branding. What phrase do you want to own in the customer’s mind. Except that here its about what phrase do you want to own in Google’s mind. For example I want small business marketing course – to be associated with http://www.1manbrand.co.,uk. For a long time it was at number 1. You associate it by making sure that Google finds it.

Anchor text is important. If I create a link like this small business marketing course then small business marketing course sits over http://www.1manbrand.co.uk. Small business marketing course is called the anchor text for this link. Remember this – it’s important.

So what you need to do is to get this link with the right anchor text all over the internet. That will coach Google to send anyone who types in small business marketing course straight to you. In an ideal world I would like to have that link on the front page of the BBC – referring sites don’t get any better. However my powers of threat or persuasion are not enough for me to convince the BBC webmaster to make it so.

So what can we do? Well Punch above Your Weight is all about how to create various parallel presences all over the internet where YOU are the web-master and can control the linkages – over and above anyone that you can persuade.

It also tells you to use these best keywords to tag blogs, photos, videos and all kinds of other things to boost your online presence.

And lastly it tells you where to put them on the site. Which tags – H1, H2, page title, page description etc are the most important and how to make use of them.

It’s clear to me that most web designers don’t understand this judging from some very simple tests you can carry out on the site.

Search Engine Optimisation is an iterative process. The first cycle will make most of the difference and you can do it yourself. The more specialised and technical your product, the better it will probably work. If it needs constantly refining as you would if you were head to head with a big player in a massive consumer orientated niche then you will probably need an SEO expert. Most of us are not in that position.

A bit of intelligent analysis and judicious action will probably make a big difference.

We know – we found all this out by doing it. You can do it too.  More details at http://www.punchaboveyourweight.com.

From our e-book 20 Business Stories

Posted in Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, internet marketing, marketing strategy, small business marketing, small business marketing tools, web 2.0 | 5 Comments »

Why is the corporate sector so controlling?

September 5, 2008 by DrAlanRae

In our research projects we’re constantly aware that the independent gifted amateurs are using all kinds of tools - some of which are reviewed here to make themselves more efficient and extend their reach.

By contrast, the corporate sector gets ever more controlling - so that people who are locked inside their firewalls are falling behind in understanding how the rest of the world is working.

We have 2 classic examples that have cropped up in the last few weeks. My main research colleague now has to do all her internet related work from her own machines because anything the University controls is completely locked down. Even though she’s responsible for teaching Internet use at Masters level.

Secondly an old Business Link colleague of mine (IT / e-business adviser)  tells me that the organisation that has taken over the Franchise that he works for has policies that not only prevent him looking at the web sites of some of the people that he’s advising (because the name is deemed “inappropriate”)  but also prevent him from naming the site in an e-mail to his boss complaining about this piece of control freakery.

What is the matter with these people? Don’t they realise that if you prevent people doing their jobs it can hardly work to the organisation’s advantage?

Posted in small business marketing | 3 Comments »

Review of “Fooled by Randomness”

July 31, 2008 by DrAlanRae

I have just been re-reading this book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

It’s a fascinating read about how we find it so difficult to assess whether what we’re seeing in the market place is the result of skill or chance. If we are looking at something that requires a large number of small transactions that require demonstrable skill - such as playing the piano or dentistry then it’s unlikely that someone who has performed well on several occasions will be able to bluff their way in the future if they are incompetent.

By contrast individuals whose work involves a small number of large operations and who are measured by results rather than process plus results - such as CEOs or investment traders may well - if there a larger number of people engaged in the profession be successful entirely by chance. Probability tells us that if there are enough monkeys in the market then some will be successful every year for years on end. This is because we lose sight of the unsuccessful ones. This is a particular problem in a random environment such as the market. Not only do we perceive random success as deliberate - the successful do too and it affects the way they behave.

Taleb explains that while looking at the past delivers a pattern - almost ANYTHING can deliver an apparent pattern - that’s what chaos theory tells us. It can’t be used to predict the future. While you can use statistical probability to help you make aggressive bets, you can’t use it to manage risk. To do that you have to make sure that you protect yourself from unexpected events - Black Swans Taleb calls them - which can wipe you out.

So the rules of thumb as to whether a track record is valid or not is

1)    Are there so many players that a significant number would statistically look good for 6 or 7 years - given that we only see the winners?
2)    Is the environment for the activity non-random?  Engineering is non-random - if it goes wrong people die while government activities are random as in if they go wrong nothing very much happens really.

If we reviewed offers made to us in this light and applied some elementary statistics then we would get on better.

But why do we find it so difficult to manage rationality? - Because we need emotion to make decisions and rationality is only wheeled out after the event to make it look good - something that every salesman knows.

We don’t use logic - we use heuristics - quick and dirty rules of thumb which save us time. Scientific method takes too long.  Taleb argues that our brains are wired up to ensure the spread of progeny and get us out of trouble quickly. If we processed things to explain the world as it is - the time lag would kill us - particularly with a woolly mammoth and a couple of sabre tooths on our case.

Our brains use modules to kick in and solve problems on automatic pilot. Really there’s no central processing unit which is very much in line with modern brain research, There’s a really interesting description of how this works in Bob Cialdini’s book on influence but basically it’s about the search for pattern and the use of certain short cuts like social proof, authority, and reciprocity to make quick decisions rather than logical decisions. We’re much better at spotting cheats than using logic for instance.

