Historic blog from the frontline
A ready to go resource based on Charles Greens lessons after a successful exit in 2017
The Trials and Tribulations of Building a Global Business – The RFi Group Story
Founder at RFI Global
July 21, 2016
So, why am I writing this blog?
It’s probably best to start by saying, this is not a blog about how to build a global business or become a serial entrepreneur – if you want that, then you should probably follow Richard Branson or another genuinely global entrepreneur and success story. I certainly don’t see myself as an expert, just someone who has used up a lot of energy, luck and ridden a massively steep learning curve to get to where I am today – which is still, I hope, only part way through the journey.
The idea of this is to simply tell the story of the last 10 years, from deciding to start a company, the trials and tribulations of actually doing that, to now attempting to run a global business, across 40 markets (although some days it feels like I’m clinging on by my fingertips) and continuing to develop, grow and build it to where I know I want it to be. And to where I know it can be.
Over the past decade I know that I have made an enormous number of knee jerk and poorly thought through decisions, but fortunately, have also made some good judgement calls that have played out well and served the business fantastically. I have spent endless hours, days, nights, weeks and minutes agonising over what to do and when the decision has been quite clearly the wrong one, trying to react as quickly as possible to correct it. Sometimes my decisions have made things better, sometimes they have made things worse, and sometimes they have had no effect at all. I wanted to write a blog about those experiences – the good, the bad and the ugly, to perhaps in some way help others foolhardy enough to go down this path.
Based on the 20:20 ability of hindsight - this will be a series of thoughts and stories which started with sitting down in my spare bedroom with a phone, piece of paper and a pen with a vague idea of what I wanted to do (which I enthusiastically – and mistakenly – took for a business plan at the time), through to where I am in the journey so far.
RFi Group is a story of constant change, of how to fail quickly, learn how to never blame others, to face challenges and successes head on, to adapt as you progress. It’s a story of where I went wrong (sometimes repeatedly), how to pivot quickly, as well as a list of things I have learnt along the way that might help you in your own business or career. This is not a success story - far from it – this is a story of overcoming non-stop challenges, having an enormous amount of fun, being frequently exhausted and constantly energised by the business and our team and learning more than I ever imagined.
So – Post # 1
Why do it?
‘Starting your own business’ - the questions everyone asks - why do you do it and how do you actually do it? What do you need to be an entrepreneur, what are the key things you need to start a business?
The first and most important thing is don’t do it for money! Not only will you probably not see a pay check for months, maybe even years, but it’s really important to realise that money is a side product of success but it can never be the sole motivator - and here’s why…
The 5 critical things you need to start a business are:
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Passion: You absolutely have to have passion. Passion for your idea, passion for your solution, passion for the problem you’re trying to fix and passion to drive yourself and your team. Without passion, you don’t stand a chance.
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Resilience: Based on that passion you absolutely need resilience to overcome all the obstacles and challenges you will inevitably face. Unless you’re the next Steve Jobs (in which case, congratulations! :) resilience will beat creativity and genius any day of the week. On most days it’s going to feel like the whole world is against you, and is throwing everything at you - including the kitchen sink! Sorry to mix metaphors here - but you have to be able to duck and dive a bit. While everyone talks about an ‘appetite for risk’ when starting a business it’s actually much more important that you are pugnacious and love a good fight. Any start-up is going to be taking on the big boys, incumbents, industry titans etc and you need to develop a feisty nature that thrives on confrontation, loves being the little guy who relishes taking on the big guns and winning.
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Flexibility: Because your customer’s needs and wants are always changing, you need to constantly change and - again essential - truly be open to change. The ability to pivot is crucial to any business - standing still just means you’re getting left behind. One of the greatest advantages you have over the incumbents is being nimble, so make sure you maximise it. Whether it’s reacting to an opportunity, adapting a product or marketing message or defending yourself against a competitor, being flexible and nimble in all your thinking is a key advantage.
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Back yourself: People will always nay say you and tell you it’s a bad idea. As people always say; “Stay away from negative people, they have a problem for every solution.” Having said that, any entrepreneur needs a boundless optimism that is bordering on delusional. I say bordering on delusional because a ruthless pragmatism and level of self-honesty is also critical. When it’s not working, you HAVE to be able to call it, to pivot and to move on - when optimism becomes blind hope, bad things happen. So back yourself, but be self-aware as well.
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Finally - Have fun! Life as an entrepreneur is pretty full on - the endless hours, constant challenges, the mental and physical exhaustion, as well as the impact on your family and friends - none of this is exactly great. So if you’re not having fun (at least 51% of the time) why do it?
I once read Chinese fable that compared building and running a business to climbing a sheer rock face - most of the time you’re hanging on by your fingertips, every now and then you drag yourself further up, inch by inch. On good days, if you’re lucky, you find a tiny ledge to rest at briefly while all around you others are losing their grip and falling off and that’s it, that’s all there is - no one ever gets to the top. While that’s a fairly bleak way of looking at it, it’s realistic - so if you’re going to do it, buckle up for the ride. In my experience it absolutely should be like a rollercoaster; full on and exhilarating mixed with moments of sheer terror, it is not for the fainthearted. Don’t get me wrong - when it’s going well there is no better, more fantastic and satisfying feeling. While the rollercoaster comparison is obviously veering to the dramatic, the extreme highs and lows can be minimised and smoothed out with some careful planning and preparation - my next topic…
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
By Failing to Prepare You Are Preparing to Fail
Founder at RFI Global
July 26, 2016
Post #2 - By Failing to Prepare You Are Preparing to Fail
While this is a cliché, it’s a well-worn cliché for a reason - Planning, is an absolute must.
Whether it’s a tricky sales meeting, an after dinner speech, a conference presentation or an investor meeting, planning is everything. Did you know, a 7 year old's soccer team generally does more practice than most people do in business situations. It has always baffled me - why would you do that? You need to give yourself every possible chance to succeed. Over the years at RFi Group I’ve done lots of confronting and daunting presentations and even my most dreaded situations, (Live TV - I don’t think will ever get entirely comfortable with it!) have been relatively easy, and I emphasise the relativity. This is only because I have tried in advance to practice how I am going to react to every possible question, potential outcome or variation. I believe it’s possible, especially if you’re selling your own idea or product, to predict pretty much every possible response or question you might get and to work out in advance what your best answer is. Even better (and I tell the RFi team this all the time) if you’re going into a big meeting, think of the three things you absolutely don’t want to be asked – then work through how you would respond to those, practice your responses and I guarantee the meeting will always be easier than you have imagined. Plan, prepare and practice – the three key Ps. You simply can’t do too much of any of them.
Another tip - When you do practice, make sure that you practice out loud. Things often sound better or different in your head, to when you say them out loud. Building a business is great fun but enormously challenging – you will frequently fail and will have to learn from it each time BUT the one thing that is unacceptable and makes your life harder than it ever needs to be, is to fail because you didn’t prepare properly! Sometimes you only get one shot at a particular opportunity so don’t blow it by failing to prepare.
When you start a business, if you think it’s going to take 6 months to get any revenue in, then plan for no revenue for 12 months. If that doesn’t work, go back to the drawing board. If you think you might run into legal issues (which happens a lot with previous employers) then ask yourself, have you put some money aside to deal with it? Have you spoken to a lawyer about the best angle and likely outcome? Do you have a first customer or client lined up? What happens if they fall over? What’s your back up plan, or Plan B? What about a Plan C, or even Plan D? Trust me, especially at the start, you need at least a plan A to G! The more you have worked through the likely outcomes and how you will react to each one, the better. However when you’re first starting up don’t suffer planning paralysis. Once you think you have a relatively good handle on it – just get out into the market. The quickest and best way to build a product is to get an attempt out there so you can start to see as quickly as possible what works and what doesn’t work – which brings me to a minimum viable product, my next topic…
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Minimum Viable Product (the MVP)
Founder at RFI Global
July 28, 2016
Post #3 - Minimum Viable Product (the MVP)
If there’s only one book you read before you start, then “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries would be a good one. You can do all the planning and research in the world but unless you’re very lucky, getting the product exactly right first time just isn’t going to happen. So, what do you do?
Based on research; after seeing an opportunity and talking to potential customers, you should have a pretty good idea of what the product might look like – so, first things first, get your first version of the product out there (your MVP). Once you’ve done your planning and preparation don’t procrastinate – get it to market! What do people think? What do they like about it? What don’t they like about it? What can be improved on?
It is also absolutely essential to get a group of potential customers (even better if they’re actual customers) to create a feedback loop and you simply have to be honest with yourself and get them to be honest with you. People instinctively want to tell you nice things – they want to tell you what they like about it – it’s human nature. That’s great, but you have to find out what they don’t like about it – what isn’t any good, or can be improved on. What components does a competitor already offer? What is your point of differentiation? What features don’t make sense or add value? The quicker you can take on board the feedback, get a product back out into the market and start the feedback process again, the better. The really important part is to keep the feedback loop open – to have a permanent and continuous feedback loop so you can continually adapt your product or service to meet the changing and evolving needs of the market.
The most important word here, is Pivot. As you develop your initial product, as the market changes, as competitors start to imitate (imitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s still challenging especially if they have deep pockets) as clients change what they require – you will have to constantly pivot. Once you’ve got a product working, whatever you do, don’t lose the feedback loop – it’s essential to your growth.
I launched RFi Group in September 2006 and the basic product concept that now underpins our entire business globally, took until October 2007 to refine. However that product is still constantly being adapted and is evolving, as both our clients’ needs and the markets continue to evolve. Our product has been created and influenced by all of the following factors; an opportunity to fill a need in the market, the market changing (which in our case was the 2008 banking crisis - so a fairly huge change, as all our clients are banks!) a complacent incumbent, a competitor copying our model, clients’ needs continuously changing – but at the heart of it all, at the heart of our product’s constant growth, is a constant feedback loop and the ability to quickly make the call and to pivot or adapt.
From September ‘06 to October ‘07 while we were building the basics of our first product, did we have any revenue coming in? Yes - because we had an MVP that allowed us to bootstrap the business, which brings me to my next post – the value of Bootstrapping.
To bootstrap or not to bootstrap?
Founder at RFI Global
August 4, 2016
Post #4 - Bootstrapping
So, to bootstrap or not to bootstrap?
Firstly; what exactly is bootstrapping? And then, why should you take this route?
Bootstrapping simply refers to a business that uses all its revenue (every single cent) to reinvest in the business in order to fund its growth, as opposed to getting outside funding or seeking investors. I appreciate that the former is not always an option, especially with tech start-ups where there are large upfront costs, but, it is still worth considering if it’s possible…
The first caveat here is - Yes, I bootstrapped my business so am probably quite biased, but, what I wanted to talk about in this post was the advantages and disadvantages of bootstrapping.
First, the pros…
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Bootstrapping is great for getting a basic product off the ground and into the market quickly
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It means that while you’re still refining the product and getting feedback from customers, if you’re bootstrapping, you still have a revenue stream coming in to live on (in my case, with twins on the way, this was somewhat important!)
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Bootstrapping also teaches you how to manage cash-flow and to how to get the most value for every dollar you spend. Whether it’s an employee, marketing, office space or travel costs, it’s great for teaching you what accountants like to call, ‘fiscal responsibility’
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Bootstrapping also allows you to retain ownership of your business without diluting your shareholding - which, along with cash-flow, is probably one of the greatest advantage to it
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Finally, it allows you to really test whether or not your idea/ product is going to work
The cons…
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Bootstrapping a business reduces the speed with which you can scale up, quickly
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It limits the quality of the talent you can initially persuade to join your crusade
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The constant worrying over cash can lead to short term decision making and distract from building a business
Overall the benefits, in my opinion, greatly outweigh the negatives. In the early years, every time I was offered investment and thought about how I might spend it, I realised months later with the benefit of 20:20 hindsight, that there were significant challenges with the particular business strategy and it would have been a waste of the money, as well as unnecessarily diluting my share. The catch 22 is because of my obstinate refusal to take investment, there have also been a number of times where I’ve had to turn down opportunities to grow the business faster, because of a lacks of funds.
The beauty of bootstrapping is really in the harsh viability testing it provides for your product... and I deliberately use the word harsh, rather than fair. It is a harsh test and maybe there are some products that with a little investment could have got off the ground. Having said that the number of start-ups looking for investment just to stay afloat and pay off existing debt rather than to invest in growth, is a testament to the phrase “harsh but fair” when it comes to bootstrapping. At the end of the day, if ultimately you can’t create a basic product and convince someone to pay enough to make ends meet while you refine that product, then you should probably pivot and pivot quickly. So, how do you convince someone to take your product?
This brings me to the importance of sales… but first, you have to make sure that product is a painkiller, my next topic.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
You have to create pain killers, not vitamins
Founder at RFI Global
August 9, 2016
Post #5 create pain killers
When you’re building any product, you have to make sure there is a need for it.
At RFi Group we were both lucky and challenged by the fact that as we were developing our product for financial services in 2007, the global credit crisis hit and then ran for another 2-4 years, depending on your geographical location.
Having all your clients go through a massive crisis doesn’t really sound very helpful, but actually, it really helped our focus. As Warren Buffet famously said, ‘when the tide goes out we get to see who’s been swimming naked’. The crisis meant that we had to focus on delivering a low cost product that was delivering high value, it “must have” content with an exceptional client experience that differentiated it from our competitors and also, delivered it faster. Now, you could argue that you should be doing that at all times anyway and most disruptors - like us - use exactly that model to take on an incumbent or a group of incumbents, and they'd have a good point, but it’s amazing how many businesses launch a ‘vitamin’ product.
While the health industry would argue against this, although people sometimes want vitamins, they ALWAYS need pain killers. This is why pharmacies are recession proof. When you’re creating your product, you have to be focused on what problem you’re solving, what pain point you are helping with. If you’re not helping with a pain point, then unless you’re lucky enough to be launching in an economic boom, no one is going to be interested and, even more catastrophic, when the economic cycle turns down, you can end up in all sorts of trouble. Unfortunately at the moment we are facing global economic and political uncertainty and volatility resulting in constrained budgets, whether you’re a consumer, or a business customer. So here is a key fact:
People will always find money for what they have to have and what they need to have, and in tough times this is often at the expense of what they’d like, or it would be nice to have – so always, always, make sure you build a pain killer.
One of my first businesses was a b2b media business targeting high tech. In the late 90s when cash was sloshing around, we didn’t worry about our business model too much or our key points of differentiation, as the advertising dollars just kept rolling in (good times!). This went on for 4-5 years and who’s going to complain or look to closely when the money keeps rolling in? In the tech crash of 2000 we quickly discovered (far too late) that our magazine had too high a cost base, a fundamentally flawed cash-flow model and not enough differentiation with our competitors – This, in almost an instant, meant we became ‘nice to have’ and like a puff, we were gone (if 18 months of unmitigated stress and exhaustion can be described as a puff :).
The key is to make sure you are solving a pain problem and then, just as importantly, to keep a permanent feedback loop to make sure you keep on solving a pain problem. As problems change you also need to evolve so that you are continuously working as your clients’ pain killer. To do that, you have to make sure that you are tracking how your product is actually performing – I’m not talking a vanity metric either (more on that later) that only tells you what you want to hear.
So; focus on the problem, understanding the problem, providing a solution and then make sure you have a feedback loop that keeps you up to date with the problem as it evolves, so your product can evolve too. The next step is to convince your potential customers that your product is the ‘must have’ pain killer they have to have and for that, you need sales… my next topic.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Sales is a critical science, not an optional art form
Founder at RFI Global
August 16, 2016
Post #6
So, here’s my first disclaimer – there is a billion dollar software company called Atlassian who do not have a salesforce. They are the exception to the rule! Lots of other billion dollar software companies are trying to work out how to do it and failing – don’t make this mistake. You absolutely need someone to sell your product. This is vital for two reasons; 1) It brings in revenue and 2) It brings in feedback on how to improve it.
Here’s the thing about sales, it’s not a natural skill that you're either born with, or not. Despite some of the myths to the contrary, there is no such thing as the ‘gift of the gab’ or a natural salesperson. Sales is a science not some mystical art form – it is all about listening, not about talking and involves nothing more complex than a well-developed understanding of human psychology and lots and lots of practice. (I’m not saying it’s easy!) Yes, it is a skill that can be learnt, BUT if you are not a salesperson then don’t try to learn how to do it at the same time as starting a business – get a salesperson on board asap! Sales is NOT a cost – any decent salesperson should be able to more than cover their cost with the revenue and information they bring in. In the beginning, 50% cost-to-revenue is acceptable while you try and work out the product proposition, but it should pretty quickly get down to 20% and then to 15%.
