Know yourself, know your enemy and know the terrain in which you are going to engage them and you’re more likely to win than if you don’t. I know there’s a whole lot more about burning your boats and smashing your cooking pots before attacking (not to mention beheading a couple of the Emperors favourite concubines pour encourager les autres) but for the purposes of this blog that’s enough.

So this one is about the terrain – the way that market’s consolidate and you need to decide whether you’re part of the Gorilla’s Gang or whether you’re going to play nicely with the other Monkeys.

It also covers the kind of issues you’re going to hit along the way – moving premises, recruiting staff (particularly the sales staff) knowing when you’re going to have to stump up for my IT and a totally unexpected wrinkle that kicks in once the company has more than 10 people in it.

So that’s what this little video is about – its about 15 minutes this one – likely to be the longest one – but it’s interesting stuff.

Well I think so anyway

www.alanrae.co.uk

I’ve now run four of these and spent a lot of the last 10 years carrying out research projects into different areas covering IT and systems, Marketing and Peoople issues.

So I thought I’d try it out on you chaps Any feedback will improve the final product.

Just so you know what’s coming up they’re about 10 minutes worth of voice over powerpoint.

They take a balanced scorecard approach and the 7 topics covered are

1) Business Basics
2) Markets and How companies Grow
3) Innovation and Products
4) Sales and Marketing
5) People
6) Building Value
7) Business Model and Finance

Let me know what you agree / disagree with

Thanks

I’d advise you to look at it in detail as it’s got a lot of meat in it about when to go forward and when to hold back at different stages of the business.

by visually via

I find that many insights these days come through conversations on-line and in pubs. There’s something aout conversations that crystallise your thinking. I do quite a lot of this on the Ecademy Blog page  and in fact the impetus to restate this came from a conversation in there with the redoubtable Steve Holmes.

The 7 Point Plan for How to do Business

Fundamentally we are all working towards creating   a sustainable business that will grow.  By sustainable I mean “Lots of Apples at a reasonable profit for a long time” – in the concise words of Emily Durrant.

So here is what I think is really important if you want to succeed.

1 Treat people who buy from you, sell to you and work for you as grown ups – it’s amazing the difference this makes.

2 Identify something that people want to buy – then sell it to them – politely. If in doubt ask them what they want.

3 Describe what you have to sell in words of one syllable focusing on why it’s useful to whoever’s going to buy it. If you are selling spinach then this step is not necessary.

4 Take the trouble to create easy to operate procedures that have some resilience in them. That means doing the numbers and having some way of tracking the growth of value in your business.

5 Think permaculture and build sustainability into your business model. It’s no longer a nice-to-have but a core part of a 21st century business strategy. For instance we’ve put in a rainwater harvesting reservoir this year. It will save us £8k a year.

6 When you screw up admit it and refund without question – this will save time, money and your blood pressure.

7 Take whatever profits you make and spend them on something that is valuable, useful or beautiful. Don’t what ever you do entrust it to a suit to invest on your behalf.

That’s about it really

If you want to build some of these into your own business I  can help you. Next event is a Free webinar on 1st November on using Social Media for Real Businesses – you can book on here. or you can read an extended version of this in my e-book 21 Business Stories .

Growing Jobs was a project that we carried out earlier this year looking at what it would take to create a world class workforce in the horticultural industry. We were selected because we specialise in Business Performance Research and are also organic growers trading as Fletching Glasshouses.

It identified 6 key principles of workforce development and created 4 case studies with PDFs and short video clips of the people involved telling their own stories.

The 6 principles were

1) Adopt Good HR Practices
2) Keep your core team employed throughout the year
3) Find ways to make peak resourcing easier
4) Be innovative in looking for new blood
5) Be prepared to organise your own training
6) Promote our industry as a good place to work

You can find out more details at the growingjobs.org website

You can use this link to buy the report now.

The completely novel site also allows you to read it online before you buy it.

If you do got this route, please let me know how you get on

Alan

How to do Business

Leading your organisation in the 21st century is about being in the knowledge economy. You must strike the right balance between systems / results and motivation / creativity.  You need a synthesis of left and right brain thinking, a blend of people skills and effective use of technology. More on left and right brain thinking here.

Large organisations are great at systems but poor at engagement. In small organisations the reverse is true.  Large organisations worry about motivation and conflict  while small companies worry about how to trade with larger organisations, how to use KPIs and systems and how to market themselves.

So they behave differently. Small organisations tend to be informal, flexible and creative. Large organisations tend to be efficient but bureaucratic.   They work best in different parts of the market.

Market Dynamics

Most products follow an uptake curve that’s shown in the diagram. In the early stage only those who see the value of it ahead of the curve will buy it.  If it crosses the “chasm” and gets adopted by the early part of the mainstream market, it will become more and more commoditised and margins will fall.  This pattern is seen both in the commercial sector and in the uptake of services in the public and third sectors.

