Business Networking – do or die?

Posted on | November 10, 2010 | 1 Comment

My column for the business page of the Falmouth/Penryn Packet today. (I’d have linked it but can’t currently find it online)

Penryn-based business writer, Andy Coote of Falmouth Business Club suggests that networking is an activity to increase when conditions are tough.

In tough times, there is always more pressure on business budgets and businesses begin to strip non-essential expenditure out of the mix. The budget for marketing is an area that often comes under intense scrutiny and there is a temptation to reduce expenditure that seems to have no hard benefits attached.

Business Networking is an area that should be maintained and not cut. It is notoriously difficult to quantify what hard benefit comes from it and done properly, it is not a sales activity. You are meeting people who will come to advocate you and what you do. The return on networking will come from the people they speak to (and probably beyond).

To quantify the benefit, you could count referrals and put a value on them. It is an exercise many attempt but it has difficulties. How do you identify work that comes via a contact of a contact (of a contact of a contact …) who first met you networking?
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After the cuts comes growth?

Posted on | October 25, 2010 | 1 Comment

The Prime Minister, David Cameron, is due to address the CBI conference later today and, according to the usual pre-information (or leaks as they may be known) he will be talking about growth and how the private sector can take its place in rebuilding the economy after last week’s swingeing cuts.

According to The Telegraph, the Prime Minister will “announce the creation of a £200 million network of technology innovation centres based on a model by James Dyson, linking University researchers with business and the national infrastructure plan aimed at securing £200 billion of long-term investment from the public and private sectors to take advantage of an era of unprecedented economic change”. He will suggest that this is an incredible opportunity for Britain, for start-ups to flourish, but innovations to drive growth and create jobs. He is also expected to say, “to build the new dynamism in our economy, to create the growth, jobs and opportunities Britain needs, we’ve got to back the big businesses of tomorrow, not just the big businesses are today stop that means opening up access to finance, creating an attractive environment for venture capital funding, getting banks lending to small businesses again.”

The estimates following last week’s public spending review were that some 490,000 jobs would go in the public sector and it would appear, apparently confirmed by Vince Cable today, that the government fully expects many jobs (perhaps as many) to go in the private sector as a consequence. That sets a requirement on private business to create nearly 1,000,000 jobs just to stand still. If we are to help the economy to grow and to avoid the double dip that the Independent today is predicting, then we need to at least double that.

There will be many people who leave their jobs as a consequence of the cuts who will have great business ideas and will want to become the new entrepreneurs. This is as it should be, however they will need to understand the differences between developing ideas as part of an organisation that supports them and developing ideas as individuals with no support guaranteed to them.

One of the key jobs for existing small businesses will be to help other new small businesses to come to terms with the differences between working in the corporate environment and working as a self-employed person pursuing their idea, often pursuing their dream.

One of the motivations behind the presentation I gave last week to the Falmouth Business Club was to restate some of the basics that I have learnt in the years since I left corporate life. I completely underestimated the requirements on me when I tried to set up in self-employment for the first time back in 1990. I have now been self-employed since 1999 and it has been every bit as difficult to keep momentum growing as it was the first time.

Achieving the level of growth the Prime Minister is implying he needs will not be easy. Rather than criticising from the sidelines, what we now need is for businesses to get behind the government and try to grow the economy. It is too big a task for any individual business to achieve alone, so we have to start working together and where better to do that then within networking groups. Finally we may have reached the point where networking has a critical job to do within the economy. We must do our best to meet the requirement.

Presentation on Business Planning (Falmouth Business Club 21/10/10)

Posted on | October 24, 2010 | 2 Comments

These are some thoughts onplanningand building momentum. I will be developing some of the themes here in future posts.

Please add comments and help me to develop these ideas.

Hidden Expectations can Damage your Reputation

Posted on | October 13, 2010 | 3 Comments

When Wayne Rooney left the field after one of England’s disappointing performances in the World Cup back in the summer, he made a remark – “Nice to see your own fans booing you. If that’s what loyal support is…” – that suggested that he really didn’t understand why the fans were expressing their disappointment so vocally. After their early departure, I lost count of the jokes and one-liners at the expense of the team, the manager Fabio Capello and individual players like Rooney, Emile Heskey, John Terry and Stephen Gerrard. The expectations that supporters had of the team, which were probably never realistic, had been left unfulfilled and the backlash was immediate and vocal. The reputation of team, manager and players was damaged and is taking some repairing.