Let’s be clear here – you don’t need to hand over the keys to your product – you probably know the product inside out and can explain it better than anyone – but, you do need someone whose skill is getting meetings, setting up appointments, running the sales part of the meeting, following up and – the obvious clincher – closing. Sales is a process and you need someone who knows how to run and manage that process.
If this is your skill set, great – if not, bring it in. If this is your skill set, then unless you’re an unusually talented person, you’re probably not a product person. Think Bill Gates and Paul Allen, or Steve Jobs and Steve Wosniak – whoever you partner with make sure that their skills compliment yours. There’s no point getting another version of yourself – you need to fill the skills gap you have.
Sales itself probably requires its own series of blogs – but the most important part, other than again planning and practicing, is enthusiasm. Whether you’re selling your MVP, your finished product, selling yourself to an investor, a bank, potential key team members – whoever – the one thing you have to have is enthusiasm. It’s a good rule of thumb that whoever you’re selling to is at best going to be 10% less enthusiastic than you, so, you do the maths: If you’re at 50% excitement the best they’re going to be at is 40%. It’s statistically impossible to be at greater than 100% but this is one time you have to try! If you don’t love you’re product and what you do, how on earth can you expect anyone else to? Enthusiasm, like attitude, is a little thing that goes a long way… which leads me to my next topic: Attitude.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Attitude is Everything
Founder at RFI Global
August 23, 2016
Winston Churchill also said “Attitude is a little thing, that goes a long way”.
Whether it’s a ‘can do’ attitude or a positive mental attitude, it’s important to remember that it’s crucial and not simply a ‘nice to have’ – the right attitude is a must have!
Stuff happens – simple as that. ALL THE TIME. What’s important is how you react when stuff happens, that will drive whether or not you will succeed. Every crisis, potential disaster, new competitor can also be a massive opportunity.
The story that the Chinese symbol for a crisis is a combination of the symbols for danger and opportunity, is actually an urban myth. As with most things Chinese, it’s much more detailed and complex than that. However, as a motif for building a business - it’s perfect.
The truth is, you will constantly be surprised and confounded by a multitude of events and at every twist and turn, you have to be able to ask yourself “Ok, how can I turn this to my advantage? How can I pivot, so it works for me rather than against me?” Some of the time you’ll just need to figure out what you learnt from it and move on, but more often than not, you should be able to find the silver lining and make it work to your advantage.
At RFi Group, most of our more successful decisions have been reactions to adversity. In the early years, it was a big competitor directly taking on our business model that made us focus on developing a different customer service experience, to wow new clients and keep existing ones.
Our 98% year-on-year renewal rate is now one of our key metrics and every interaction with our clients is tracked against it.
In another instance, a local competitor decided to compete directly and undercut us, so we were forced to expand our proposition and enhance the value-add for our clients. Our global media business that was born out of this, now accounts for 25% of our global revenue, as well as providing an excellent branding and marketing tool. The right attitude - is gold. It’s as essential for you as the team leader, for the team itself, and for the organisation as a whole.
Calvin Coolidge once said: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” Over the past ten years, I have learnt, that persistence and determination in the face of all odds, are the twin children of the right attitude.
So, how do you create a team with a winning attitude and lead them? My next post ‘Building the right team’ will seek to answer exactly that.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
How to build the right team for fast growth
Founder at RFI Global
August 30, 2016
The famous business researcher Jim Collins says that the most important thing for any leader is to get the right people on the bus first and only then, work out where it’s going. (Check out his book, Good to Great).
At RFi Group we know that once we get the right people on the bus, the bus just takes off (and at a stratospheric pace) but it’s fair to say that we’ve learnt the hard way to employ for attitude (over experience).
Let’s be honest – everyone wants to employ for attitude but every now and then along comes someone with so much relevant and great experience that you throw the rule book out the window and even if you have a tiny little voice nagging away at your sub-conscience, or tiny little tell-tale signs that should have red flags all over them, you optimistically ignore them because of this fantastic experience that they seem to have.
So, here’s a simple fact – people will never change. You can improve their skill set, teach them how to do things, but you can never change their personality and therefore, their attitude. The phrase ‘one bad apple’, is terrifyingly appropriate in a small business when you employ the wrong person. The ripple effect of their negativity and no-can-do attitude quickly builds into an unstoppable tsunami that, if you’re not careful, can destroy the culture you have so carefully created. In the last 10 years, this has happened to us 5 times – each time it has had a catastrophic impact and each time, in a moment of honesty, I’ve had to admit that the warning signs were there in the first interview.
Remember that no one is ever as good as they pretend to be in an interview, so if you have even the tiniest doubt, listen to it!
So, what do you look for to help you build the right team? Entire books have been written about how to employ the people you want to and how not to make mistakes, so here’s a tip – when you get it wrong and you will as a matter of course, then don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater i.e. just because the person was wrong, it doesn’t mean you don’t need someone with that kind of background in that kind of role. The worst thing you can hear from a struggling business is that “oh we employed someone to do that crucial role once, but it didn’t work out so we didn’t bother again.”
At RFi Group we focus on getting people who love an absolutely vertical learning curve and to be out of their comfort zone all the time. Sir Dave Brailsford the Principal of the cycling team, Team Sky, says, “I have never come across anyone in the top 2 percent in the world, who operates within their comfort zone.” The problem is, that only an idiot sitting in an interview with fast growth awards all over the walls would say they don’t like a vertical learning curve and being out of their comfort zone all the time. We’ve discovered that about 50% genuinely do and 50% absolutely don’t. Remember if you’ve got a fast growing business, then everyone in the team is going to be going through not only a massive learning curve, but also, pretty rapid career progression – its relatively possible to fill a role (just ask a recruitment consultant) and to fill it with someone who can step up again in 6 months and maybe again in 12 months, but can they do it again in 18 months and again in 24? Only if they’ve got the right attitude. So, my advice for any fast growing business, employ people who absolutely love being outside their comfort zone, all the time. If you can get the right team, with the right attitude, people who genuinely love being outside their comfort zone, then that is absolute gold.
“Pursuit of excellence has to be relentless – people underplay the amount of time it takes to be the best in the world at anything. It cannot and should not ever be comfortable because the moment you feel comfortable, you stop challenging so you stop improving.”
So, now you have the right team, all you have to do is lead them… My next topic.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Leadership - infectious enthusiasm coupled with ruthless pragmatism
Founder at RFI Global
September 6, 2016
I was once asked in an interview how I defined leadership and I said: infectious enthusiasm coupled with ruthless pragmatism.
I should apologise to the real Ted Turner ( founder of CNN) and the fictional Frank Underwood ( House of Cards) - both of whom I stole parts of this from but I’ve yet to come across a better definition. ( As an aside I’d also like to stress that there’s plenty that the fictional Frank Underwood does that I absolutely don’t agree with :)
I am a firm believer however, that one of the most important jobs as a leader has to be to create enthusiasm, and that enthusiasm has to be infectious. Your team must be as passionate and determined as you, or you’re going to feel very lonely pretty quickly and as your organisation grows, that infectious enthusiasm has to spread throughout. There’s nothing more disheartening than a passionate leader with a lukewarm team – it just doesn’t work. At the same time, the leader has to stay grounded in reality. It’s no good creating this incredibly positive team that refuses to be defied by the odds, if you’re not also able to recognise when you need to pivot or change tack. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, that’s an easy and obvious decision, but more often than not, it isn’t. When you and your team have poured all your energy and passion and creativity into finding a solution and it just isn’t working, it’s your job as the leader to call it and also re-energise everyone again. Often this can be met with a cry of “but we’re so close” or “we’re almost there”. Subjectivity, or being too closely involved in a project, can create cognitive dissonance i.e. a refusal to accept or see the obvious truth. It can be difficult, but it’s your job to remain objective and it’s essential that you know when to call it which is where the ‘ruthless’ pragmatism comes in.
It’s also your job to notice when a team member isn’t cutting it or gelling with the rest of the team. In this instance it’s imperative you move as quickly as possible. As I said in an earlier post, the ripple effect of the wrong person in a small organsiation can quickly build into a tsunami. As a leader you can’t shy away from the difficult calls… but if you’re worried then just think - what will be worse? If it’s down to having a difficult conversation with someone, versus watching your entire business go up in smoke, because you didn’t act? Have the difficult conversation. Put like that it’s a no brainer and even the most difficult conversation becomes relatively straightforward.
Something we do at RFi Group before anyone is hired, is a final ‘cultural interview’, which consists of a general chat with three or four junior and senior people from across the business, to see if we all think this new person is a ‘good cultural fit’. There’s no agenda or way of preparing – it’s just a simple chat to see if they fit. When the answer is “no” then whatever our thoughts originally were, we have to go with it, even though failing a cultural interview is often the most confronting and upsetting for the proposed candidate.
So who is in charge of creating this company culture? Well put simply, as a leader, you are! You are in charge of both the company culture and the momentum of the business (both crucial topics I’ll come on to). Your actions will set the culture. People don’t just follow leaders, they emulate them. Your team will naturally copy your manner and behavior, so make sure, above anything else, you behave in the way you want your team to behave and you treat them as you would want to be treated.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
How the blame game kills fast growth and innovation
Founder at RFI Global
September 21, 2016
It’s commonplace nowadays to hear that you need to ‘fail often’ and ‘fail quickly’ – mainly thanks to Google and Silicon Valley. While to a degree this is true, as a startup, you don’t want a culture of failure. If all you do is fail, then sooner rather than later, you’ll be bankrupt. Rather than failing quickly, what you need to do is reinvent how you think about failure and more importantly, how you deal with blame.
Failure is just a process of evolution. Evolution is not a simple straight line of progress, but nature trying out many different variations, learning from these, keeping the good bits, the marginal gains and improving on the bits that don’t work well. This is, in essence, exactly how a business should grow as well; by putting a product out there, creating a feedback loop and constantly adapting the product to meet the changing needs from that feedback loop. However, none of this works if you have a traditional corporate view of failure.
At every company meeting we have at RFi Group, I post a picture that says: 'To err is human but to blame someone else shows management potential' - then we put a huge red cross through it saying 'This is NOT the RFi way!'
Mistakes happen for three main reasons: Human error, process error or system error. The first one occurs when someone tries to do something quickly without having the time to think it through in detail. THIS IS OK! It’s almost always quicker to try something, get it out there, work out what needs changing and get it back out there, rather than to have endless management meetings trying to work out what the problems might be. Human error also occurs when a team is working long and hard hours, they are tired and therefore make mistakes. Both these types are fine, and are a symptom of fast growth. Process failure happens because a company is growing fast and trying new things – either the process doesn’t exist yet, or the current process no longer works because things are developing too quickly. System failure happens for the same reason because the company can’t scale up quickly enough to keep up with its growth. All of these are symptoms of fast growth and are good reasons for mistakes to happen.
What’s critical, is that the team are able to spot “failures” and importantly alert everyone to them, without worrying about whose fault it was or who will get the blame. As soon as the mistake is spotted and announced, two things happen – Firstly, the mistake doesn’t start compounding and causing bigger and bigger issues to deal with (think of the Toyota kappa system), secondly, as soon as more than one person is looking at the issue, as soon as more than one brain is trying to solve it, the time it will take to resolve has been exponentially sped up. It is crucial that every team member feels that irrespective of the cause of the mistake, they should instantly be able to call out when they see it, without any fear of blame.
Over the last decade we have employed a number of people with a degree of experience from large corporates at a senior level – some of them have worked out well and about 6 or so haven’t. What those 6 had in common was that as soon as something went wrong, their first instinct was not to fix it, but to blame someone else. I cannot emphasise enough, how bad this is for a fast growing business! While the finger pointing game is going on, two bad things are happening 1) no one is fixing the mistake and 2) some poor customer (who doesn’t care whose fault it is but just wants it fixed) is left hanging. If your business is expanding, growing, evolving, all of which it should be - then you should be making mistakes almost constantly. Making mistakes means you’re trying new things constantly, trying different ways of doing things continuously to see if they’re better. If every time someone makes a mistake they get blamed, then pretty quickly mistakes will stop happening as people stop trying to continually improve things, or worse, they’ll be buried underground and the life span of your business just got a lot shorter. If you encourage the entire team at all levels to try new things and when they don’t work - which they won’t about half the time - you learn from the experience, praise the team for trying and move on with the learning taken on board, it is then that the lifespan and success of your company just grew.
To make sure that no one plays the blame game you have to create the right culture, a culture of marginal gains and continuous innovation – my next topic.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
The importance of marginal gains in a culture of innovation and fun
Founder at RFI Global
September 27, 2016
If property is all about location, location, location, then a fast growing business is all about culture, culture, culture. So, who is in charge of deciding the culture? You are!
Most businesses meander along and then after a while realise that they have a certain 'culture' - if that culture isn’t right, they then have the mammoth task of trying to change it. I honestly can’t stress enough how important I think it is that you focus on the culture you want, right from the get go.
...Why?
Culture is what defines your business. It’s how clients and customers see you and equally importantly, it’s how your team, and potential team members see you. Humans are social creatures and like to socialise in tribes – dynamic, resourceful, ambitious people like to work with like-minded people, so if that’s the kind of person you want to attract then you need to ensure you have the right culture to attract them.
If you want a culture of fast growth then you have to have a culture of continuous innovation. As I said in my last blog, you have to empower the team to be able to try things at every level without fear of failure or blame. When this works you get a series of marginal gains. People often think that innovation is about major step change but it isn’t. Innovation is about continuous improvement – it’s about a constant series of marginal gains, about always seeing yourself as a work in progress. If across your business the entire team is focused on making a continual series of marginal gains (without fear of blame when they don’t work) then when you combine all those marginal gains, you have an exponential effect and a culture of innovation and continuous improvement.
At the same time the culture has to come from the top - it’s no good preaching one thing and behaving entirely differently yourself. You have to remember when you run a business – you are always watched. This is especially important when thinking about your cultural values. The best way to think about cultural values is to imagine a new team member in a situation that they have never been in before, or have had no training in - and they have to make a critical decision on the spot. What should they do? If you’ve got it right, then they should think about the cultural values, apply them to the situation and let the values guide their decision making. If you have clearly communicated the cultural values, then this is what will happen.
So, who decides the values? You and your team. Values that are handed down like the Ten Commandments have limited success. At RFi Group we started with the assumption that we were going to wow the customer. We didn’t know how as we didn’t know what the business model was, but form the very start, that was our goal and that was what guided our decisions. Once the business had got a footing we sat down as a team and discussed what the values were, how we were going to communicate them and how we were going to constantly reinforce them. Personally, I would try and avoid anything that sounds like it was written by a management consultant! Also try and make them fun as well as easy to remember.
At RFi Group our values are encapsulated in the Disney cartoon character – the Roadrunner. Roadrunner is smart, lean, dynamic, fast, clever and the clincher, it wins - beating the Wile E. Coyote every time. Each month we have the Roadrunner Awards where every team member across the business is encouraged to nominate anyone who has helped them in the month or has exemplified any of the core values. Each month at the end of month drinks we read out every nomination across the business as well as the four or five winners. As well as allowing us to recognise every team member who has had a great month, this also reinforces the values in a fun way.
The other reason the right culture is important is that you want your team to be dedicated, hardworking, committed and generally awesome – so you need to make sure that where they come to work and spend most of their time, is a fantastic place!
Birthday’s off, open plan offices, cafes, table tennis tables – whatever it is, your team is going to spend a lot of time in their workplace so make it as great as possible. We have a cultural committee made up of people throughout out the business at different seniority levels, a confidential, anonymous (if you want to be) suggestion box in the kitchen, a best place to work officer, competitions, a library, charitable partnerships where we all take part in giving back to the community and a host of other things, all suggested by the team.
