A second Graphic which goes into the basics behind the premature scaling model in more detail. Heartily Recommended and essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the reality of small business life and how they behave.

by StartupGenome via

 

This is probably the most valuable and informative business graphic I’ve seen in a long time.

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

One of the great things about social media is that the tools that we have at our disposal for getting our message across get more powerful all the time.

YouTube has recently revamped their channel facilities which not only make it easier for users to find the content that’s been created but also allows us to embed complete playlists into a web page.

I’ve recently been creating a Business Basics video series which uses the findings from the additional evidence base section of the growing jobs project as the bulk of the section on Managing Teams.

I’ve taken the opportunity to create a new play list which is embedded here. It combines this 16 minute video with the 4 video clips from the project from VHB-Humber, Bardsleys, Lowater and Hillier.

I hope you find it useful

The 7 Point Plan for How to do Business

This Blog has been running for quite a long time now so I thought it might be helpful to restate what I’m about here

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.

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 .

At the last meeting of the Brand Network we were looking at what are the key issues of brand UK. I rather glibly suggested that misbehaviour was the dominant leitmotif illustrating the kind of creative anarchy that we like to entertain here in the UK

2 weeks after that we had the riots so I was required by my co-conspirator to come back and justify the analysis.  This is about what we concluded. I started by presenting this photo montage.

 

Brand UK = Misbehaviour?

The centre image comes from a pastiche of riot photos shown as if they were part of a prospectus for the London Olympics. You know weight lifting = running off with cardboard boxes of stuff, shot put = hurling bricks at the police. All in the great tradition of British Satire.

Seeing it as part of my brief to be tough on the causes of riot I’ve chosen to surround them with some prime movers in our public life.  So please welcome TBliar, the Bullingdon boys, the Duchess Fergiana,  Fred the Shred, Rebekah who is largely responsible for creating the hysteria that required 10 million of her fellow citizens to go on a useless CRB register  as well as the phone hacking imbroglio and the appalling Hazel Blears shown hypocritically complaining about oiks instead of MPs stealing things.

Other items include the BP logo as redesigned by Greenpeace, Clarkson and poor Amy who demonstrate careers built on creative misbehaviour, and some local misbehaviour from the Lewes Bonfire, some Pagan Morris men and my band Newick Folk illustrating the local values of “wunt be druv” as they say round here.

 

So what we said can be summarised as

The issue

Brand UK is about creativity contained. We recognise that creativity and anarchy are two sides of the coin but that over time the balance has shifted and needs to be rebalanced

–      The energy has got a bit darker

–      The powers that be have behaved badly

–      The infrastructure has been run down

–      We are more controlled and have become the CCTV capital of the world

We concluded that’s what needed is just enough structure to keep the balance between the powerful and the rest of us. That means we need light touch interventions for most of us unlike the “Regulatation, Regulation, Regulation” of the Tbliar era and tough rules for the powerful to be vigilant against structural corruption.  We need to end the strike of Capital we’ve endured since WW2 and maybe we need to revise down the Monopolies and Mergers threshold to stop the powerful from abusing  market share.

We need  to  regenerate national capital instead of running it down or selling  it off cheap  whether it was Margaret flogging off the family silver, Gordon selling off the Gold reserves at rock bottom or the shameful way in which successive governments have devalued our higher education system that should be a pivotal building block in the knowledge economy.

We need to persuade our politicians to deal with this to preserve our creativity – all we have to work with in the knowledge economy.

This is not to say there have not been some noble attempts and dare I say it successes achieved in a very quiet and British way.

Sports education is a case in point. We have build some great University based centres of excellence recently while  lottery funding of sport has let us succeed in a wide variety of disciplines. Who would ever have thought we would end up with the number one cricket team.

The way that the riots have been dealt with is also a triumph for the British Way. Old fashioned policing, use of CCTV and getting people before the courts where standard if exemplary sentences have been handed out has contained the situation now that they know that enough of them will get caught to restrain the rest.  At least it’s stopped the radical right in it’s tracks.

We also see the spread of effective crime prevention measures like Speed Awareness Courses which instead of handing out fines and points give the inattentive  an hour and a half of “speed kills” and two and a half hours of advanced motoring skills – all run by experienced lady driving instructors.

Very clever that  – we need more of it.

So our prescription for brand UK is to foster creative anarchy with just enough structure to channel it.

This means investing  in  infrastructure, reversing  the run down of research and training for practical activities and build a culture of competing on the edge.

Inventing a pill to deliver “Science from first principles” would be handy too.

At the last brand network event we were discussing what makes Britain unique – what is the underlying essence of Brand UK?

In a fit of uncharacteristic prophecy I said – Misbehaviour. This was about 2 weeks before the riots kicked off.

It can perhaps be summarised by our unofficial national anthem. The one that starts “We don’t need no education”.

I was arguing that its the positive side of this streak of bloody mindedness – Wunt be Druv as they say around here – that is the source of the creativity that the rest of the world knows us for held in dynamic tension with the kind of precision operations that make things like Royal Weddings and trouping the colour possible.