Your customers will have their expectations of your service to them. Maybe you’ve always delivered within a few days and that response time has been built into their processes. Maybe you always find a quick solution to their IT problems and their expectation of service uptime is based on that. Then, one day, your service is not as timely – after all it has never been promised – and the response you get is surprising. You are held responsible for their systems being compromised because you didn’t live up to their expectations. You’ve tried to help them and do your best and, somehow, that is no longer enough. You may be excused for thinking something along the lines of– “we’ve worked our socks off for them and all they do is complain.”

Becoming embedded into the processes of your customers is usually a good thing. It gives you a certainty of business and you can plan your own processes much better. Most good supply chains work that way, with ‘Just In Time’ processes being the norm. The key difference is that, in most cases, the expectation is written into the agreement. There is a service level negotiation and agreement that makes it clear to both parties what can be expected and how any failure in those service levels should be handled.

Take a look at your key relationships. How have they developed? Is there an explicit service level agreement or is it implied and maybe one sided? How would you know what your customers expect of you?
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Impressive Social Media Acuity

Posted on | October 12, 2010 | 1 Comment

Yesterday morning, the Daily Telegraph published an article making claims about the human resources practices that were being used by Everything Everywhere, the new joint working partnership between Orange UK and T-Mobile. The article suggested that Everything Everywhere were using a traffic light system to indicate to their employees if their contracts were about to be terminated. On the face of it, a very bizarre approach. You can read the article in full on the Daily Telegraph site.

This article however is not about that. I tweeted the article at 1652 as follows

http://bit.ly/bDAGdg You just couldn’t make it up!

Just 4 minutes later, I received a reply from Conor Maples, PR Manager at Orange UK putting their side of the story.

@andycoote our response to bizarre and inaccurate claims in today’s Daily Telegraph http://tinyurl.com/2wurfdz

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The ‘shoe repair’ challenge

Posted on | October 8, 2010 | 1 Comment

“The children with the holes in their shoes are the cobbler’s children” is a phrase that rings some bells with me. Alarm bells, as it happens. Let me
explain.

I’m a business writer and content strategist. I write a lot of material for clients as well as editing a blog for the Academy for Chief Executives. I recommend to others that they develop a body of content on their specialist subject and use that to attract readers, advocates and clients. That body of content can also become a book to put stakes in the ground around their area of expertise.

So far, so good. But, I’m not doing it myself. The last blog here was (without looking it up) sometime in May. So what’s happening with my blog?
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The Pursuit of Fairness

Posted on | May 19, 2010 | 1 Comment

Originally published on Fresh Business Thinking earlier today.

In the Election campaign that ended earlier this month, two of the three main Political Parties in the UK included the concept of fairness in their slogans. The Liberal Democrat manifesto talked of “change that works for you – building a fairer Britain”, and the Labour Party proposed a ‘future fair for all’. As was to be expected in manifesto slogans, both are very aspirational, even idealistic. Despite the loss of seats that both parties sustained, it is clear that people do respond positively to the idea of fairness but are maybe not clear on what it means in practice.

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Renewing business plans

Posted on | May 12, 2010 | No Comments

Whatever the size of your business, you have a finite capacity which is determined by the resources you have. There will be a limiting factor to how effectively that resource can be used. A manufacturer may be limited by machine capacity, a retailer by shelf space and a services company by human resource – by its people. In my case, my limiting factor, as a one person operation providing writing services, is my time.

One of the aims of an effectively run business is to maximise the use and profitability of the resources at its disposal, hence the need to review and revise plans from time to time and to make sure that usage really is effective.
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Politics and the English Language Revisited

Posted on | April 22, 2010 | 1 Comment

Tonight, in Bristol, the leaders of the three main parties will debate on live television. We now know that the performance of each leader in the debate can change perceptions and may change the course of the election.

I tweeted an audioboo by one of the BBC’s political correspondents, Chris Mason (@ChrisMasonBBC), on the interesting use of language around the potential for no single party to have an outright majority of the House of Commons. Is this a ‘hung parliament’ or a ‘balanced parliament’?
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The Leader’s Journey – Bringing it all back home

Posted on | January 21, 2010 | No Comments

The process of change is one that fascinates me. From the moment we decide that something needs to change until the final satisfying feeling of change completed – or not – , we are, in effect, on a journey. That journey has no clear destination, can be quite difficult, maybe dangerous, and, at the end of it, there is no guarantee that where we reach is any better than where we began (if, indeed, it is a different place at all).

How can mythology help us to understand this process and, in particular, that thorny question of why, after trials and tribulation and much effort on our part, the change we thought we wanted to make simply doesn’t happen. One tool is the Hero’s Journey (also called Monomyth), developed from the book Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. Campbell analysed the mythology of many cultures and discovered that their stories followed a similar structure – one that seemed to satisfy our innate need for a journey and a resolution. It is possible that it can be applied to change making in business, so let’s try.
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