One cool one is that, instead of those clichéd motivation posters which are the curse of corporate offices, we decided to adorn our walls with the work of the team. Every 6 months everyone submits their favourite photos, we all vote and the best ones are blown up and framed to decorate the office and meetings rooms. All of this makes it a great place to be and a great place to work, but the moment when the culture really comes to the fore, is the cultural interview. Everyone who comes to work at RFi Group has to have a cultural interview, before being employed, which is essential in hiring the right people. (See my post on the right team from three weeks ago).
When you combine the right team with a culture of continuous innovation then you have pure gold and you can take some moonshots (my next topic).
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Why you need to take moonshots
Founder at RFI Global
October 4, 2016
Moonshots are crucial for any business.
When JFK said ‘We’re going to land a man on the moon’ NASA had no idea how, but they now had a clear goal to focus on.
I always compare moonshots ( or “big hairy audacious goals” as Jim Collins like to call them) to trying to climb to the summit of a new mountain. When you start out, you only know where you want to get to, without any idea of how you’re actually going to get there. In fact, you can barely even see it in the distance. First you trek to the bottom of the mountain where you set up base camp, next you work out how to get to Camp #2. It’s not until you’re on your way to Camp #2 that you start to work out where Camp #3 is and how to get there. The same method continues with getting to Camp #3, then working out where Camp #4 is and how to get there. All the time, as you move from camp to camp, you are getting fitter, more acclimatised and better at climbing until eventually - after an exhausting but exhilarating climb - you reach the summit… and when you do you can’t quite believe it, especially when you look back down to see how far you have come, and then - just as you start to feel a sense of achievement, you see another new, even bigger mountain in the distance that you didn’t know existed until you got to this summit and off you go again.
This is what I think about when I think about moonshots. Moonshots are important not just to focus your team, but because your moonshots are what get you closer to your vision. Think Elon Musk and colonising Mars - his first moonshot was to make a reusable rocket; or, Jeff Bezos making Amazon the global everything store - but his first moonshot was a global e-book store. Moonshots should be big, they should be ambitious and they should be audacious. If you aim for something that is 10% better or 20% better, then that’s all you’ll get to. If you aim for something that’s 10 times bigger or better, then even if you only get close, you’ll have still achieved previously unimaginable things.
RFi Group’s first moonshot was to grow a business to $10 million in ten years ( it took six), then to have operations in 40 markets by 2020 ( we hit that one this year :). Every time we take a moonshot we have to look at ourselves and go “Seriously? Can we really do this? Is this really possible?” and that’s what a moonshot should be - something that feels like you’re dreaming because you have no idea how you’re going to get there - just an unwavering desire to get there.
As important as a moonshot is, it’s no use by itself. You have to have a series of smart goals that will help you get there, that have to be specific, measurable, attainable and realistic. While these goals are still stretch goals ( easily attainable goals aren’t goals) the difference is, you know what these are and what you need to do to achieve them. At RFi Group we’ve always had two key specific measurable goals: the first, is a 98% client renewal rate, so that 98% of customers renew as customers every year. The best in market we could find for a b2b provider when we started, was 75%, so this was and is our first stretch smart goal. Once we had the building block of 98% of our business renewing, we then looked at our annual growth. At RFi Group this is a simple metric of 50% year-on-year and this is our second smart goal. When you consider any new product, service offering, new market, JV or strategic initiative, if you are always looking at it through the lens of “Does this help us grow 50%?” Or, “Does it help us renew 98%?” then the conversation is always pretty simple - either it does or doesn’t.
Although there are lots of supporting metrics behind them, these are the two key smart goals or metrics, that we use to run our business – their simplicity and their governing ability to overrule all discussion, mean that there is no one on the entire team who isn’t aware of them and doesn’t consider anything without referring to them. These two key smart goals are the ones that have helped us so far to achieve our moonshots ( along with the right team, culture and our focus on marginal gains)… Fingers crossed we continue to do so - which brings me to my nest topic, tracking the right metric.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Team Sky shows why you have to track the right metric
Founder at RFI Global
October 11, 2016
So, you’ve got the right team, a great culture, some big moonshots and clear smart goals, but how do you measure performance? Which metric do you track?
As an intelligence business, we spend a large amount of time helping our clients track the metrics that enable them to understand how their business is performing. But how do we actually do it? To be honest, we spent a huge amount of time at the start and for a number of years working out how NOT to do it!
Simplicity here is key and making sure you have the right metric. I always like to think of Sir Dave Brailsford and Team Sky. When he announced in 2009 that he was going to put together a British cycling team that would win the Tour de France within five years, everyone laughed. Well, he did it in three with Sir Bradley Wiggins in 2012, then with Chris Froome in 2013, 2015 and 2016.
During the tour, every pro cycling team analyses every single piece of data they can, which means all the Tour de France teams have exactly the same data on their riders, but when Chris Froome was accused falsely of suspicious results in 2015, Team Sky released the key metric they use to track him. At the time Dave Brailsford said it was like lifting up the bonnet of an F1 car to reveal the engine – a sport with a similar focus on tracking the right data. The point wasn’t that the other teams didn’t have the required data or metric, it was that they didn’t know which was the correct one to be tracking in order to produce a winner. Think of the UK 2015 election where the polls said that Ed Milliband had a good chance. When with hindsight they looked at the surveys, they realised that although people said they were going to vote for him, they also said they didn’t think he would be a good prime minister or trust him to run the economy. It’s knowing which question to ask and which metric to track that is important.
At RFi Group we have one key performance metric - a 98% renewal rate. Each year we aim, as a minimum, to renew 98% of our customers. We managed to do this from the start but it took almost 5 years to work out which key question and metric enabled us to predict - with any degree of accuracy - whether or not we were going to be successful at this. To be honest, as a business that specialises in using data to provide insights we were a little slow off the mark at analysing our own data. Initially we were so delighted to manage a 98% renewal rate that the thinking was “If ain’t broke don’t fix it!” This approach is clearly limited in its effectiveness and longevity! Once we started to analyse the data, the amount of trial and error before we hit on the right question was significant and other than using machine learning, there’s really no way around this.
Now there are a large number of contributing metrics we track on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to ensure we stay on track for 98% and although all of those have been tested for correlation, there is one key question which has a far greater correlation than others and this is the one we religiously track. We know through extensive testing that client satisfaction has only marginal bearing or relevance on likelihood to renew, so satisfaction for us, is almost purely a vanity metric. It’s important you avoid these – vanity metrics allow you to feel good about your business without giving you any real indication of how’s its actually performing. Time and time again businesses get into trouble and the ExCo team are shaking their heads going “But we get a great score on satisfaction/ recommendation/ Facebook likes” etc. That’s because these are vanity metrics – you have to track metrics that genuinely tell you how your business is performing, not metrics that just make you feel good. Unfortunately, the only way to identify the right question and metric is continual testing and correlation analysis. Once you’ve got the right metric to track, then you need to ensure you are setting targets that drive optimum performance. Which brings me to my next topic – Setting targets.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Always aim to shoot the gap
Founder at RFI Global
October 18, 2016
“World class performance comes by striving for a target just out of reach but with a vivid awareness of how the gap might be breached. Over time through constant repetition and deep concentration the gap will disappear only for a new target to be created just out of reach again.” Matthew Syed, UK Olympian.
I would love to be to say that we always hit our stretch targets at RFi Group but that simply isn’t true - we hit them most of the time, but sometimes, we miss them. However, by setting ourselves stretch targets, even when we narrowly miss them, we are still performing at the absolute upper limits of our abilities.
The point of a stretch target is that you stretch to reach it. By definition, once you reach it it’s human nature to relax, ease back and pat yourself on the back for a job well done. I’m always mystified by people who say they’ve hit their target and they still have 2 months of the year to go - clearly your target wasn’t ambitious enough - it wasn’t enough of a stretch! If you aim to grow by 10% you’ll grow by 10%, but if you aim to grow by 50% or 60% or 75%, then even though you may or may not get there, you’ll probably get pretty close. The point is, unless you aim to grow at 50% or 75% you’ll never even get near it. The difference between a moonshot and a stretch target is that a moonshot will take a number of years and you have no idea to begin with how you’ll get there. A stretch target is a stretch but you have 90% of an idea of how to get there and what you need to do to bridge the gap and to execute.
At RFi Group our stretch target each year is 50% year-on-year growth. Everyone knows the story of the rice farmer, the emperor and the grains of rice on a chessboard (http://www.singularitysymposium.com/exponential-growth.html) and I’ve lost count of the times and of the number of people who have told me that you just can’t keep growing at 50% year-on-year! I was told this in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and every year since. The funny thing is, that for 10 years now we have managed to do it and this is mainly down to the goal of setting it as a target.
It’s amazing, but once the conversation at the start of each year is focused on “how do we grow 50%?” it doesn’t take long for enough ideas to be generated to give us a good idea of how we’re going to do it, how we’re going to stretch just out of reach and bridge the gap. Intuitively you would think that as a company grows bigger by revenue, to grow by the same percentage each year, becomes harder. But we’ve found, that the opposite is true. As we’ve grown in size, our capabilities have too, our financial and human resources, our collective creativity, our ambition and the number of opportunities in front of us have all grown too - so in a weird way, it almost becomes easier each year to sit down and work out how to grow 50% year-on-year. Sometimes we just miss it, sometimes we’re just ahead, but overall we have averaged it every year for a decade. I am absolutely confident that if we had set ourselves a target of 25% year-on-year growth then we would have worked just as hard but only achieved that. If you’re wondering why we didn’t set ourselves a 75% year-on-year target then other than giving all the team stress induced heart attacks, remember a stretch target must be ‘striving for a target just out of reach but with a vivid awareness of how the gap might be breached.’ Frankly a 75% growth target would be way out of reach and we would have no idea of how to bridge the gap!
For RFi Group our stretch target is 50% year-on-year growth but it doesn’t matter what your stretch target is – whether its growth focused or not. While from the outside, it might look like fluke or luck, from the inside you know that if you set a clear, simple goal, one that is just out of reach, you get an ambitious team to focus on achieving that goal and you make every decision based on whether or not it is going to help you achieve that goal, then it is perfectly possible to bridge that gap and to get there. As soon as you get there what - apart from celebrating - is the first thing that you do? Set another stretch target!
What’s important is that your target is directly linked to what you want to try and achieve with the business, it is a clear simple target that everyone is across; it guides your decision making, it is constantly communicated and it is always celebrated when you achieve it or even when you get close. Which brings me to my next topic - how is it best to communicate?
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
When it comes to communication the answer is… you can never do enough!
Founder at RFI Global
October 26, 2016
Firstly, a disclaimer - anyone at RFi Group reading a post from me on how best to communicate will probably at this point be falling off their chair with laughter. Despite my best intentions, I’m not great at it! I have to stress this is absolutely not due to lack of effort, but more simply when you’re growing really fast it’s very hard to communicate effectively, especially across disparate geographic areas. Well, at least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it :).
So, the first question really has to be, how often should you communicate? The answer is, and here is the first law of communication... as far as your team is concerned you can never communicate enough!
At the same time, you don’t want your team permanently stuck in endless communication meetings, so, there are some simple steps to follow which I have found have worked for me over the years:
1. Formalise the communication - This sounds wholly unnecessary when you’re a team of three of four people in a tiny room, where you can all reach out and touch one another but that’s exactly when you need to start. Firstly, it’s good to get into the habit as early on in your business as possible. Secondly, you will be amazed when you’re growing, at how little time you actually have to sit down and think about these kind of issues. So, start with a weekly catch up - as a bare minimum - on a Monday morning. First thing Monday is deliberate, it’s a great way to remind everyone of the little wins achieved the week before and also set out the goals for that coming week. Do it over coffee and bagels so everyone gets a chance to catch up informally, as well and warm their brains up for the week ahead – you can’t expect everyone to walk in first thing Monday and instantly be “on”, so, help them.
2. Repeat every communication - It generally takes about 15-20 times for a team to get across everything that’s being communicated, so make sure you are consistent and repetitive!
3. Keep it to relevant people - As your team grows it’s important to constantly revisit who should be attending meetings. As you grow and people’s roles become less generalised and more specialised, be ruthless in ensuring that only the key people attend meetings. The definition of key is ‘must be involved in the decision making’. If they are just there to be kept in the loop, then thy don’t need to be there and could be better spending their time doing something else. At the end of the week at RFi Group, each team leader writes a brief weekly update on what milestones they have achieved that week. These are sent to me and collated into a single ‘Weekly Update’ document and then redistributed back to the ExCo team. This ensures everyone (who needs to be) is across everything and the weekly team meetings on Monday morning, allow for any issues to be raised.
4. Keep it short and keep it small - 30 mins should be sufficient for most meetings and for most internal communication. Generally, I only allow an hour if the host can make the case. Forcing meeting hosts and presenters to make the case for an hour meeting almost instantly reduces most meetings to 30 minutes! Also, keep them as small as possible - think the Pizza Size strategy – Amazon’s Jeff Bezos divides teams into a group that can all be fed with just two pizzas, his ideal size for a meeting. Smaller groups provide more discussion, more focus and faster decision making.
Having said all this, if you are growing as quickly as we have at RFi Group, then you will need to almost constantly restructure the business, reporting lines, communication lines, processes, etc so team meetings are an essential first step in communicating this – note that they are a first step, not the only step.
Key communication messages need to be reaffirmed again and again. Every single team meeting at RFi Group begins with the company vision being read out - this takes at most 20 seconds - but it ensures that the whole team are focused on the same goal, at all times.
So restructuring, a constant side effect of fast growth and, my next post topic...
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Like the Melbourne Cup, if your business is under complete control - you’re not going fast enough
Founder at RFI Global
November 1, 2016
“If everything is under control then you’re probably not going fast enough.” Marco Andretti - American auto racing driver.
If a business is growing fast, it should always be running ahead of the existing processes and therefore, if the aim of the business is to always be growing fast, you should permanently be in a state of chaos – make sense?
It’s hard enough to communicate in a permanent state of chaos, but how on earth do you structure everything so it still actually works? The first thing to do is to adapt the right approach, i.e. to accept that if you’re doing well, then the structure is always going to be - at best - a patchy solution that constantly need attention. It’s also never going to work perfectly, so when it doesn’t, just deal with it and don’t throw all your toys out the pram - that doesn’t help anyone. The key thing to remember is the structure is always fluid, until such time as your growth slows to 10-15% year-on-year, at which point you can fill in lots of little charts and boxes :). As a general rule, the amount of structure and process should always be running slightly behind the appropriate amount for the current size of the business. It’s much better to err towards chaos, than to go the other way and err towards too much process and rules, which can quickly kill any fast growing business.
When there are 3 or 4 of you in a room together all the time, the structure - like the communication - doesn’t matter that much, but again now is the time to start practicing getting it right, when it’s more of a ‘nice to have’. As you grow beyond four, to five, to ten and then ten, to fifteen and then fifteen to thirty, you’ll need to update the structure (and when the pace speeds up, you’ll wish you planned it months ago). The good thing is, there are often many warning signs that things are spinning out of control; projects or work being done and no one knows who made the decision to do it in the first place or why, things slipping through the cracks or in some cases gaping holes and everyone assuming that someone else was looking after it, invoices not being sent out or not collected ( a serious one) , people being moved from one role to the next, or being employed and when they turn up none knows who employed them, or why?! Key things like the business name, or strategy, or logo being changed and you only find out after, or even worse when you're actually in front of a client… all of these I am proud to say we have done at RFi Group, some many times and also many others I haven’t listed here for fear of embarrassment! All these mean that it’s time to sit down look at the business and work out the optimum structure for the time being.
( NB - At RFi Group we gave up designing organograms because it took too much time and they were out of date too quickly.)
When this happens, you will invariably have to deal with some ego issues. When you are small, people out of necessity must wear many hats - but as you grow, roles become busier and more specialised and the team needs to focus more and more on specific skills or areas. Logically this represents career growth and advancement and everyone should be happy, but human nature often doesn’t work like that – humans develop ownership and don’t like giving things up! Usually if you give people the choice of choosing they will naturally soft select i.e. choose the things they are best at and which you as a business want them to focus on. Sometimes however, people are weirdly obsessed with an area for which they have no affinity of ability and then you need to have an honest or hard conversation.