Profit available to an organisation is the mirror image of the uptake curve. In the early stages of a market where customers need help and support profit margins are good. As the market develops the product gets commoditised and the amount of margin decreases. Eventually, in the aftermarket when the majority have moved on to something else the profit margin increases again.

How profit changes during product life cycle

Only the largest players can follow the commoditisation route successfully. The rest of us have to cater for early adopters or the laggards.

So there are really only two effective business strategies. One is to dominate the market – as a Gorilla to use Geoffrey Moore’s terminology.

The other is to treat learning new things as a way of life and attempt to stay ahead of the curve.

The biggest challenge is to continually find new ventures that justify the cost of keeping your team together.

What should you do?

Large organisations get efficient by cutting costs

• applying technology to improve process
• application of purchasing power to suppliers.
• Being prescriptive in how their staff behave.

Smaller organisations identify a viable niche that’s profitable and congruent with their team’s values. Then they learn as rapidly as possible to stay ahead of competitors.

They lead in a way that creates a group field to harness the discretionary commitment and creativity of their staff. They help them operate proactively via self managing teams. Stafford Beer’s viable systems model is a good illustration of this approach.

Viable Systems Model

However both these approaches have their limitations.

If they want to grow, small companies need to learn skills from large companies to become fit to trade with larger partners and take part in the world economy. These skills include

–        Basic HR – you can read more at our www.growingjobs.org site

–        Systems thinking and KPIs

–        How to achieve and maintain accreditations

To provide the responsiveness customers demand in the era of Twitter and Facebook, Large organisations need to learn from small companies how to

–        Engage staff and motivate them by example so they routinely go the extra mile

–        Develop and maintain total customer focus

–        Carry out rapid and responsive new product development

–        Recognise that performance is the basis of brand

The key skill is how to learn on purpose. How to generate and communicate a shared vision of the future and evolve a way of  operating within the social ecosystem that blends people and technology skills to produce a uniquely effective operation.

Our business is to help you achieve this – as a small organisation wanting to grow, or a larger one wanting to learn how to dance with the market.

1. Help with creating white papers, presentations and other high quality collateral
2. Help with selling successfully to larger organisations
3. Help with Market Research.

Companies were happy with their systems and people motivation and retention – the biggest worry is getting a good stream of new customers.

However experience tells a different story. We know that if you want your business to succeed you have to grow the business in an integrated way. You need to

- Create new products

- Produce and deliver them reliably

- Tell the market about them online and in person.

- Motivate staff to make it happen

All based on the vision and values that provide the energy to drive your company forward

I’ve  run 4 successful businesses in 30 years and the main thing we’ve learned is that your brand depends on performance. You do need systematic ways of developing the products you need. But you also need the systems to deliver without mistakes and attract and keep good people to run them for you.

If you don’t pay attention to these things your business won’t grow. I promise you.

What do you think chaps? Makes Sense?

But they do. Both involve supply chain work, both involve accreditations and both are groping towards how you run a business effectively and make use of the tools for collaboration and marketing that are available to us in this strange new business landscape.

The horticultural project has led to me writing a whole new document that wasn’t on the original agenda.  As well as writing the main Growing Jobs report I’d foolishly volunteered to write up the evidence base. However this didn’t stay theoretical for long.

One of the things that really struck me right at the end of the case studies was the way in which the larger horticultural companies – the ones that play in the supply chain – have been adopting lean.

We need some of that here in the nursery. We’ve got the guys a really good training course from the local Horticultural College and the next step is to look at lean. We’re going through that Dawn of Formality transition – the one where you have to do things properly and behave like a real company with HR and all of that stuff that we set up in business to get away from

Writing the paper forced me to look at the evidence for HOW you would implement high performance work practices and how it all started to link with Stafford Beer’s viable systems model and smart working.

To plagiarise Lenin – Smart Working is Lean plus Broadband. Hold that thought – I’ll come back to it another day.

Anyway business is a series of transitions

Getting off the ground, getting noticed, recruiting staff, putting in systems, building a management team, getting ready to scale etc etc.

Getting through them is all about how well you learn – and how well you implement it.

To finish up with, here’s a short list of things that companies struggle with as they approach transitions.

• •A strategic vision of markets, competitors and the way forward
• •The ability to communicate it if they had it
• •Acquiring Professional Management Expertise particularly in marketing, IT, new product development and a balanced scorecard approach
• •Lack of structured HR and training
• •Networking is short term and ad hoc  – aimed at leads rather than acquiring strategic partners.

Next time we’ll have a quick look at some indicators for companies that seem to be getting their act together