In this week’s CDCD I’d like to refer back to this week’s guests on my radio show, Competitive Edge, (broadcast live, each Friday 1000-12000 GMT). My two guests were:
• Mark McManus, Managing Director of Stiebel Eltron UK Ltd
• Brad Burton, Managing Director of 4Networking
In summary, Stiebel Eltron produce equipment for the power micro-generation market, while 4Networking is, as the name suggests, a national, breakfast, business networking club. Although they service very different markets, both are reasonably new to the UK. Stiebel Eltron came to the UK in 2008 (having been setup in Germany in 1924) and Brad setup 4Networking in 2006. I asked Mark and Brad for their top three tips, based on their start-up experiences. It was illuminating the extent to which their answers overlapped.
Mark’s top three tips for success:
• Understand your customer
• Have a clear business plan for each quarter
• Have a strong team – find the right people
Brad’s top three tips for success:
• Find the right people – ‘one-man bands’ just can’t do it on their own
• Be true to yourself
• Invest the time to getting to know people and like them before trusting them – accept that this is for them too, in terms of their relationship with you
Taking these Top Tips as the starting points for setting your business on a firm foundation, I thought it would be useful to reflect on ways in which you could bring more ‘power to your elbow’ regarding some of these valuable points:
Understanding your customer
Linking this with Brad’s comment on “know, like and trust” a number of thoughts came to mind. When was the last time you surveyed your market? I’m thinking here, not just of your current customers, but the wider market – people who haven’t had the opportunity to do business with you yet. There are easy, inexpensive ways of doing this nowadays. For example, you could post a survey on LinkedIn. Likewise, you could create a survey using a web-based service such as Survey Methods or Survey Monkey and pasting the URL on your social media feeds, e.g. Twitter, or Facebook.
Getting the right team
Both Brad and Mark stressed the importance of having the right people around them. Brad also stressed the importance of giving people the opportunity to “know, like and trust you”, before doing business together. There are two questions here; where do you find potential team members and what is it that you do that allows people to get to know you, like you and trust you? As regards the former question I like potential team members to be recommended to me by people in my ‘inner circle’, whom I already trust. I start the process by asking the question, “Do you know anyone who…?” and once I’ve done that I sit back and see what my close network produces.
If you feel you are lagging behind in the ever developing methods of consumer interaction maybe you could benefit from an Effective communications course.Effective communications course.
This post was first published as one of Chris Davidson’s regular “Competitive Difference” emails. You can subscribe to Chris Davidson’s “Competitive Difference” (CDCD) Via the Active Presence website. You can also contact Active Presence directly.
Why the world needs YOU like never before (Issue 11, Vol 04)
I confess that this week’s CDCD is something of a pot pouri, but nonetheless I hope still useful. Let me start by thanking those of you who e-mail me frequently, having received and read your copies. I’m grateful to receive all of your comments and indeed humbled that CDCD is so widely read and – as will become clear – in great detail. Several of you pointed out typographical errors in last week’s edition and I thank you for that. These past few weeks have been quite an education for me, as I have started using voice recognition software to dictate this broadcast, as well as write the scripts for my radio show. The software is easy to use and highly reliable, although it is prone to misinterpretations which can be fiendishly difficult to spot when proofreading. For example, in this work that I am dictating now the phrase, “and I thank you for that” was interpreted as “and I think you for that”. I have discovered that although voice dictation software is extremely useful it calls for a different approach to proofreading. Typographical errors no longer appear as “rubbish” – sometimes helpfully underlined in red by Microsoft Word. I now find that errors comprise complete words correctly spelt but making no contextual sense. By all means continue to point out these errors to me as I strive to invoke a new proofreading scheme to counteract the latest advance in technology at Active Presence headquarters.
In preparing this next paragraph, I searched the Internet using the words, “we live in uncertain times” – a search that returned more than 5 million responses. Given this, you could accuse me of not saying anything new, and to certain extent that’s true. My objective is to get you to pause and reflect a moment on current circumstances and how you might be able to influence them. There is a huge amount going on in the world and much of it is not good, as has been widely reported by every news outlet worldwide. I read a very interesting take on world affairs just this morning and I suggest that you read this entry in Dr vises blog market money matters blah blah, in which he predicts extreme difficulty ahead for the American economy and the US dollar. The extent to which time proves his predictions to be correct will become clear in due course, in the meantime it seems fairly clear to me that the only way ahead is by everybody cooperating to an uncommon and unparalleled degree. The world and its affairs are now so interconnected that they are beyond the control of any one group of people – be that group a religious doctrine, a political or commercial empire. The only way forward is by cooperation. Cooperation is only possible if groups of people communicate. The groups of people that the world needs to communicate in order to progress are groups of people that normally would not work together. And this is where you come in. The people who subscribe to and read this broadcast are, to some degree or another, interested in communication and its use in the workplace. The world needs you now, like never before. There are some people out there who recognise this need for unparalleled cooperation and they are doing their best to communicate with their counterparts – however, their communication skills simply aren’t up to the job. It’s like taking the averagely skilled car driver and asking him or her to drive a Formula 1 racing car. There is a growing and unparalleled need for high-quality, assertive, facilitation and effective communication skills. So far as I can see, this market can only grow and I would urge you to get stuck in and help people out.
I leave you with the words of Theodore Roosevelt, “Do what you can with what you have where you are.”
I’d also like to give you a brief technical update this week as well, by way of a very useful company and their website. The company is called MX Toolbox and their site is www.mxtoolbox.com. MX Toolbox is an American company, founded in 2003 and based in Austin Texas. On their website you will find a range of really useful tools, one of which allows you enter an IP address and discover whether that address is on any blacklists and if so the name of the list is on. Now it’s quite conceivable that 90% of the time you will not need to know this information. However, on the day that you really need to know it then you really need to know it and you really need to know how to find it – and this has proved invaluable to me this week, so I would encourage you to make a note of this website and at least bookmark it in your browser and I hope that you never ever have to refer to it.
This post was first published as one of Chris Davidson’s regular “Competitive Difference” emails. You can subscribe to Chris Davidson’s “Competitive Difference” (CDCD) Via the Active Presence website. You can also contact Active Presence directly.