Remember, as long as its fluid and constant, then with all the changes sooner or later everyone will be happy and the way to do that is to keep growing – so how do you do that? By focusing on opportunities - my next topic.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Why you need an echidna strategy
Founder at RFI Global
November 15, 2016
Back in 2012/13 we encountered a weird problem at RFi Group… We were drowning in opportunities, the toughest decisions being how on earth were we supposed to decide which ones to go with and which ones to leave? Steve Jobs famously once said that the key to success was to focus on a single opportunity, well... easier said than done!
So, what did we do? Firstly, we asked some of our early stage mentors for help, tried various strategies but still kept getting asked to do things which although were related to what we do, were not exactly what we do. The problem with saying “no” was that the revenues for each one of these opportunities was eye watering in comparison to what we normally did, so we figured we only had to land one of these deals for it to be worthwhile (and what can I say, large dollar signs are very seductive :). At the end of 2012 we hadn’t won a single deal and when we looked back, we realised that all we had done was chew up a huge amount of time working on these deals, putting the pitches together… all for nothing. As always, with the joy of hindsight, we knew at the time these opportunities weren’t really our core business, but as I said, the dollar signs were just too tempting. So, how could we make sure not to make the same mistakes again?
Enter Jim Collins and the Hedgehog Theory ( see Good to Great). In Aesop’s classic fables, the hedgehog is constantly hunted by the clever, fast, sleek and cunning fox, but every time, it just rolls up into a ball and avoids its peril. i.e. if you only have one strategy, it really doesn’t matter, as long as it’s effective. Jim Collins turns this into a business learning – You’ll have seen something similar to this on LinkedIn and/or Facebook where you have three circles in a Venn diagram; one represents what brings in most, or all, of your revenue; another, what you love doing and the third, what you can be the best in the world at – this last one, is very important. It’s not enough to be ‘good’ at it, you have to believe you can be the best in the world at it. Whatever sits in the middle of this Venn diagram is your hedgehog strategy, it’s what you as a business do and if any opportunity presents itself you have to give it the hedgehog test i.e. “does this opportunity, if successful, sit in the middle of our hedgehog strategy?”.
As we founded RFi Group in Australia - where they don’t have hedgehogs - we decided to call this our Echidna Strategy ( or what the Englishman in me likes to call “an Australian hedgehog” :). Every opportunity we receive is run through the echidna test, to ensure it fits. So, how have we done? In 2013 we wasted months responding to thirteen large opportunities that sat outside our Echidna Strategy. In 2014 we developed our Echidna Strategy further and responded to only one, and in 2015 none. Over the years, although it’s been a huge personal challenge not to try and leap on every opportunity that has come our way, I have learnt that our Echidna Strategy serves us well.
So, my advice is, work out what your Hedgehog (or Echidna) Strategy is and stick to it – that way you can ensure all your efforts and focus are spent on developing your core business and not getting side-tracked.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
How to find opportunities to grow your product and geographic reach
Founder at RFI Global
November 22, 2016
The easy answer to how to grow, is to sell more - either by selling your existing products to more customers, or by creating more products which in the latter’s case also increases cost. At some point though, you do need to think more strategically.
When you’re launching a business, it’s incredibly difficult to get that initial product uptake. One of the ways you can make life easier is to focus on an area where there is a gap, an unfulfilled need. Not only does this increase your chance of success, but it also means you are unlikely to be going directly head-to-head with any large competitors. There are lots of small under-served segments that large incumbents either ignore or decide are not worth it with their model - perfect for a small, niche, disruptor in other words!
Once you have a firm grasp of this segment or niche, the logical thing to do is look at adjacent niches or segments - these can be adjacent geographies/ markets/ products, etc. The important thing is, you can leverage your expertise, your brand and possibly your existing client base, to make everything slightly easier...
At RFi Group we started in market research, then moved into bench-marking and data analytics, then to advisory services, to events, to media, then TV. At each stage, the next step was a relatively minor logical step into an adjacent area where we already had a lot of the knowledge, expertise, clients and were able - in advance - to work out our key points of differentiation. Similarly, with our geographic growth, we literally moved from one market to the next, almost according to the map. Factored into our thinking was also which markets had the most obvious gap, so in the early stages we focused more on emerging markets rather than established ones. We also skipped Europe entirely as not only was it seen as a series of difficult markets with incumbents who had large tenure - but also, most of them were in or just coming out of recession, so when we looked at all the factors they just fell into the ‘too hard basket’.
The key questions around growth are: ‘Can my model or product work in any related industries? Are there any similar markets I can target which look like the one I have already had some success in? Can I alter my product slightly so it will now appeal to this other segment?’ And, ‘Do any of my existing customers have similar problems in another area, which a version of my product can sell?’
It’s also important the entire team is motivated, trained and incentivised to spot opportunities/ related areas so that you can try and take advantage of them. One good rule is to hunt in pairs – it’s pretty rare for anyone to have all the skills that are required to both deliver a product/ service and spot an opportunity - so we send everyone out in pairs. One to present and deliver and one to watch and listen. No one ever spotted an opportunity while talking! Once you identify an opportunity, you run it through the hedgehog/ echidna test and then if it still stacks up, you work out how to enter the new market.
The most important mistakes to avoid are to presume you know everything about the market/ industry and to make assumptions (that road leads swiftly to chaos as we have discovered!), or to presume your product doesn’t need to be altered to meet with local/ differing niche needs. At RFi Group we have made both these mistakes so many times it’s becoming embarrassing - either presuming we understood a market when with hindsight we clearly didn’t (Canada, USA, Mexico, UK to name a few!) or thinking that we didn’t need to adapt our product to meet local needs and requirements (UAE, Singapore, Brazil, New Zealand).
So, what are the tricks to new market entry… my next topic.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment - I am always open to a conversation.
Why you need to send The A Team
Founder at RFI Global
December 6, 2016
I’m always excited about going into a new market. What are we going to find? What challenges are we going to have to overcome? What don’t we know yet that is unique to this market that might trip us up?
Despite the excitement over the years, we have learned the hard way at RFi Group all the things not to do when entering a new market. Of all of them, the most important lesson is not to make decisions based on assumptions, on what you think you know about the market. We’ve made this mistake in many markets ( Canada and Singapore both spring to mind) but perhaps the most glaring example is the UK. Admittedly we launched a mortgage program at the start of 2009 and at the height of the financial crisis, just as the UK mortgage market went from net positive 350 billion to net negative 100 billion ( I often say it was the worst time in the last 100 years to open a London office!) but aside from our spectacularly disastrous timing, we also made a lot of mistaken assumptions.
Based on learning the hard way, how do you go into a new market?
The first question to answer is; ‘Are there any gaps in the market and if so where are they? Where is the opportunity?’ It’s always easier to find an unidentified gap or unmet need than to go up against a local incumbent who has the benefit of possibly years of history and trust. Next is to find out who the local incumbents are and therefore, potential future competitors and exactly what it is they offer and how they are perceived. Do customers like them or are they sick of them? Do they only buy from them because there’s nothing better on offer? Most unchallenged incumbents eventually get lazy and begin to drop the ball, at which time they become much easier to disrupt. Finally, once you have worked out if there is a niche for your value proposition and how to adapt it to local conditions, you need to see if you have any transferable clients i.e. existing clients in your current market, who are also in your new market, where you might be able to get a referral in.
Once these questions have been answered you have to go and spend time in the market. Ruchir Sharma the famous JP Morgan economist, investor and author of Breakout Nations always suggests that going to the market, getting a taxi, a haircut and a beer and talking to people is as useful as any economic analysis and I couldn’t agree more! Whether it’s a new geographic market or a new niche in the industry you operate in, you have to personally experience it. Not only does this allow you to better understand your future customers and their needs and wants, but it also allows you to answer the fundamental question of what problem/ issue/ pain point your product/ solution is going to solve in this new market.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen or heard of a really successful product or business idea that is expanding rapidly, but then pulls back from a number of markets and every time the reason is the same – ‘We didn’t understand the market/ we didn’t do our research/ we didn’t realise that the problem we solve in our home market, isn’t an issue here’.
Once you’ve understood the market as much as possible then you need to work out who to send and it always has to be the A Team. You want to do everything possible to maximise the chance of success so sending your best people is a no brainer. You can’t be half-hearted about it – you either need to spend the resource to send your best team or honestly, not bother. Not only does it increase your chance of success but it shows to the potential new market how serious your intent is and how committed you are.
So don’t make assumptions, experience the market first hand, even if only briefly, and send the A Team and you will significantly increase your chance of success, especially if you can adapt to the culture, my next topic…
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Adapting to new cultures – why it’s worth making the effort
Founder at RFI Global
December 13, 2016
There’s a phrase in Asia called ‘hitting the bamboo ceiling’ which as RFi Group initially grew in South East Asia, then up into North Asia, before finally moving across to West Asia - was something we are very aware of, but which I think applies with equal validity everywhere.
I’m always mystified by the fact that most people know and accept that people in different regions or areas of their own market or country behave very differently - which really needs to be factored in for business - but, when they go abroad, they expect everyone to behave the same way.
While most people will take the time to try and understand the behavioural norms of a culture which is clearly very different to their own, they often won’t bother with cultures that appear less different. As a global business, we know that we need to understand not just how doing business differs in different markets, but we also need to be aware of and understand differing consumer traits and cultural norms.
I often hear people at business conferences talking and acknowledging how different it is doing business is in a certain market as compared to their home market but they talk about it in a really begrudging way; one that seems to imply resentment on their part at all the effort involved. So, here’s some advice – make the effort and learn about the culture. Not because it will be easier to do business – it will. Not because it will make potential clients and business partners see that you are sensitive and care about learning about their culture and therefore make them more likely to engage with you – it will. Not even because it will ensure that you don’t potentially put your foot in it and cause offence (whether it’s sliding a business card down the table in Asia, thoughtlessly sipping some water mid-presentation during Ramadan, trying to pick up your host’s dinner bill when you’re the guest, or trying to book a meeting on the most important national holiday of the year - I’ve done one of these but I’m not admitting to which!). All of these are good reasons, but the best and most important reason is quite simply - you’ll uncover more business opportunities. Once you open up and try to understand the differences between the cultures, you’ll be amazed at the opportunities that reveal themselves.
As a child, I remember my grandmother telling me “Send a turnip around the world and it will still come back a turnip” as a dismissive remark about people who travel, but don’t let the experience affect them, and, the same is equally true in business. The more time you spend understanding the nuance and norms of the culture in a different market, the more interesting gaps and business opportunities you’ll find.
As I said in my last blog regarding entering a new market - never assume anything. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been talking about something that is of absolutely no value in one market, only to be told (much to my surprise) that it’s not available in this market and would be really valuable so can we please work out how to provide it!
So, take some time to learn about the culture, it will improve your experience, it will be really interesting and educational and it will help you identify marginal gains ( my next topic) to help your business grow…
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Why understanding that there was never an evolutionary ‘missing link’, is the key to business growth
Founder at RFI Global
January 5, 2017
The history of evolution is not one of step-by-step development as we as a species moved from the trees to homo sapiens. In fact, there is no such thing as a ‘missing link’, which by definition implies a series of step changes, all moving inexorably in a longitudinal direction. Evolution is a tale of trial and error, of continual little mistakes, of things that nature tried, that didn’t work out but from which a little lesson was always learned.
The real-life basis for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous novel The Lost World is a tepui in Venezuela, a mountain with sheer sides, called Roraima. When the world’s oceans receded millions of years ago, they left some evolutionary experiments stuck on top which are still there today; frogs that crawl, oil-birds that live in caves, aggressive carnivorous plants – little mistakes in other words, where nature tried things that didn’t work, but a lesson was learnt that contributed to evolution. Personally, I have no idea if crawling frogs led to leaping frogs but when you see the crawling ones you figure that nature didn’t get that one right!
The point here is, it is absolutely critical for any business that is growing, to really understand this lesson and to apply it to themselves. The reason to have a culture of continuous experimentation and a culture that encourages failing fast, is so that you can constantly try new things in small contained areas of the business. The last thing you want to do is radically alter the fundamentals at the heart of your business model – if it goes wrong then your whole business can go up in smoke. However, you should be constantly tinkering at the edges, playing with the margins, looking for incremental gains and simply, just trying new things. If these small tests don’t work out then you haven’t effected your entire business, you’ve just learnt your lesson and can move on. If they do work out, then you have made a marginal gain. If you break your business down into lots of discrete but connected parts and you focus on marginal gains for every little part of the business, then you start to create the possibility of exponential gains. If you try to increase the effectiveness of your value proposition overall by 10%, you will struggle. However, if you break your business down into 10, 20 or 30 key discrete parts and you dedicate each team that deals with that part to increase their effectiveness by 10%, the overall effect on the business is exponential.
Sport and business are littered with examples of marginal gains from Sir Dave Brailsford working out the optimal temperature for cycling shorts at the start of a race, to Sir Clive Woodward redesigning loose rugby shirts into tight shirts so that players couldn’t be grabbed by them, to Sir Richard Branson installing in-seat entertainment in economy class or to Steve Jobs famously getting rid of an on/ off switch; For every single gain, there were lots of mistakes where something is tried, it doesn’t work but no blame is attached, a lesson is learnt and eventually, a gain is discovered. At RFi Group we have lots of monthly awards for the team, but the biggest prize is for the person who - across the entire business - has come up with/ invented/ discovered the best and most valuable marginal gain of the month.
Innovation isn’t about major step change like the now defunct ‘missing link’, it is about trial and error, small wins and marginal gains, all contributing to having an exponential effect on the growth of your business.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
In a fast-growing business, job descriptions can be like straitjackets
Founder at RFI Global
January 10, 2017
Fast growing companies always talk about how its crucial to hire for attitude rather than experience. However, it really doesn’t matter how many people you have with the right attitude if you don’t create the right kind of fluid space. You can create a fun, fast, fluid culture of continuous innovation but if you let job descriptions slip in and pre-determine career paths it can very quickly fall over. What on earth am I talking about?
As a small, fast growing company of course it’s crucial to find the right kind of people, but in the same breath you mustn’t pigeon hole them with a specific job description, which I can guarantee will only act like a straitjacket and sound the death knell for innovation.
At RFi Group we always used to say when interviewing someone we liked that we would provide certain things: a brand, some products/ business lines, some space to sit in and from then on they were effectively their own entrepreneur – where the role took them or how it developed depended entirely on them, their abilities, their passions and where they saw the opportunities. Our job was to provide the space, the culture, the support and encourage the right kind of thinking. Frequently, we would interview someone for a certain role, decide they weren’t right for it but like them so much that we created an entirely new role specifically for them that we hadn’t previously even considered! ( Not such a great outcome when you’re running the cash-flow of a bootstrapped business!)
In time, we took this type of thinking to a new level.
Whenever anyone started with the Group, unless they were a graduate trainee, we would give them a blended job description which often had elements of what in a bigger business would have been three fundamentally related but otherwise different, roles. As a small business this gave us the advantage of not putting all our ‘cash-flow eggs’ in one basket, but also, by forcing people to wear three different hats, we could see as a business which role suited them best and they could see from a career perspective which way they wanted to go. It also guaranteed us - as much as possible - a stream of flexible, dynamic people who found such roles appealing. We then prioritised the three elements into Horizon One ( core to the role), Horizon Two ( a possibility we’ve given some thought to) and Horizon Three ( a random idea, or an area they might choose off their own bat to explore). As the business grew, some key team members would go from wearing three hats, to two hats, to one hat in an often entirely new area that they had created or helped to create, which they now specialised in, combining their passion with their hard earned experience. This formula really has been a ‘win/ win’ for RFi Group and our team.
For the ExCo team we adopted a unique approach - every senior person we employed instantly had to take a 10% salary cut on the package advertised. We would then set some KPIs for them to hit in the first 90 days around spotting opportunities for growth and innovation, which as soon as they hit moved them straight back to their previous salary level and beyond it by a positive 10%. All our recruitment consultants were convinced it was a scam to drive down their commission but it had some very serious points. Nobody would agree to such an idea unless they really believed in the business, the story and what they could offer, so it wheedled out anyone who was just saying that they did to get the job. It forced everyone at a senior level to move immediately into the practice of thinking hard ( because their salary depended on it) about where there were immediate opportunities that we hadn’t yet spotted. Finally, it created a level playing field for the senior team, as everyone who had got through probation and was on the team, had effectively earned their salary back and had proved themselves to the others in this fundamental skill whether they were in sales, research, events, media and even accounting!
