part0007

When I tell people that it’s perfectly possible (and OK) to reinvent the wheel, I’m often met with a set of blank looks. That’s because we’re fed the lie that you can’t or shouldn’t , especially when it comes to business. Without a growth mind-set, the default position is to accept failure, be that during an economic downturn, or when the orders have dried up, or if you simply don’t know which way to turn and you feel stuck. In this chapter, I want to encourage you to dig deeper and explore that growth mind-set I’ve talked about already, because no matter what’s holding you back right now, I want you to be able to turn obstacles into opportunities – and then grow. This isn’t such a radical, impossible idea to get to grips with since plenty of businesses have pulled it off with great success, my own included.

The truth is, just because you’ve been doing something in a certain way since the year dot, that doesn’t mean it’s the only way, or the best way, to do it, especially if your order book is looking empty. This is when your growth mind-set will come into its own. For example, a handbag is a handbag – it’s a useful accessory for carrying things around, so how come top fashion labels seem to have no problem shifting large quantities of them at £1,000 a piece versus Dave’s handbags on his stall at a fraction of the price? The difference is in the articulation of the product. The fashion houses have turned an everyday item into a ‘must have’, luxury product because they’ve reinforced its value in the minds of customers. You might not be selling handbags, but the principles remain the same, and by the end of this chapter you’ll know why. All you need is the capacity to take a step back and look objectively both at what you offer, and also at what your customers really want . Then you can determine if that’s based on a need or a desire, and what are their ‘pain points’ in purchasing from you are.

Be better informed and prepared to ‘reinvent’ your portfolio of products, or services. It initially might seem counterintuitive, but the results of this exercise can often be surprising, with equally surprisingly simple solutions. You’ve got nothing to lose. Often, once business owners in a rut have taken the triple R test, they realise that the answer is right under their noses. What’s previously blocked them is the fact they’ve been spending too much time in their business, rather than on their business. It’s an insight I and my business partners were quick to learn during the credit crunch of 2008.

Principally, we were in the business of selling gas detection systems. The calibration consumables associated with the product were previously seen as a necessary evil. In reality, these pressurised gas cylinders were a nightmare to sell, because they were hazardous cargo items intended for customers’ ships in the far corners of the world. We always knew this presented us with problems, but until we were forced into examining what those problems were, we buried our heads in the sand and ignored them, because that was the easy option. It never occurred to us that the whole process also proved painful to our customers (and our competitors). Having been forced to look at those problems through our customers’ eyes, I set about finding a simpler solution, that would not only serve our own customers (and ourselves) but also create an opening to serve our competitors’ customers as well. It was time to reinvent the wheel (or in this case, the gas cylinder). The solution we arrived at involved using exactly the same products but marketed, managed and sold in an entirely new and frictionless way.

The solution (our ‘FASTCALGAS’) was simple: we reviewed our product portfolio and linked all the part numbers to our customers’ different gas detector model names, making it simple to identify and match the correct gas to the myriad of gas detectors on the market. We averaged out hazardous carriage costs, alleviating the need for shippers to take two days to come back with a quote. We provided a worldwide guide to ports and generated an instant price guide based on the number of cylinders, which we input into a spreadsheet. As a result, we identified our ‘minimal viable product’ (MVP). It wasn’t perfect at the start, but it was a million miles better than anything that had gone before. We created a streamlined, integrated process which, from placing the order through to delivery, was fast, efficient and seamless. In retrospect, it should have been obvious, but at that time there was no industry standard practice for ordering such parts. Each supplier used their own, chaotic system and, as a result, it actually drove all of our combined customers nuts. As was typical at the time, nobody was listening to the concerns of customers who really had to work hard at buying what they needed. However, our radical, but incredibly simple, new approach meant that our product indexing against parts and needs immediately reduced customers’ purchasing efforts.

Our second initiative was to simplify the shipping costs. Instead of preparing specific quotes, we calculated the average price per route that included a built-in margin, but on which we would assume the risk if we were under. Thirdly, we reorganised our own internal distribution by arranging with our suppliers to hold stocks near the major airports. For the first time, we had fully engaged with our customers’ pain points and established how to serve them best. It took the potentially business-busting credit crunch to turn us around. Come the downturn in the global market, we took that unexpected turn of events, flipped it on its head, and found a new way to exploit it. In one stroke we removed our customers’ pain points of trying to match the right products to their needs, as had been standard industry practice. The FASTCALGAS model gained massive traction almost immediately, with customers falling over themselves to buy from us and competitors falling over themselves to try and find out what we were doing. Within two years of implementation, our FASTCALGAS product line had hit £2m per annum alone. We’d discovered a unique selling point (USP) within our niche marketplace which we then set out to own, in a similar way, for example, to Volvo owning the reputation for manufacturing the ‘safest cars’. In reality, their vehicles are no different to many of their competitors, but they claimed the ground in terms of safety. We claimed the territory of saving customers both time and money, even though our products were no different to those supplied by our competitors.

The learning curve for us at the time was the realisation that opportunities don’t just exist during upturns, but that quite often they crop up during downturns, but only if you have the right mind-set to exploit them. Once you have that mind-set, you’ll notice opportunities all around you and there’s no need to be 100% in magpie mode where you chase every shiny object.