My partner in crime in the brand network – - Mark Wing – has insisted that I come and defend this point of view at a special brand network event on Thursday at our usual haunt the ship in Fitzrovia.

You can sign up here This is an official Ecademy event btw given that the Brand Network is an Ecademy Club.

Of course if you can’t wait till then you can always debate the point here.

Last year we did some work for SEEDA looking at what it would take to build a world class workforce for the horticultural industry.

This meant talking to 30 or so growers, finding some good case studies of simple but effective practices and distilling out some basic principles of good practice suitable for smaller businesses. At the end of last year I published the report and case studies as a paperback.

Now I’ve added the evidence base – a review of current thinking on high performance work practices and what aspects of it are useful to small businesses generally based on the research and our own experience of running IT, training and horticultural businesses over a 30 year period. This produces a useful guide to companies in the process of growing that are having to start being a bit more deliberate in the way they manage their staff.

You can read some of the book here.

We had an interesting meeting led by David Amos at the Brand Network Meeting on Monday.

We asked ourselves what is it that captures the essence of Brand UK?

Inventiveness, creativity, high quality specialist manufacture like formula one, patents, music and institutions like the Royals, pageantry, the NHS and national trust. And what about the dark side of NEETS, binge drinking and the unofficial national anthem. The one that begins “We don’t need no education…..”

There’s no doubt that we think of ourselves as different. We have a tradition going back a thousand years of a laissez faire approach to life. You only need a director, a company secretary and £2 of issued shares to form a company – not £25k on deposit with the Government for 6 months. You need a proposer, a seconder and 10 assentors + £500 per constituency to fight a general election as a political party in the UK. Try doing that in continental Europe.  In the middle ages anyone  who escaped the land and survived undetected in a town for a year and a day became free.

I think – and tried to convince the group – that its this cultural bias towards getting away with things and denying central authority the right to license everything like they do in the EU gives us the freedom to be creative and to develop things organically and in a bottom up kind of way.

It also means that people are free to move from profession to profession here in a way they can’t do in Europe. In my first job I was dealing with a German engineering company who asked me if my Doctorate was in Engineering or Economics. My answer that it was in Biochemistry was literally incomprehensible to them.

I think this leads to the culture of free-wheeling creativity that is characteristic of brand UK.

To the rest of the world it’s misbehaviour. The Chinese certainly thought that Boris waving the flag with his jacket unbuttoned and David Beckham kicking a football into the crowd at the end of the Beijing Olympics constituted misbehaviour on a grand scale.

So what is our symbol of misbehaviour and creativity? David introduced us to the concept of the cricketer’s tea – an inspired mix of salted nuts and crisps pictured here.  Says it all really.

cricketers tea - brand UK?

Like lots of us, I have a certain amount of difficulty defining exactly what it is that I do.

Be reassured – if you think your life is too complicated to fit into an elevator pitch you’re not alone.  However one great thing about being an Ecademy member is that the blog page is always full of knowledgeable and clever people banging on about the latest practicalities in things Digital.

So two of these guys were having a chat about what one of them did and to prove a point the other put his ecademy profile into Wordle to see what he actually wrote about.

Hmm I thought – let’s put Alan Rae’s Profile into Wordle and see what we get.

I should add that I’ve been using wordle extensively on my current research project to find out what’s the most prominent concern of the respondents in qualititative answers.  Effectively it turns a load of text into a tag cloud reflecting the relative importance of each word according to how big the font is.

So here in a nutshell is what I’m all about . If you want to try it yourself you can find this free utility at wordle.net    It’s telling me I do Business Research.  That’s a relief for someone with a site called Howtodobusiness.com. At least I’m displaying a modicum of congruency by being on my own message. It’s surrounded mainly by things to do with our family horticultural business – so that’s encouraging too.

More anon.

Social Media for Real Businesses

Well I’ve finally got a published book with an ISBN number – (well its the second one really – there was always the Business Link’s Fast track to e-commerce published in 2002)

It’s called Social Media for Real Businesses and is there to help people who are a bit unsure about all this stuff how to use it to create the social proof that people look at when wondering who to buy things from.

It covers how to create your story, how to develop the digital collateral to back it up using tools like YouTube, Slide Share and Paper.li and how to get other people to talk about it in social media networks. And how to use twitter to tie it all together.

The book recognises that most of us are not selling to the twitterati – we want to sell real goods and services to real people that we meet or are introduced to. What we want from all this web malarky is ways for people to find us and find out what we’re good at so that when they meet us they take us seriously.

That’s what it covers and it’s based on our current business (which after 7 years has several online businesses ranging from Plants4presents to 1Man Brand) fortified with a long running research collaboration with several business schools into how businesses really market and sell, what are the reasons that people go on line and what are the special requirements of companies in supply chains and one man knowledge businesses.

You can check the book out here and read some of it for free.

Or if you’re already sold you can buy it directly from me here.