The key message here is that if you want to create a fast-growing, innovative business then, as well as employing the right-minded people, you need to create career paths that are as fluid, dynamic and fast paced as you want the business to be – so beware rigid job descriptions and fixed career paths, they will only back you into a corner and kill your growth.
But what about our graduate trainees? Some may have no idea what they want to do career wise. For them, you need to have a dedicated focus on professional development and training that allows them to experience as many roles as possible - my next topic…
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Why you must train your team in non-essential skills
Founder at RFI Global
January 17, 2017
For any fast-growing business, one of the key issues is the ability to attract talent. Unlike large incumbents, you’re moving quickly, generally desperate for more team members, but restrained by cashflow - especially if you’re bootstrapping the business. As soon as you have the cash to get someone new, you’re in a race as you needed them to start yesterday! Compounding the issue is that for a fluid, agile, fast business you absolutely don’t want people with very specific experience and the desire for a fixed job description, looking for a pre-set, linear career path ( see my last post). What you want - and what you need - is bright, young, ambitious people… the trade-off? They don’t often have the relevant experience. Now, it’s obvious you have to give them basic skills training specific to the role you hired them for, but too often in a fast business it’s ‘all hands on deck’, so after a couple of basic sessions you fall back on the adage of “on the job training”. This lack of structured training is often unavoidable and even though you can sell it to your team as being part of what makes the role so exciting, in the long run it won’t serve you well. If you are serious about growing your business, you have to be equally serious about growing and developing your team.
This doesn’t mean that you need to burn through cash on external trainers. When you sit down and think about it, you’ll be amazed how much experience you and your team already have and how easy it is to turn this into internal training modules at no cost. At RFi Group we have 20 skills courses and 25 knowledge courses that we rotate through every 6 months. These are constantly being added to, developed and enhanced. Every person across the group has to complete basic sales, research, analysis, customer experience and IT courses, before moving to specialist courses in each area. As a business owner or leader, you have a specific vision which you are passionate about and which you are personally willing to work without break to achieve. While you ideally want your team to buy into your vision and to create a shared vision as much as possible, you can’t just expect them to work all hours without giving something back (other than salaries and share options!) The more you can invest in developing your team, the better for them as individuals and their careers, and the better for you as a business. If that means they get to a point where they can no longer grow with the organisation, then when they leave you can know that you’ve just helped launch someone’s career, which is something to be proud of. How many people do you know that say “I was lucky enough earlier in my career to have a great boss who really invested time in me?”.
However, let’s be honest, most businesses don’t want to spend a huge amount of time training people just so they can leave. So, when you have a team of people who have bought into the vision, are doing a great job, working really hard and are part of a great team - what should you do? You should give them the opportunity to learn non-essential skills in completely different areas to their current role. If you are employing bright, young people ( especially graduate trainees) you have to understand that they often have no idea what they want to do with their careers, or if they do, those ideas might change or more simply they might just want variety.
At RFi Group we have had sales people who have made great editors, analysts who have made great journalists and event organisers, journalists and event managers who have become great sales people and personal assistants who have become great designers and marketers! As a fast-growing business, this is absolute gold because as your business grows in new areas and markets you have a rapidly developing team growing and evolving along with the business. As an individual team member, its’s also great because you get to constantly grow and develop your career. So, how do you do it?
Of the 45 courses we run at RFi Group, about 70% are in totally different areas to most peoples’ role but we actively encourage everyone - it’s actually a key KPI - to attend training sessions that are outside their skill area to see if it’s potentially an area they might to move into. If they are interested, they can then trial working there for a couple of weeks or months to see how it goes. This also increases greater role understanding and team cooperation as people move between different areas bringing knowledge across with them. This focus on providing training, not just in job specific areas, but in areas across the business means you have a motivated core team growing as individuals and in turn helping the business grow.
Many small, fast paced businesses think that professional development and training is something for large corporates and it should be all about learning on the job. This is a mistake - it’s in your best interests as a business to invest in your team as individuals. Almost every small company wants to be fast-paced, dynamic, customer-centric, flexible and innovative - the key to success is in the execution and a focus on continually growing your team as individuals, especially in different areas, is a key plank in that execution.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
The Diversity Imperative – why small businesses ignore gender at their peril
Founder at RFI Global
January 24, 2017
In a week where millions of women around the world have peacefully marched in protest against the new US President, it seems timely to draw attention to the issue of diversity in business. While the case for gender diversity is overwhelming, it’s not often a topic that gets picked up by small, fast growing businesses as being a key pillar of success. Like professional development, small businesses all too often ignore diversity at their peril and think it’s only an issue big businesses need to deal with. While undoubtedly, it's an issue for big business, it is still vitally important for any small, fast growing business.
One of the biggest issues when you’re running a small, fast growing business, is that by definition as you constantly try new things, problems and mistakes will occur. While many are minor, you often feel that some days you’re constantly beset by problems and you spend all day firefighting. While this is also often the case in large businesses, the potential outcome is, by definition, very different. If you can’t solve the problem in a large business you can go and talk to your boss about it while the organisation deals with the issue. If you can’t solve the problem in a small business then not only is there often no-one you can talk to about it, but even a small problem can be enough to flip your business over and make you bankrupt ( scary, but true). As a rule of thumb the success - or not - of a small business, is entirely based on its ability to quickly and creatively solve the many problems that arise.
As this is the case, then surely it follows that as soon as you discover a problem, you want as many possible solutions to it, as quickly as possible. Which brings me to this: Men and women think differently about solving problems - it’s a simple, inarguable fact. So, whether you are a male business owner/ leader, or a female business owner/ leader, it is absolutely critical that you have plenty of people of the opposite sex working with you and on your team, to help you solve problems – it’s a no-brainer!
The exact same is true of cultural diversity. Different cultures have different ways of approaching situations and solving problems. As a business leader, it follows that the more cultural inputs you have to any situation/ problem, the more likely you are to find the optimal solution. Especially, if yours is a global business attempting to connect with 44 markets (so far :)) around the world, as RFi Group must do!
At RFi Group we have always had and always will have, a 50:50 split across the team of female and male. This is across the entire team, across management, senior management and across the ExCo as well. Our advisory board is currently 2:1, but I am working on that as we speak. As well as our gender diversity, we have team members from different religions, ethnicities, nationalities etc - as a global business, it’s a must have.
While I would love to say our gender diversity policy is altruistic and all about empowering women, it’s also simply economic and business self-interest. If you have a diverse team, you will solve problems more quickly, make more profit and grow faster - it’s as simple as that.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
When you’ve done data - you won’t go back to intuition
Founder at RFI Global
January 31, 2017
When you talk to any business owner about whether or not they have a firm grip on their business and all the details, they will always say ‘yes’. When you ask them about the numbers, they’ll say that they’re across all the numbers. When you ask them about which numbers they’re across, they’ll talk about P&Ls, cashflow or revenue and if you ask them to break it down, they’ll talk about number of calls being made, cost per FTE, pipeline management, etc. Finally, if you ask them what their customers think about them, they’ll go on about how much their customers love them and think they’re wonderful. I’ve met with some businesses where at the end of these conversations you’ll literally feel like you’re dripping in treacle there’s so much saccharin about! Next you ask what their annual customer renewal/ retention rate is and they’ll say, with a smile on their face, somewhere between 50-75% … and that’s the moment – that’s it right there, when you’ll know for sure that they’re going on intuition, gut feeling and the word of the client’s services or sales teams at best, blind optimism at worst.
In this day and age when Amazon can recommend a book for you based on previous purchases, whether you’re b2c or b2b, it’s simply unacceptable not to be creating and tracking key customer data points and the customer experience across your core business. As a fast-growing business, it’s crucial for two reasons: firstly, you need to be using evidence-based insight to constantly improve the customer experience, secondly, you have to build a high customer renewal rate so you can create a solid base for your accelerated new business growth. Put simply, intuition won’t do. ‘But I’ve got a great client services team!’, I hear you say. There are two fundamental human flaws with that statement: Firstly, people like to be nice - so when someone they like comes to visit, asks them how it’s all going and are they going to renew their contract, or how can we improve the customer experience, no one wants to be the bearer of bad news, so they just smile and say yes, it’s all great, the experience or service doesn’t need improving and they’re going to renew. Secondly, nowhere is confirmation bias more dangerous than in these types of conversations. I’ve sat in renewal meetings with clients who list a long series of issues urgently needing attention to a client services rep., who will promptly walk out and confidently tell me it went really well, nothing needs any work and that client will renew without a problem. It’s almost like they were in a different meeting! Why? Because people hear what they want to hear and tune out all the noise that contradicts this view – it’s human nature. The solution is simple: gather data.
This isn’t as easy as it seems. Firstly, you usually have no idea what the important data is, so you need to gather as much data as you think is relevant and then test it over time for correlation and relevance. Quite quickly, you’ll establish the vanity metrics ( the ones which make you feel good but have no actual bearing on renewal or retention!) and you’ll get a good idea of the metric or combination of metrics that allows you to identify any retention issues. Once you have vigorously tested it to ensure it gives you a reliable and valuable steer on renewal, you must then focus on ensuring that the data is consistently and constantly gathered and most importantly reported on, especially to you!
Once you’ve identified your businesses key metric/ data points, don’t sit on your laurels. It is really important to be constantly looking to refine and improve it – this is the most important metric in your business. It tells you how to improve the customer experience and whether the customer will remain a customer. You also have to learn to absolutely trust it. At RFi Group we’ve had a 98% annual renewal metric since we started and we’ve hit it every single year. We continuously collect client data and over the years we have vigorously tested different data combinations and metrics to identify key renewal indicators. These are constantly tracked and we are always looking to refine and improve them to both better understand client retention and to constantly improve the client experience. However, I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve been told a client is having a fantastic customer experience and is definitely going to renew and had to show the client services person the data and convince them of its validity. A few times in the early years the client services rep. would be so convincing that we would believe them and let it slide and here’s what we’ve learnt: the data is never wrong, the human is :)
So firstly, make sure you’re gathering data on your customers, secondly analyse it and identify the key metrics that allow you to track your business’s performance and the customer experience and finally, trust it – the data never lies. Not only will this improve your customer retention, it will also allow you to constantly improve the service and experience for your customers and that is the goal of every business.
As well as tracking the data you also need to create a constant feedback loop, my next topic…
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
In the age of the consumer you need both humans and data to create the optimum permanent feedback loop
Founder at RFI Global
February 7, 2017
In my last post I covered the need to track the customer experience and retention on a regular basis with data, on the grounds that data is never wrong and the human often is. However, it is also important to understand that you need data as well as humans, not instead of. While it is crucial to track the customer experience across your business using data to identify key indicator metrics, to allow you to do this you also need a permanent feedback loop. The permanent feedback loop needs to be between you and your customer directly and for an optimum outcome, you need both humans and data.
Many businesses start with a feedback loop while they’re trying to build an initial product or a minimum viable product (MVP). Whether it’s in real-time or post experience, developing a customer feedback loop is a crucial part of any business or new product launch. In this embryonic stage, businesses build a feedback loop as they test their MVP and follow it with an almost religious fervor as they fine tune their product to what the market wants and needs. Unfortunately, once they have done this the feedback loop is all too easily forgotten or discounted. Once the first product is successful and up and running, it’s all too easy to sit back on your laurels and rest – this is a serious error. Too often, successful businesses aggressively sell, have serious success and achieve market dominance, then mistakenly track a vanity metric before being sideswiped when a disruptor or competitor suddenly takes their market because they didn’t see them coming. Why didn’t they see them? Almost always because they didn’t have a permanent customer feedback loop. Markets move far too quickly to not keep your finger on the pulse via a feedback loop. Consumers’ attitudes, demands, economic sentiment, technological capability, political state – all of these dynamics are moving at lightning pace and if you don’t create a mechanism for uninterrupted customer feedback, then one or more of these changing trends will flat foot you.
This is the age of the customer – the age of the consumer – and all customers expect to be able to provide feedback on products and services. You simply have to create a proactive, easy-to-use, easily accessible feedback loop from the customer direct to your business. If you don’t create a road for this, not only do you put yourself out of the loop, but you also put yourself at a disadvantage to your competitors who will all have one. As your customer constantly evolves, you need to constantly track their changing needs and - importantly - have the ability to evolve and continuously change and develop your product/ proposition to meet their new needs. It’s no good collecting constant feedback if your business model doesn’t then allow you to evolve to meet your customers’ needs and this is the advantage many new companies have today over incumbents. There’s no point gathering real-time customer data, if you can’t act on it quickly - and ideally - in real-time.
At the same time, you have to set it up so you gather both human and data based feedback. Why? The human often provides an explanatory filter, a validation or a new point of inquiry for the data. While the data provides the hard evidence, the human knowledge often provides context that otherwise can leave the data meaningless. The human can also be crucial in taking the data which is based on past evidence and using it to help forecast different probable outcomes. However, it is critical to remember that you never let the human context/ viewpoint overrule or invalidate the data – the data is never wrong!
You need to use both humans and data to provide a constant and where possible, real-time feedback on what your customers are thinking. This isn’t testing a new idea or product options ( which you should always do as well) - this is checking the effectiveness of and the response to your current product, understanding the current customer experience and how the experience can be continuously improved to meet your customers’ changing needs. In some cases the data might illuminate a new point of inquiry which would have otherwise been missed by the human, or the human might be able to answer the question that the data itself has identified. The human can both, help explain and validate the data, or provide an intuitive counter point. The key is to make sure that the human and the data complement each other and work in combination to provide the most comprehensive read possible - the data doesn’t replace the human but rather it validates and enhances the human view.
At RFi Group we use both the data and the humans a.k.a. our client services team to create a constant feedback loop on every single client interaction and touch-point. This ensures that we have the optimum and most comprehensive view of the customer experience. It allows us to respond and evolve our product on an ongoing basis to meet all our customers’ changing needs and wants and - importantly - our business model is specifically designed to be flexible enough to quickly adapt and develop. It also allows us to constantly check that we are always providing a fantastic value proposition that is meeting and exceeding customer needs and demands and to keep our eye on any potential competitors and/ or disruptors - my next topic - that may be heading our way.
So, make sure that as well as tracking data metrics as often as possible, you create an established mechanism for your customers to provide constant feedback via a human as well as - not instead of - a data metric, to give you the optimum customer picture. Finally, ensure your business model allows you to respond to this feedback quickly and in real-time.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Why you need to be paranoid to grow
Founder at RFI Global
February 15, 2017
If you are a business owner or leader, then a well-developed, permanent and healthy sense of paranoia is key to continued growth and success. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but you need to make sure that imitation of your product doesn’t become a replacement of your product. Competitors can and should be a key to your success but they also can be dangerous. I have spoken a lot in my blog about the imperative to continuously track your customer’s behaviour if you want to stay ahead and not get disrupted, but it’s equally crucial to constantly watch your competitors. Competitors are a fantastic source of information and ideas. If anyone thinks what they offer is genuinely unique and they don’t have to worry about competition or disruption, then just look at android’s market share versus the iPhone, or the recent success of the surface pro, against the iPad. You ignore or deny your competition at your peril.
It also doesn’t matter what you think of your competition - you have to always assume that your customers will have a far rosier view of them than you do. As a business owner, you understand all the nuances and key differentiators of your model and why - in your opinion - it is superior or better than your competition. You also hope that the majority of that knowledge and differentiation is successfully communicated by your sales, marketing and PR teams to your customers. If your customers, even the evangelical ones, have 80% of the knowledge you have about your product, then you’re doing well! At the same time, your knowledge of your competition’s flaws and faults is again going to be more in-depth than that of your customers’ perception of them. It’s also important to remember your competition is out there singing its own praises and drawing attention to any perceived inadequacies in your model/ product. It is never a good idea to be optimistic about your customers perception of your competition. Be pessimistic, be paranoid and to be clear: never, ever, underestimate the competition. However, it’s not just the potential loss of market share or disruption that should drive you to continuously watch them…
It was once famously said that instead of hiring management consultants, all you really need to do is watch your competitors and I couldn’t agree more. Competitors are always active: launching new products, trying new marketing messages, identifying new markets etc. it doesn’t really matter. If the competition is great, good, indifferent or even bad – they all provide a constant stream of new ideas. They might be ideas that can be improved upon, ideas that accidentally show you exactly how not to do something, or in some situations ideas that if you don’t scramble quickly enough, will start to eat into and steal your market share… The one thing they have in common? They are all food-for-thought that can massively fuel your growth. There are ideas that can help refine your marketing, help you to identify a new segment to target, enable you to develop and improve your product or service, ideas that can make you think about brand new markets or even brand new products – they are all ideas that will help drive rapid growth for your business. So, how often should you check on them? Daily if you need to! But weekly at a bare minimum. Look at their website, watch their PR and marketing, talk to your customers about them – don’t think that your customers aren’t using them, or at least considering them as well!