When an opportunity presents itself to you, establish a process that places it at the top of your sales funnel (see Chapter 10 ), set the criteria through which it can be filtered and apply the ‘hedgehog’ theory, a fantastic tool that Jim Collins adapted and refined in his excellent book, Good to Great (2001). In this, Collins (who adapted his theory from an ancient Greek parable in which a hedgehog outsmarts the predatory fox) states that businesses are more likely to succeed when they identify the one thing they do best. I learned a huge amount in reading this book (I recommend it to you, heartily). Collins says that when the going gets tough, it’s those businesses that concentrate their efforts on what they’re good at who survive and thrive. It’s a theory we’ve adapted for our own purposes, with full acknowledgement that Collins was the inspiration. We call it the ‘VAP process’:

Once you apply these questions to any new opportunity, you’ll know if it’s an opportunity worth pursuing. If it doesn’t get past all of the above, it will go nowhere and my advice is don’t waste any more time on it. This process of ‘opportunity filtration’ is essential because the last thing you need is to grab every opportunity and run with each and every one. One problem, I believe, prevalent in British small industries is that they develop and create too many products without properly identifying in advance if there’s a viable market for them, leaving them with an inventory that nobody wants to buy. However, with some careful (and inventive) repurposing, that scenario could open up a whole new set of opportunities.

It worked for champagne. As legend has it, in what looked like a fermenting disaster way back in 1693, as the Benedictine monk Dom Perignon was desperate to rid the abbey’s wine of the bubbles that were deemed undrinkable. He tasted the brew on the off chance and, to his surprise, it set his head alight. ‘Am I drinking the stars?’ he exclaimed to the other monks he then gathered around him to taste it for themselves. And so, a whole year’s grape harvest that was on the verge of being poured into the river (along with much of the abbey’s potential profits) became the basis for what is now the world’s best-known luxury drink, and the rest is history.

At the end of any meeting I have with a client, I always finish up by asking them, ‘Is there anything else new that you’re looking at?’ I call this the ‘hidden opportunity process’ – HOP. That’s how we, as a business operating in the maritime industry, managed to diversify into one of the UK’s leading commercial drones businesses. We did it by spotting an opportunity and reassigning our resources. In 2015, when we were looking to diversify in light of the new technologies sprouting up around us, I was in Singapore for a week having a meeting with a large oil tanker company and our Far East area manager. After we’d concluded our agenda together, I asked the question, ‘What new technologies are you looking at?’ They replied, ‘What are you doing with drones?’ To be honest, I knew nothing at all about some toy that, to my mind, only geeks flew around.

However, a week later and back in the UK, I had just concluded a meeting in the less exotic Wolverhampton with the West Midlands Fire Service and I asked the same question. Once again, ‘drones’ was the response. Now, on each occasion I could have told myself that my business was based in the maritime and safety sectors and that there was no obvious connection between these and drones. However, my growth mind-set told me otherwise because it tapped into my entrepreneurial brain. ‘Watch this space’ was my immediate reply. We’d never wanted to be defined by our products alone, but rather by how we could grow, both as a business and as people. Suddenly in quick succession there had been two separate occasions when an opportunity presented itself to me and, let’s be honest, it wasn’t hard to connect the dots. Drones was a new and emerging market that had yet to fully identify itself. I took that thought away and over the next eight months I researched the market and put it to the test. We passed the concept through our ‘hedgehog’-adapted VAP process. To reiterate:

One of the most convincing answers we agreed on was that, even though we might not have specialist drone technology knowledge or experience, the principal proposition we were being asked to provide was based on increased safety – and as business providers in that field, we had that in spades. Therefore, it wasn’t such a big leap for us in terms of our business-to-business (B2B) service provision and our skills were eminently transferable. The fact that our existing customers, with whom we had established a reputation for excellence already, were making noises about this new area was an opportunity we would have been foolish to ignore. Especially after we’d worked out that it could also be a highly profitable extension to our current business. After this, I wrote a business plan and showed it to the bank, who loved it and supported us. We created a new company, Coptrz, that would work in tandem with our existing one, Martek. This was the result of a HOP, and three years later the business had already sold £7m in products, training and services and was bound for the Fast Track 100.

The reason it worked was because within the space of a week I’d asked the question, probably a dozen times, ‘Is there anything else new you’re looking at?’ and among the drab responses, we hooked a whale. Now imagine how the HOP could transform your own business, and the potential opportunities it could create, with minimal effort. For example, if you have ten salespeople in the field who, between them, already make a minimum of fifty calls each per day and they’re finishing each call with ‘What else new are you looking at?’, how many potential opportunities might this create by just having that one simple HOP? With a growth mind-set, you are equipped to learn what’s needed to diversify and grow while drawing on your core skills and reputation. No matter which pole you’re sitting at, the upturn or the downturn, opportunities always exist in both hemispheres; when the horizon appears to be negative, there’s usually a positive. You only have to look to nature itself for proof positive of that – wildfires fuelled by long periods of drought devastate forests and bush, but the resultant ash nourishes the soil that then grows more life.

The easier option, when you’re stuck or facing a downturn, is to give up or remain static, repeating the same old patterns, including trying to be all things to everybody, which in reality will lead you nowhere. I’m guessing that’s not the reason why you’re reading this book – which could be the first opportunity you’ve created for yourself.

Take a good look at your business and what you’ve spent so much time, effort and resources in building. Put yourself through the ‘triple R’ test, do it rigorously and with complete honesty. Face the brutal facts head on and don’t allow them to intimidate you. Look at what your competitors are offering. Ask yourself, ‘Does the need still exist for my business?’ If the answer to that is still ‘yes’, then go on to ask, ‘How can I develop that opportunity and make it grow?’ Because, assuming there’s still a need for your business, then your journey isn’t over. In fact, this could be a huge opportunity for you to eclipse anything you’ve ever done before. If you’re now confident that you can pass the ‘triple R’ test, think of ways in which you can re-evaluate, repurpose and reassign your products, core skills and services. Invest in the results with total enthusiasm to enable the opportunities to grow and prosper. Don’t lose sight of the fact that you had the ability to start your business in the first place, because that should already tell you that you have the ability to grow.