Taleb argues that our decision making is biased against perceiving abstractions as risks.  Being non critical of how much are own or others success is random rather than achieved leads into all sorts of difficulties, particularly where the “noise” is great compared with the “signal”.

It’s a timely reminder that the survivors are the ones who haven’t bet the company.

Alan

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Business Books, Business growth issues, Strategic Thinking, knowledge verification, small business marketing tools | 5 Comments »

Tools for Building Gangs (collaborative working)

July 22, 2008 by DrAlanRae

 

Our recent research shows that people are often  looking for people to collaborate with when they’re out networking.

After all, many people find themselves setting up as one man bands (independent consultants) later in life after a lifetime in a corporate. While the corporate world has some real downsides, if you are an expert in your field it has a number of advantages that the small business owner doesn’t have.

These include

  • People to do your admin for you
  • People to do your IT for you
  • People to do your selling for you
  • People that your skills complement to make a complete offering.

Life as a 1 man band is different. You have to either pay someone out of your earnings to do all the above – or you have to do it yourself.

It’s a truism that if you are delivering services yourself you can’t sell when you’re delivering and you can’t deliver when you’re selling. So you might consider forming a little gang of like minded people whose skills complement yours and form a consortium.

This lets you share the load of bidding and spreads the cost and time of customer acquisition. The importance of this can be judged from the preliminary returns from a current project. The average organisation spent about 14 hours on marketing per week which is what you might expect given that most were selling business services, less than half turned over more than £100,000 and employed more than 2 people.

So if the ratio of promotion and admin to delivery is approaching 1 to 1 it makes a great deal of sense to form a collaborative gang which will let you deliver a more complete offer to your client as well as spread the load of tendering.

Once trust is developed and you are in a position to start collaborating, the current development of the internet has made life very easy for you. Most of the tools you need, both for online networking and for collaborative working are either free or comparatively inexpensive.

Apart from email, the main tools you need are a tool to deliver voice over IP (VOIP) which will let you hold conference calls and run chats plus a document repository where you can store documents, manage the email threads and generally work collaboratively. It’s only about 8 years since that was effectively beyond the resources of even a 20-50 person company. So the power of broadband has effectively changed the balance of power for the individual worker. Effectively all you need is a laptop with a wi-fi broadband connection and you can work anywhere. More to the point you can project manage from anywhere too.

clip_image002

So what are the tools of choice?

http://www.Skype.com, http://docs.google.com  and BaseCamp are 3 that should be in the frame for any aspiring gang creators.

clip_image004Skype includes VOIP, video conferencing 1 to 1 only, teleconferencing (up to 5) and chat (up to 50 in a chat). It’s free if both parties are on Skype. It effectively revolutionises how you do business because any gang can have its own permanent running Skype chat. This means that anyone can raise a topic and it sits there until one of the others has time to deal with it.

It has a much greater immediacy to it than e-mail and is almost entirely opt-in. Because it multi-tasks its possible to have ongoing conversations while engaging in writing complex documents – like this one.

This is what it looks like and here is an example of an ongoing chat. As you can see there are about 50 people in this with topics constantly coming and going.

It can be used in a much tighter way between 5 people delivering a project together, Check it out at http://www.skype.com

Google Docs is a powerful tool that allows documents resembling word, excel and PowerPoint to be hosted by Google and accessed by you and your team. The real benefit is that you can have a team of several people working collaboratively on a spreadsheet at the same time, each updating their own sections. You can have a look at http://docs.google.com

BaseCamp is a product of 37 signals that also do a chat product and a hosted CRM application. I have been using it to support my projects for the last 18 months. It essentially gives you some space to store the definitive project documents, allows people to comment allows you to enter and agree milestones and track progress.

I have a fairly modest subscription of about £6 per month which allows me to run 3 live projects plus as many archived ones as necessary. It’s real benefit is that it deals with version control, saves you having to be constantly emailing files to everyone and manages the audit trail of emails as commented threads.

clip_image006

Because its all properly backed up it means that your documents are more secure than sitting on your own server at home.

Uploading files is easy and I’ve now run 5 projects using it.

Costs range from $12 per month for 3 live projects and 1 Gb storage up to $149 per month for unlimited projects and 50 Gb. The more expensive versions also contain basic project planning tools and timer recording.

You can allow your clients access to the environment too so that you can add transparency of project management to the other benefits to the customer of dealing with your organisation.

BaseCamp, in its larger capacity offerings is a secure, encrypted environment. This can be very important to clients as would be need for secure encrypted environments for Video Conferencing and chat.

Skype is a free environment but there are other, equivalent, products which for a modest monthly fee will deliver an encrypted and more powerful service. http://www.megameetings.com for instance will offer video conferencing for 5 at its entry level price and will also offer the facility for secure teleconferencing with recording and transcript facilities.

These tools facilitate the development of groups of consultants functioning as consortia which will enable them to bid more successfully for contracts and deliver them more effectively.

This obviously has an impact on the whole smarter working agenda which we’re going to look at next.

If you would like to know more about this subject we’re running a workshop on 30 July at The Hub near Liverpool Street.  full  details are available at  http://www.punchaboveyourweight/collaboration.htm. This text is taken from 21 Business Stories - a Howtodobusiness.com e-book.

 

 

Posted in small business marketing | 3 Comments »

« Older Entries