At RFi Group we try to constantly watch competitors in all of our markets and product divisions. Over the years, I would estimate that the constant customer behaviour data provided by the permanent feedback loop, has been responsible for about 50% of our growth and the development of our products and services. The other 50%, has all been thanks to our competitors! Whether it’s launching products that directly compete with ours, improved service offerings that put ours at risk, failed launches that show us where there might be an opportunity if we can get it right, or poorly executed ideas that if done correctly can turn out to be winning improvements; our competitors always have and continue to provide a fresh source of new ideas that helps drive our performance and growth. So, be paranoid about the competition, really paranoid, all the time and use the paranoia to drive your growth.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
What can fast growing businesses learn from African game reserves?
Founder at RFI Global
February 21, 2017
One of the key challenges for any fast-growing or rapidly changing business, is how much control to impose, versus how much creative and disruptive freedom to allow your team. Clearly this needs to be proportional to the size and maturity of your business but as you try to grow, change and develop your business, it’s also a key question. At RFi Group all our clients are in the financial services industry and therefore, all grappling with the issue of digital disruption. On the one hand we find the ‘career bankers’, familiar with all the risk controls and requirements of the system, whereas on the other hand, we find the new team players, plucked from the start-ups, Facebook, Google, Amazon etc. to inject some digital creativity into the traditional institution. The challenge is that where the former argues there is not enough control, the latter argues that it is all too structured and restrictive to be able to work quickly and creatively.
This - in essence - is the challenge facing any fast-growing business. When you start off, there are just a couple of you and the last thing you need is rigorous structure and controls – this is a fast-paced, entrepreneurial start up! However, as you grow you do gradually need to bring in just enough control to make sure you don’t overheat and the whole thing blows up… but not so much that you kill off the fast-paced culture. The risk if you don’t put controls in place, is that as you grow the small cracks will appear wider and wider, until a massive hole appears that can actually sink you. At the same time, you don’t want to try and impose IBM style processes on a team of only 50 people. For a fast-paced, rapidly growing business, as a rule of thumb you want to err on the side of almost enough control, rather than swing too much the other way. This also directly impacts the type of person you bring on board as you grow. Yes, it’s great to get lots of fast-moving, disruptive, creative, ‘fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants’ type people, but you can’t all be like that. You need to bring experienced/ process driven people on board to provide some rigour, but not so much that you have a mini revolt on your hands! One of the areas that it’s best to do this, is in operations and finance. While the people you have in these roles should fit your fast-growing and dynamic culture, these are the same people who should act as checks and balances to make sure you don’t blow up. Another area is in QA – an area that should be constantly developed by marginal gains, but where a more rigorous process-driven skill set, doesn’t go amiss.
So, the big questions is, how do you blend these culturally opposite types and here’s where my game reserve analogy comes in. Firstly, because it makes sense and secondly because I’m tired of reading yet another fusion-food cooking analogy that talks about blending diverse ingredients that complement each other, so forgive me! The idea of a game reserve is to take wild animals which clearly have roamed free for millions of years and put them within a controlled environment that isn’t as restrictive as a zoo, but gives them a sense of being truly wild and the ability to act so. Sometimes the boundaries are clear, with fences and armed game wardens (aka the finance and ops. teams), sometimes they are merely discouraged from certain routes by inconvenient obstacles ( strategic use of KPIs). When they get to a certain maturity/ numerical size, they are sometimes moved to new areas – you get the gist. The key is to use your experienced/ control-driven people to put in boundaries with rules, KPIs and processes, that allow your creatives/ dynamic/ entrepreneurial people, to roam free. A key point here is that game reserves were originally developed as a way of monetising wildlife via tourism. If you have loads of creative disruptors roaming without any controls, then you fall into the trouble that lots of start-ups have, of loads of great ideas without a sustainable revenue model. As lots of start-up's find to their peril, is there is a huge difference between a free or low cost product idea that consumers love, to one that actually makes a profit. So, not enough boundaries and you have wild animals roaming free through city streets and complete chaos – too many boundaries and you have a zoo with profitable animals, miserable in their constraints. So take a look at your business, work out which one it’s closer to and then bring on just enough rules and processes to get you where you want to go… without turning it into a zoo :)
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Don’t let investor money seduce you
Founder at RFI Global
March 1, 2017
I’ve written before about whether it’s better to bootstrap, or to look for an investor for your business. My feeling on this is that it’s always better to bootstrap: Bootstrapping leaves you in complete control, it’s an effective and excellent way to manage your risk, it teaches fiscal discipline and it provides positive and sustainable cash flow –what’s not to like! However, after 10 years of bootstrapping RFi Group, we decided to bring in some investors. Proud of our profitability, positive cash flow and sustainable business model, imagine my surprise when every single potential investor we saw asked the same question: “As you’ve bootstrapped your business for the last 10 years, how do we know you won’t go crazy with the money we invest and blow it all?” It didn’t matter if they were private equity investors, institutional investors or family offices, they all had the same fear – uncontrolled, wild spending on our part i.e. letting the money go to our heads. Suddenly one of the things we were most proud of - bootstrapping our business to profitability - was seen as something of a liability.
I remember people I knew in the late nineties taking their entire start-up of 200 people to Val-d'Isère for an all expense ski week for ‘corporate bonding.’ More recently, I met someone who having landed their first investor was excitedly renting some of the most expensive, office space in the city with uninterrupted harbour views and I felt nothing but deep sympathy for their poor investor! So naturally I was a little affronted at first to be asked these questions – we weren’t thinking about taking the whole company skiing, or to the Whitsundays, or anywhere!
However, almost a year later I’m starting to understand it a little more and my interest in this as a common business issue was further heightened when over the weekend, I read about another well-known recipient of investment funding (vinomofo), who received 25 million from Blue Sky Capital last year, as widely covered in the media. In the article, the CEO was quoted as saying how hard it is to keep everyone focused and accountable, when there’s so much cash washing around. When for years every, single dollar spent has to be justified and argued over and the outcome rigorously analysed, it’s a significant step change to suddenly have plenty of cash – so, how do you keep from letting the money seduce you?
The best analogy I can think of is to compare it your personal wealth/ living standard. When you first leave home and/ or are a student, you are living almost hand to mouth. Every single bill and expense is scrutinised, discounts are ruthlessly tracked down and taken advantage of, costs are cut at every available corner, fiscal discipline and cash control reign supreme. As your income increases so the purse strings are loosened and less attention is paid to every little cost and to always getting the best deal. This is absolutely fine for your personal lifestyle because usually your income grows incrementally, so your behaviour has time to adapt and adjust. Getting an investor can have the same dire consequences as winning the lottery can for your personal life – globally 1 in 3 lottery winners are bankrupt within 10 years, irrespective to how many zeroes are in their win. Why is this? It’s because their behaviour doesn’t have time to adjust to their new situation, so they make serious spending mistakes/ investments, as opposed to those who gradually increase their wealth, who usually don’t. It’s exactly the same for your business when you bring an investor on board.
Just because it’s no longer critical to behave as if you’re bootstrapping the business and every single dollar you spend needs to be justified debated and analysed, it doesn’t mean you should stop doing that. The exact same culture and mentality that got you to the point where someone wanted to invest, is the same mentality that you absolutely need to have to make the best use of the investment. Sweat the details! Don’t take your finger off the pulse of your business and question everyone, all the time about their numbers/ revenue/ cost control just like you used to! And, when you look to spend the investment, spend it as if it were your own money and be just as rigorous in the questions that you ask. An investment spent well can significantly fast track the growth and profitability of your business, but don’t let the money seduce you and your team! Stay focused and just like when you were a hand to mouth student, or back when you were bootstrapping, make sure you scrutinise and justify every cost, assess every risk to make sure that you get the maximum return to drive your growth.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
What should you do when you personally screw up?
Founder at RFI Global
March 14, 2017
Everyone working in fast moving businesses talks about failing fast and a culture of “no blame” and that’s great when your team make mistakes, but what happens when you get it wrong? To make matters worse, when you get it wrong as a leader not only is it more visible, but it generally has far graver consequences. Coupled with the fact that you made a mistake, is the guilt and embarrassment because everyone can see that you messed up! So, in these instances, what should you do? Whatever happens, however catastrophic, don’t be embarrassed – as the age old saying goes, everyone makes mistakes. Steve Jobs famously lost his position at Apple originally because he made a mistake about Lisa - the follow on from the Macintosh.
The first thing you have to do is own up to and own the mistake. It may be that no one else has even realised it yet, but step number one is to confess to it and to publicly own it. Do not blame others in your team. At the end of the day, although they may have contributed to the mistake, you're the boss and it’s your call - the buck stops with you.
Secondly you obviously need to fix it. Don't compound the mistake by closing your eyes and optimistically hoping that if this happens and if this happens and if this happens, then it will all be alright. Hope is not a strategy! The word ‘if’ is not one that you want to have in the conversation at this point and definitely not several ifs! The same applies with your mistake as applies to your team when they make a mistake – by admitting it and owning it you instantly open it up to the team for their input into solving it. The more brains you have working on a solution and the quicker they are working on it, the sooner you will find a solution. Hiding it, denying it and not seeking help on it, never ends well. Work through different scenarios, find several different solutions – by the time you get to plan G, you’re probably covered.
Finally, learn from your mistake. Too often you see people beating themselves up for ages about their mistakes. Yes, it hurts when you do it. Yes, it can be embarrassing/ make you feel stupid/ make you worry that your colleagues don’t hold you in the same esteem as they previously did… frankly that’s crazy thinking. Everyone makes mistakes - it’s how you deal with them that’s important. There’s a Zulu tribal tale about the wise man and the fool. They both get a camel thorn in their foot when they are out walking in the bush. The fool says; ‘I will keep this camel thorn in my foot forever, so that the constant pain reminds me of where I was walking when it got stuck there’. The wise man says; ‘I will take the thorn out but I will not throw it away, I will keep it with me always to remind me not to walk in that place again.’ When it comes to making mistakes, be the wise man, not the fool.
Finally every mistake is a huge opportunity for you to learn. Not just for you as an individual but for your team. Everyone learns by example so here is an example to practice what you preach about making mistakes, not worrying about blame, owing the mistake and inviting others to quickly help you find a solution. Here’s a chance to show your team in real-time how you want it done if they ever make a mistake. So when it happens ( and I guarantee it will) lead by example and practice what your preach!
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Keep calm while all others are losing their minds
Founder at RFI Global
March 21, 2017
As the saying goes, ‘If you’re calm while all those around you are panicking, you probably don’t have a clue what’s going on’. Despite the humour of this comment, it really should never apply to anyone running their own fast-growing business. Yes, while running a fast-growth business is dynamic, fun, energising and constantly challenging, it is also by definition in a more or less constant state of flux. The polite phrase for this is ‘everything’s pretty fluid here’, which to be honest, more accurately translates as ‘we’re nanoseconds away from utter chaos'.
Now, let’s be frank – if you run your own business or any fast-growing business, then this is pretty much a permanent state of affairs. Reid Hoffman the founder of LinkedIn describes running your own business as similar to jumping off a cliff and trying to build an aeroplane on the way down, and that’s pretty accurate. However, while you may thrive in this slightly psychotic state of permanent stress and chaos and some of your key team members probably do as well, you have to remember that lots of people don’t. As you grow, you will bring on more and more people who while they are a great cultural fit also don’t necessarily lend themselves to a permanent state of insecurity.
At this point you have to do two things. Number One: Communicate. There is nothing quite so effective as a company rumour-mill to get things going pear shaped and fast. This invariably tends to happen when the constant change is in a state of ‘reaction’, not just to positive moves but also in reaction to set backs or market challenges. Even worse is when things are not communicated and this snowballs from a minor issue, to being perceived across the team as a major, company-threatening crisis. So, whatever the issue and however minor it might seem to you, get out there, get on the front-foot and let everyone in your team know what’s going on. Every now and then this will mean breaking the chains of reporting, or someone feeling that they’re out of the loop as they were away or unavailable at the time – it doesn’t matter. Communicate to the team before it becomes an issue and mollify anyone left out the loop.
Secondly, stay calm and don’t panic.
Don’t bury your head in the sand – as I said in my last blog post, hope is not a strategy! It is however a simple fact of any business, that you will have to deal with challenges, competitors, missteps, gambles/ projects that don’t come off etc. which can be tricky in any business, but in a fast-growing business that is already fluid and slightly chaotic, the added effect of this can be exponentially more damaging. The last thing anyone wants to see is their team leader either freaking out or clearly on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Your job is not to absorb all the stress of the situation – you can try, but you’ll either end up dead or pretty close to it – your job is to pass on just enough of the stress to get your team to respond in a positive way, to absorb most of it and importantly remain and be seen to remain, calm. Panic sets in from the top so don’t run around like a headless chicken. Communicate to your team, work through some solutions and at all times, remain calm.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Why painting your nails is important before a big deal
Founder at RFI Global
March 28, 2017
Last night I went to an auction with my wife. As the mother of four small boys she has stopped being a CFO and now stays at home with the unenviable task of trying to coral four small people to school, through homework and music practice and back to bed via dinner and a bath without having a daily nervous breakdown. This means she is no longer used to the daily stress of negotiating large business or financial deals, although I feel that the million, little negotiations of putting shoes on and picking clothes up off the floor are quite frankly the raw end of the deal! Anyway, as we were getting ready for the auction I suggested she put on a great outfit, some of her favourite jewellery and painted her toe nails – to which I was told not to be so patronising!
So here’s the point: I was not being patronising – I was actually being completely serious. Everyone knows the expression ‘put your game face on’ or as sales people, looking at each other as you walk into a meeting and saying “it’s show-time” or “game-time”. This isn’t just flippantly stolen from random Hollywood movies, this is a key, psychological step on the path to success. Whatever you’re negotiating – from a small initial sales deal, bringing an institutional investor on-board, to selling your entire business, every deal is in a way exactly the same... You can control as much of the negotiation as possible, but you can never control everything.
I’ve blogged before about why you need to practice as much as possible. Work through every possible answer, work through all the objections and questions you never want to get asked, work through the worst possible scenarios and how you will respond to every single one. Create mental models in your mind of how this or that will look and how you will react, practice what you will say and not just in your head but practice saying it out loud. It’s never great to lose a deal you really wanted to win, which will of course happen, but to lose a deal because you didn’t prepare enough, is almost a crime.
It’s critical to control everything you can, which brings me back to painting your nails.
One thing you can control is how you look and feel. Whether it’s a favourite tie, suit, top, dress, outfit, hoodie, whatever it is – you want to look your absolute best and know that you look your best, because that’s what gives you confidence. It’s what will make you stand a little taller and feel empowered, all of which increase the chances of getting the deal.
I travel internationally frequently as do many of the team at RFi Group and - to maximise our time - we often fly overnight, land first thing in the morning and head straight into a day of back-to-back meetings. Now, although I do everything I possibly can to ensure I get rest and sleep on the plane, there are a number of factors that I can't control. I can’t control if the flight will be on time, I can’t control clearing customs, how long my luggage will take to come out, the traffic leaving the airport, I can’t control crossing some of the busiest cities on earth in rush hour. But, what I can control is whether I fly with luggage in the hold, what hotel I stay in and the route I use to get there. Here is where the meticulous planning comes in, because it puts me in control. I stay in the same hotel every time I’m in certain cities because I know how long it takes to get there at all times of the day or night, where I know I can always go straight to my room to shower and iron a clean shirt, as well as how long it takes to get from that hotel to the business district in rush hour etc. What I’m getting at here is the more elements I can control, the less stressed I am and therefore the more focused I can be on getting what I want from the meeting. If I know that 60 minutes after landing I am going to walk out of my hotel, showered, suited and booted, in a clean shirt with my favourite tie, then I feel in control and I’m going to have my game face on.
A few years ago, a female member of the team asked for a full-length mirror so she could check what she looked like before she went out to client meetings. At the time, there was much rolling of the eyes and jokey comments BUT, in the end we had to move the mirror to where it was easily accessible for the entire team because it turned out that everyone, male and female, wanted to check what they looked like before they went to a meeting. They wanted to make sure they looked and felt their best, because they can control that, it gives them confidence and that’s what helps get deals done. So, before your next meeting, check yourself in the mirror, get your game face on and if it suits, paint those nails…
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
If you can’t card count, when do you double down?
Founder at RFI Global
April 4, 2017
Growing a fast business can feel a lot like being stuck in a Vegas casino in the early hours of the morning – giddiness, exhaustion, fear, exhilaration, adrenaline when it works, devastation when something fails. Essentially, the concept is the same, in that you’re making multiple bets on differing outcomes and hoping that enough work that you come out ahead. So, without card counting, how do you know when to double down on something and when to quit and walk away?
There comes a point in every project, product build or new business initiative when you need to face the fact that in its current form, it’s not working. At this point you have a number of options: you can carry on as you are, you can double down by increasing your spend and your focus on it, you can pivot or - you can just quit and walk away. Whichever option you choose, here’s the most important thing to remember – you have learned something. It’s crucial that whatever happened, whatever the outcome, you have learnt a lesson and taken it on board – to fail and not to learn anything from the experience or to forget what you have learnt, is foolhardy. So, however the ‘cards’ have fallen, the first thing you must do is work out what you learnt from the experience and what you need to remember going forward.
But still the question remains – what to do?
In the first instance it is crucial to be objective – it’s all too easy, especially when it comes to a project you have invested heavily in from a spend, time or emotional perspective, to let objectivity slide and subjectivity take over – this is an error. Just the same as when you make a mistake, it’s great to get the feedback from the team. What’s working? What are the possible solutions? What went wrong? What could have been done better? What can be salvaged, if anything? However they too can be consumed with subjectivity – no one wants to call time on a project when they have invested so much effort trying to make it work.
One really useful trick is when you’re first starting out on a project - any project - always clearly define what the parameters for success and crucially the parameters for failure are. It’s easy to define success but more important is to define partial success or by another definition, partial failure. Where is the boundary between partial failure and actual failure? What are the soft boundaries and where are the hard boundaries when it comes to spend, timelines, a minimum viable product, etc. While it’s one thing to decide these, what is really important is that they are both written down and communicated to the whole team. Which is important for two key reasons. (1) it holds you accountable to a third party and (2) it ensures that even if you don’t want to call it, your team members have a documented and agreed mechanism for forcing you to face facts.
There’s a third positive psychological reason as well...
Everyone knows that if you want to run a marathon, take part in some fitness event or any other kind of challenge, it’s good to do it for charity. This is not just useful motivation and for a good cause, but it has a more proven benefit – by publicly stating what your goal is and what your intentions are, taps into a deeper human instinct, that the only thing worse than failing is being seen to fail by others in your social group. Humans are social ‘group’ based creatures and psychologically, the motivation to visibly succeed in the eyes of the group will always help drive determination to succeed.
So, whether you double down, pivot or quit, the important thing is to have objective, pre-agreed definitions of not just failure, but the boundary with and definition of partial failure, and to have communicated this in detail at the start of the project to the entire group. Even if you quit at least you will have learnt something.
Who needs card counters anyway?
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Can you avoid valleys of death?
Founder at RFI Global
May 23, 2017
With such a dramatic title, it’s probably best to start by defining a valleys of death and giving credit to Verne Harnish who identified them.
I for one was relieved when I first came across the ‘valleys of death’ analogy, as I realised that they are just part of any fast-growing business and the experiences I was having weren’t unique. As a business grows and scales, the intuitive and logical view is that everything will get easier. Instead of just one salesperson or product person, you’ll have several; instead of one person being responsible for marketing, PR, HR, media etc., you will have several people each dedicated to a single one of these functions and you can play this out across the rest of the business. So, as your team grows it theoretically should all get easier – but, it doesn’t.
I have always maintained that it was much harder to go from 2-5 people than from 5-15. It was again harder to go from 15-20 people to 20-35 and again from 35-40 to 40-60, etc. This is what Verne refers to as the growth paradox – as your business grows in size, it gets more difficult. This is down to a few things; more people being involved in communicating with each other, which, unless the systems are set up correctly in advance, the more chance of miscommunication, of the ball being dropped or, of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. The issue with this is that very rarely can a fast-growing business plan much in advance, let alone communication protocols for the future! Here are just a few of the key perils a fast-growing business that finds itself in a ‘valley of death’ can experience: processes creaking, miscommunication's, never having enough resources, everyone working long hours, QA dropping off.
If you run a fast-growing business then you’ll recognise most of these feel like permanent challenges. However, as you get bigger you expect these to dissipate not increase. So, the question for every business owner is; ‘Can you avoid valleys of death?’ The short answer is no - which is not, I suspect, what you wanted to hear! What you can do as a fast-growing business is skip over the issues or power on through depending which analogy you prefer.
RFi Group has had ten years of continuous 50% year-on-year growth which means that we have managed to do exactly this. In the middle of each financial year, some of the signs mentioned above would start to appear but as revenue, client number and staff numbers grew, we would quickly find that they dissipated again reasonably quickly. At some point through your growth, you will get to a stage where it’s not possible to do this. If you consider that one of the larger valleys is when you go from 70-350 staff and $25M-50M revenue, it’s a pretty impressive business that can power through that valley in a year or less. So, what do you do?
In my experience, you build your infrastructure platform - i.e. bench strength. When you talk about building platforms, people invariably think about IT platforms. While that’s also important, I’m talking about a much more fundamental platform – your team. It doesn’t matter if you have the right strategy, required cash and a great execution plan – it’s all valueless without the right people.
Most businesses that grow quickly do so because they have a unique product or value proposition and a unique/ great customer experience. So, if it’s unique, where do you get your bench strength from? You employ people with the right attitude but most importantly you allow for the time it will take (6-9 months), to train them. This means - and I can’t believe I’m going to put this in writing - you have to slow down. You have to allow the time it takes to up skill them to your product. In an ideal world, you can split the business into BAU to do this and fast growth to carry on driving growth. More frequently, with a business that’s sits in this valley though, you will have a lot of key people straddling both. This will be challenging but don’t worry – every business goes through this growing pain.
Once you’ve built the human infrastructure and knowledge base, you’re ready to power on through to your next stratospheric target and while your strategy becomes more fixed, you’ll need to pivot tactically, my next topic.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Why gazelles should jink but shouldn’t pivot (especially in the valley of death)
Founder at RFI Global
June 6, 2017
So, other than a type of African antelope, what exactly is a gazelle? In business terms, a gazelle is either any business more than five years old growing at 25% yoy, or it is any business between 10-50M turnover. For the sake of argument, I’m going to combine the two and say it is any business with more than 10M in revenue, more than 5 years old and growing at 25% year on year (a.k.a., RFi Group).
Over the last 12 months of writing this blog, most of what I’ve covered has been about the need to be able to pivot - and again, I cannot emphasize how critical this is to any start up or fast-growing business in its infancy. If you can’t pivot and pivot quickly, then you run the real risk of not actually making it. So, why now the 180 and the dictum that you shouldn’t pivot? It’s simply a question of size and maturity.
It’s fine to pivot when there are three of you and you’re trying frantically to develop your MVP. It’s fine to pivot again when there are 20 of you and a competitor seriously threatens your business model. However, once you get to a ‘gazelle’ size although you can’t pivot strategically, you can pivot tactically. To complete my African analogy, think of a gazelle being chased by a hungry lion – the overall strategy of the gazelle remains constant; don’t get caught by the lion as it will eat you. However, the gazelle doesn’t run in a straight line, instead it constantly uses its advantages of speed of turn and nimbleness to jink to the left and to the right, to avoid being caught and eaten by the lion. The exact same applies to a gazelle sized business. The flexibility you learnt as you built the business to this size needs to remain and be constantly utilised, but at a tactical, not a strategic level. If you have a team of more than 50 people, revenues of more than 10M and are growing fast, then the execution of your business plan is paramount. However, you are not yet a business of 50M at which point predictability of future revenue streams and growth become significantly easier as the business matures and becomes more established. Growing up to 10M you have very little ability to accurately forecast events so you need to be able to pivot strategically. Growing from 10-50M you need to be able to forecast a strategic plan, but retain the ability to pivot tactically as events unfold around you.
All of this is especially important when you are navigating your way through a ‘valley of death’ ( see my previous blog). All the challenges this brings from lack of process, diminishing QA, poor communications, under resourcing, makes it feel like something is seriously and significantly wrong and that you should change your strategy. What I will stress here is, as long as the growth and the BAU remains constant, don’t pivot strategically. To pivot at this stage is an admission that something has gone fundamentally wrong and that you need to change your business model. If all the core metrics are still good, then pivot tactically; adapt to the new surroundings, jink from side to side if you like, but stay on course…
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Getting your mojo back
Founder at RFI Global
June 14, 2017
At some point for everyone, irrespective of how relentlessly positive and determined you are, you will reach a point where it feels like you’re wading through treacle with the results to match. It could be you’re not going to hit your sales for the quarter/ year, the latest product you created is good but not great, the latest presentation you gave was mediocre rather than insightful, your team seems low and you can’t seem to enthuse them, it doesn’t matter what your role is – at some point you will feel like the wheels have come off. This happens to most people relatively frequently and when it’s a minor setback or slump it’s just a case of firing yourself or your team up, creating some energy, a positive mental attitude and cracking on with it – onwards and upwards! But, what happens when it’s more than this? What if it’s not just a mediocre presentation, but a key investment presentation and you completely blow it? Instead of just being behind on sales, you lose the company’s biggest account? The product isn’t just ‘not great’ but it’s an absolute shocker that tanks? Your team isn’t feeling just low, they are clearly dysfunctional and you have no idea how it got to this, or how to solve it?
All, or some of these things, are likely to happen at some point. If you work in a fast-growing business which tends by definition to crunch through more stuff, more aggressively, then these are even more likely to happen and more frequently.
So, how do you get your mojo back?
A good comparison here, even for those who aren’t into it, is professional sport. The penalty striker walking up to their position in the final, the goal kicker with seconds on the clock, the athlete lining up their last jump, the tennis player serving for the match – all of these put the subject under huge pressure and intensity. They have practiced this exact procedure thousands of times over the years, but often disaster strikes, they choke and they miss. The 64-thousand-dollar question… how do they come back from that?
One of the best books I have read on this is Dr Dave Alred’s; ‘The Pressure Principle’. Most famous as Jonny Wilkinson’s kicking coach, in his book he talks about the need to focus on the process not the outcome and this is directly applicable to business. In business, the focus is always relentlessly on the outcome; the sales revenue, the great product launch, the outstanding presentation, the super performing team. The problem with this is that when the wheels come off, the instinct is to focus on the outcome and how to get back there. In serious situations where this is challenging, it becomes more and more difficult as you relentlessly narrow your focus to the outcome that you are now continually failing to achieve. As you do so, you become more negative, more stressed, more frustrated and snappy and in short, begin to exhibit all the behaviours that almost guarantee that you will continue to fail.
What in fact you need to do, is take a step back for a moment and focus solely on the process, not the outcome – in fact, as hard as it is, ignore the outcome completely. Every moment of truth – whether it’s a sales target, a great product or a winning penalty kick, has a series of discrete, separate and identifiable steps which need to be followed for it to be completed. These are what you need to focus on.
If it’s sales, you move through lead identification, initial contract, discovery, need matching, problem solving solution matching, to close. If it’s a client presentation, you move through business questions, shaping the project and methodology, analysing results, project completion and developing a clear presentation with key answers to the question. In any of these instances, you must firstly focus on each discrete part and on ensuring that each single part is done to the best of your ability. Secondly, you ignore the outcome and the concept of success and failure, win or lose – you simply focus on going through the steps with a resolute focus on ensuring that each step is performed as perfectly as possible and then irrespective of the outcome, you do it again, and again, and again. As you continue to do it, you stand tall, adopt your posture, focus on a positive/ winning mindset and ignore the outcome and gradually, slowly but surely, you will get your mojo back and the outcome will return. So, how do you ignore the outcome when it defines success or failure? My next topic...
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Why you should ignore KPIs
Founder at RFI Global
June 21, 2017
Years ago - before I smashed my ankle into a thousand pieces surfing - I was training for a marathon.
Every morning I used to run from Sydney’s Bondi Beach to Coogee Beach and back (approx. 18km). This is one of the most beautiful coastal walks in the world and is widely regarded as such. It winds along the cliffs, up and down beaches and gullies, past jaw dropping scenery with the sun rising over the Tasman sea. In winter, you can often see humpback whales breaching as they migrate along the coast. In summer, the waves are filled with early morning surfers (I used to be one of them) and after your run, when you get back at Bondi you can paddle out to catch a few waves before grabbing a coffee and starting the day. Sounds absolutely idyllic doesn’t it? Well, it wasn’t.
I had done a half marathon in 80 minutes previously and so I was determined and pretty confident, I could do a marathon in 2 hours and 45 minutes, which meant I had to be able to do the Bondi to Coogee run in under 65 minutes. For three months, I vainly battled. My time inched down at the speed of drying paint from 67 to 66 ½ to 66 - where it got stuck. No matter how hard I trained and how focused I was on the time, I couldn’t go faster. I tried different types of training methods, but nothing. I knew every single split time at every single turn as I ran the route each day. Each day I would finish exhausted and frustrated. The frustration got to the point where I no longer even remotely enjoyed it. I dreaded getting out of bed each morning knowing that despite my best efforts I wasn’t going to get to my goal. Starting the day frustrated, annoyed and stressed because I wasn’t achieving what I wanted started to affect the rest of my day – putting me in a bad mood, snapping at people, constantly seeing the glass half empty.
One day a friend suggested I stopped looking at my watch and instead looked around me as I ran. After all, this is one of the most beautiful runs you can start the day with in the world – enjoy it! The next day I left my watch and as I ran I looked at my surroundings: the beautiful natural rock sculptures, the rising sun sparkling off the waves, the drop into Mackenzie’s point, the huge surf at Tamarama beach, the cliffs at Bronte, Gordon’s Bay, etc., I didn’t look at my watch or worry about the time splits. As I ran I started to feel an old but unfamiliar feeling – I was actually starting to enjoy myself. Running back down into Bondi with an enormous grin on my face I looked at the time and was stunned – 66 minutes. I had run just as fast as when I manically focused on my time splits and watch. The difference was that instead of being frustrated, annoyed and down, I was energised, happy and positive. Suddenly all the glasses were half full again.
KPIs are important – they enable you to track how you and your business is performing. They are a useful guide. However, that is all they are – a guide. Don’t let them become your rasion d’étre.
For whatever reason, when you took this job or started this business it was exciting, it made you happy, it energised you, it motivated you to leap out of bed in the morning, so, when the numbers aren’t going well, don’t get too hung up on them. Remind yourself why you did it in the first place, start enjoying yourself again and as I said in last week’s blog, focus on the process not the performance, square your shoulders, stand tall and put a huge smile on your face and the numbers will come.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Getting out of the blocks fast
Founder at RFI Global
August 24, 2017
It was with great sadness that I watched Usain Bolt end his amazing career with a slow bronze in London the week before last. Having just returned to the UK after relocating my family from Australia ( hence my blog silence) it was sad to see - as it always is - when any sporting icon begins to lose their position of total dominance. Bolt is famous for starting slowly but quickly picking up pace to steam ahead of the field. Sir Alex Ferguson always said that if Manchester United FC were in 4th or 5th spot by Christmas, then they had a good chance of winning the title because they always finished the season so strongly. So, with that said, does it matter if you have a slow start to the year and slip behind target?
Absolutely.
As I’ve blogged about in the past, the key to any fast-growing business is momentum. Once you have momentum, it takes a life of its own. It doesn’t matter if you're bootstrapping your business or using investor capital, one of the best ways to build momentum is to get out ahead of your target and if your revenue is ahead of target, it starts to have a positive effect on the entire business ( and not just the sales people). Suddenly everything seems possible, everyone is in a great mood, smiling, laughing and most importantly, finding solutions to all the little problems – it drives a ‘can do’ attitude. The whole business has a spring in its step. So, the earlier in the year you can get ahead, the better. The tough part - how do you do it?
The first thing is to be realistic – you can’t drive yourself/ your sales people to a year-end figure and then 24 hours later, at the start of the new year, expect them to come flying out of the blocks. Unlike in premiership football where the players have had 3 months off to rest between seasons, the financial year finishes on Friday and the next one starts on Monday – there is no downtime! Like many things, it all comes down to planning. First you need to finish the year that was. Just like at the end of the calendar year, you should celebrate the year you’ve just had. Whether it was great, mediocre or a car crash of a year, you need to draw a line under it, make sure everyone knows that you appreciate how hard they have all worked and psychologically reset for the new year.
Secondly you need to be on the front foot. From Day #1 of the new year you need to have everyone’s targets done and agreed to by each individual, sales remuneration, incentives, reporting lines, all of it finalised and ready to go. Agreement with each individual is key.If you force a target onto someone who fundamentally disagrees with it, you’re setting both they and you up to fail. Make sure they have all had a two-way performance review, aired grievances, discussed shortcomings and set KPIs and development goals. Make sure you also have any replacements already in place, any promotions confirmed and any dismissals out of the way. There’s nothing worse than seeing an organisation approaching the end of the first quarter and the sales team still isn’t functioning properly because they don’t have their new targets, there are gaps in the team and people haven’t been replaced; it feels and looks listless. Sales teams thrive on energy, so don’t deprive them of it.
Finally, don’t ease up. If you’re the one driving the sales team, there’s a clear and obvious temptation to give yourself and them a mental break. The year has just finished, you’re all exhausted, you’ve got almost 12 months to get to target again, so the temptation is to relax and start slowly – fight it! The reality is people do have to have time off to recuperate and relax, but be smart about it – stagger it, let those ahead of target go on leave early so they’re back and ready to go on day 1. Even with a slimmed down team at the start of the year, make sure you hit the ground running, don’t ease up on their metrics – the extra work you do now in driving them will reap huge benefits when everyone is back on deck and you’re ahead at the end of the first quarter. Once you’re ahead, that’s when you can relax. Most importantly – set the targets correctly. There’s no point setting a low target just so everyone can be ahead at the end of Q1. That outcome means the business isn’t realising its full potential. Set ambitious targets but ones that are just - and only just - within reach. Then when you hit them and get ahead, you’ll really feel like the whole company all has a spring in its step!
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
If you want to change, don’t try to change
Founder at RFI Global
September 7, 2017
Recently a friend of mine realised that since both his sons had left home, theoretically he should now have the time to be spending more quality time with his partner. However, over the years, with both simultaneously focused on their professional careers they had got into an accidental routine of taking it in turns to be at home at the weekend/ during the week, rather than on business travel so that one was always there for the children. However, despite the children having left home and no longer needing them to be there, they were unable to break this pattern. After numerous failed attempts to drastically overhaul their schedules so they could spend more time together, they decided to set aside the first Saturday of each month as their one day together, which was sacrosanct and free from the dreaded ‘schedule creep’. After managing to do this, they expanded to the whole of the first weekend of each month, then to making sure they went away the first weekend of every month and now, as well as this, they pretty much spend most weekends of the month together.
Another colleague spent ages trying to fit a 45-minute exercise session into their daily schedule. As best laid plans usually do, it started well, but between meetings, work and travel the hopeful workout time would quickly disappear. Someone suggested that they start with a 10-min walk/ run each day and see how that went. Gradually the 10 minutes turned into 15, then 20 and finally a set 30 minutes each day, that never gets missed; resulting in a fit, energised and significantly less stressed colleague.
Both these examples are great for any business to look at, because they show the value of small step-by-step changes/ transformation, as opposed to the inherent dangers of attempting wholesale change.
I’ve blogged a lot about the exponential value of marginal gains constantly referring to the work of Sir David Brailsford and Team Sky. In a week where their star rider Chris Froome will probably ( hopefully) win the Tour de France and the Vuelta a Espana back-to-back and achieve sporting history and greatness, it feels appropriate to refer to them again. As Sir David says, innovation is about continuous improvement rather than major step change, by a relentless focus on marginal gains; from the optimum temperature of cycling shorts, to the mattresses and pillows that provide each rider with the best night’s sleep. As well as allowing a continuous focus on improvement, innovation and transformation, marginal gains are also significantly easier to achieve. Broken windows theory/ the tipping point/ marginal gains – whatever theory you subscribe to, the value to a fast-growing business is the same. Start small, develop a culture of small wins, of marginal gains and over time you will affect significant and continuing change. Whether it’s for your business, your team, or you as an individual – work out what you want to achieve, as well as each and every micro step that you need to complete in order to get there. Then, when you have a small, not insurmountable and importantly achievable goal, begin and when you have conquered that and created either the start of a new habit, or the beginning of some momentum, you will be on your way to change.
If you want to change don’t try to change radically, change at the edges first…
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
The value of getting sh*t done
Founder at RFI Global
September 20, 2017
Global Financier JP Morgan was once shown an envelope containing a ‘guaranteed formula for success’. He agreed that if he liked the advice inside, he would pay $25,000USD for its contents.
Morgan opened the envelope, read it, nodded and paid. What did the advice say?
1. Every morning, write a list of things that need to be done that day;
2. Do them
In no uncertain terms, getting stuff done and being reliable is enormously powerful in business. In any team, especially a fast-growing one, people are working under huge pressure with constant looming deadlines and never enough hours in the day. You absolutely have to rely on people to do what they said they were going to do, when they said they were going to do it by. If you can’t rely on your colleagues, then invariably you will end up doing some of their stuff yourself and as soon as this happens, you are no longer doing your own job, meaning not only are you now under more pressure, but the job you are doing for your company/ business/ division is now not being done as effectively and as well as it should be.
The problem with this is that as reasonable humans we are understanding so when someone says, “I’m sorry, I got caught up in stuff and didn’t have chance to get to it today, I’ll try and look at it tomorrow” we shrug our shoulders sympathetically and don’t make an issue. After all, there will only be a slight delay in the work, no big deal, right…? Wrong. This phrase is way more dangerous than you might think. Yes, there will only be a slight delay in the project but imagine if it was the other way around. Imagine how much more effective you would be if you never had to worry about someone doing it when they said they would. Not only would you be able to focus solely on your role/ your part, but the comfort from the certain knowledge that your colleagues were doing their part would motivate you to ensure that you were also doing the best possible job within the time frame so you didn’t let them down. As a team and as a business your overall performance would significantly improve.
If you think of the great sport teams this becomes visually more striking. Think Barcelona FC’s team or the New Zealand All Blacks; the reason Xavi and Iniesta and Messi are so great, is that they all know exactly where the other will be to pass to without even looking - they can rely on each other. It would never occur to Messi to think ‘is there any point in me dribbling all the way up field in case the others don’t bother moving with me?’ No. He doesn’t need to. Unfortunately, in business, this happens all the time. The same with the All Blacks – whenever one makes a line break he doesn’t need to look left or right to see if there is anyone to pass to because he knows there will be a teammate on either shoulder – he can rely on them to do their jobs. The reliance on teammates is more than simply a nice to have or even a basic requirement – in the hands of the All Blacks or Barcelona FC, their complete reliance and certain faith in each other’s work rate enables them to keep sustained, non-stop pressure on the opposing team until they wilt, gaps appear and they can score. So, the reliance that they have on each other not only becomes part of their performance, but a key driver of their ability to almost always win and to be considered the greatest.
In my view, it should be exactly the same way in business, but unfortunately, it isn’t. The ability to rely on your teammates/ work colleagues to do their job in tandem with you doing yours to the best of their ability and within the agreed time frames, isn’t just a basic requirement or a nice to have – it is part and parcel of what drives your performance and is fundamental to your ability as a group to exceed expectations and to win. So, the next time a colleague shrugs apologetically and says they didn’t have a chance to get to it when they said they would, don’t just let it go. You’re human so be understanding but don’t forget – they’re affecting the performance of both your team and your business! Having said that, I am one of the worst offenders at this so I am writing this blog to put myself under pressure to get better – and I’ll let my colleagues judge the success of that 😊
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Make sure you clean the teaspoons
Founder at RFI Global
September 27, 2017
Last week, one of our research directors in the London office upbraided me, suggesting the number of unwashed teaspoons in the kitchen sink was directly correlated to my now being permanently located in the London office and drinking voluminous cups of tea!
Perhaps I should add a little context as to why this is important.
After founding RFi Group 11 years ago, I have recently relocated from our Sydney office, where across 1000 m2 we have 80 staff, numerous meetings rooms, internal training rooms, a conference centre, bathrooms, showers, bike rooms etc and most importantly, a large kitchen with a suite of dishwashers; to our London office, which is closer to 200 m2.
The UK team is currently 30 people but growing rapidly and therefore crammed into a tiny office, with a miniscule kitchenette ( with no dishwasher), a single bathroom and a large cupboard moonlighting as a ‘meeting room’, not enough desk to go round and competition to get onto the wifi!
The advantages are; you don’t need to try and bring energy into the room, it is full of energy, noise and dynamism – a classic start-up like environment, as compared to the large corporate space we inhabit in Sydney ( which is lovely – don’t get me wrong). Culture is like a house plant – it needs constant attention, tending and care otherwise you turn around one day to discover its died quietly in the corner. This is not an issue in a small office. Secondly, I am back sitting on the floor in the middle of all the mayhem. I did this for 10 years in Sydney and only on the last year succumbed to pressure and sat in a big glass, goldfish bowl - aka an office. I read once that Michael Bloomberg refused to sit in an office but always had everyone in open plan seating and after 12 months in an office, I couldn’t agree more! Whether you’re running a team, a business, or a company - you absolutely need to be in the middle of it to understand the detail of what is going on – the atmosphere, the buzz, the general vibe of the team is critical – all a glass wall or door does, is cut you off from knowing what is essential and from your colleagues. Aside from the negative cultural effects of this, you’re missing the detail and the detail is key… which brings me back to the teaspoons.
As a dual Australian-British citizen, I have to drink tea when I’m outside Australia. This is because, as an Australian, I know that only in Australia is there good, quality, coffee ( sorry Italy, but it’s true) and as an Englishman, I am culturally required to only drink tea during the day. So, why is it so important to make sure I clean the teaspoons?
One of the many interesting things about the New Zealand All Blacks ( I tried to get through this blog without a sporting analogy, but again, I am Australian) is that after each test match, once they’ve showered and changed and before they do anything else, each All Black grabs a broom and sweeps up the dressing room floor. They don’t let anyone else do it - but each test player from of one of the world’s greatest and most successful sporting teams - pitches in and sweeps the floor. The reason for this is humility. Humility is a key ingredient to success. On the flip side a lack of humility i.e. arrogance, often leads to downfall. Think Jeff Skilling at Enron, Fred Goodwin at RBS, AIG, Travis Kalanick at Uber, Hillary Clinton in the US election, David Cameron and Brexit, the England football team at any point in the last 20 years (!), the list goes on. A lack of humility leads to not being across the detail, not being part of the team, no longer being close to the team, to your colleagues and importantly, to your customers. Someone once said to never ask someone to do something that you wouldn’t do yourself and that is one of the keys to leadership. Lead from the front, sweep the floor and sweat the details. How often do you hear, “He/ She is all high and mighty and thinks it’s beneath them.”? In dysfunctional teams, all the time. Crucially, not only are you not aware of any unhappy customers/ processes not working/ or product imperfection, but your dysfunctional team is unlikely to alert you to it.
So, practice humility, stay grounded and be part of the team - as well as leading it.
When visiting NASA, John F Kennedy asked a man sweeping the floor what he did. He replied, “I’m helping put a man on the moon.” Any team only works well when everyone feels that they are part of that team and contributing equally to the team – so, if you are the leader, or one of the stars, practice humility and make sure you clean up the teaspoons.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
If you neglect the house plants they will wither
Founder at RFI Global
October 4, 2017
In last week’s blog, I said a business’s culture was like a house plant – and if you neglect it, one day you will turn around to find it withered and lifeless. Since that post I’ve had a number of responses asking me to elaborate. So here goes…
Culture is great when you’re small – it’s fun, it’s easy and it’s incredibly visible with a small team, so you can keep a close eye on it. However, as you rapidly grow your culture needs to adapt to survive. I’m not talking about fundamental changes, or altering the key vales of your enterprise – these should remain the same. Just as your processes and internal communications develop and mutate as you grow, so does your culture and most importantly, how you communicate it and who’s in charge of it. I wrote last year that as a business owner there was only one person in charge of the culture and that was you, but as you grow what happens when you get too busy? And I don’t mean too busy to care or to be involved ( that would be disastrous) but too busy to be driving it daily throughout the organisation. While you can and should be the figurehead of the culture, how do you stay on top of the details?
The first key is to have someone wholly responsible for it. I remember visiting a large organisation a few years ago, with over 2,000 employees and being amazed at meeting their ‘Best places to work’ officer and her entire ‘Best places to work’ team - here was somewhere that took culture seriously! Only large organisations can afford an entire team solely focused on this but with all the online tools, social media and software available these days, any size organisation has no excuse for not having a well-developed cultural program and a chief cultural officer, even if it’s part of their existing role.
At its heart, a company’s culture should enable your team to enjoy coming to work, to be challenged at work and have the ability to develop their capabilities and career, to be recognised for the work that they do and to feel they have the right to contribute, to feel empowered and to most importantly have fun. The greater/ better the culture, the more your team will enjoy doing their work and the more they enjoy it, the better your company/ team and product will become.
The story of Zappos, ‘Delivering Happiness’ by Tony Hsieh is a great read and there are many others along similar veins, but the key questions you need to ask yourself regarding your team, remain the same:
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Do they have fun, simple values they aspire to?
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Do these values underpin all that you do?
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Are the exhibition of these values celebrated and rewarded in a regular, fun way?
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Do they all have the opportunity to communicate when they feel these values are not being followed/ can be improved on?
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Are there open and direct lines of communication, as well as confidential channels they all feel comfortable with?
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Are the values constantly and continuously communicated?
At RFi Group we have monthly awards, weekly nominations and call outs, employee engagement teams, birthday’s off, Friday drinks, charitable volunteering with your colleagues, a couple of sports teams, trivia nights... the list goes on. All of these initiative - as well as being a lot of fun - are designed to ensure the answers to the above questions are all a resounding “yes!” and to ensure that they are constantly checked, monitored and evaluated. If your team culture is always being watched, developed, celebrated and enhanced, then - just like a house plant that is tendered, watered and fed - it will grow and flourish. If your culture is growing and flourishing then so will your team and your business 😊
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Why entrepreneurs and leaders should think like parents
Founder at RFI Global
March 22, 2018
It was with great pride that recently, on International Women’s Day, RFi Group posted this infographic: (see below)
Since then we have been inundated with messages via social media and face to face and while many were complimentary - some of them, rather depressingly, have had a kind of confused bafflement to them and have asked the simple but perplexing question of; “Why be gender diverse – what’s the point?”.
Putting aside the vast volumes of research that prove without doubt the benefits to any organisation of gender diversity, I am reminded of a recent TEDtalk by the excellent Simon Sinek on leadership. In it, he points out that if as a parent you hit hard times you wouldn’t put one of your children up for adoption or sell them so that the rest of you could continue your current lifestyle; So, why when companies hit hard economic times, do leaders lay off employees? Instead he believes leaders need to protect their communities and make employees feel safe, which you’re not doing if you make swathes of people redundant whenever the hard times hit. This is a great point and I think you can take this parenting metaphor and apply it equally well to the benefits of gender diversity.
Many people feel that children growing up should have both male and female role models. The reason for this is that it provides a balanced set of a viewpoints for the child as they are growing up and hopefully, ultimately, produces a well-rounded balanced adult. As a parent I know how crucial this is. Whenever there is an issue with any of my children, I know that my wife and I will often have very different views on how to deal with it. Sometimes one of us will have a great idea and the other not a clue. Sometimes we will have almost polar opposite views. Sometimes our views will instantly be in agreement. Whichever way it is, we then - through discussion - arrive at what we feel is the best outcome for our child.
As an entrepreneur and leader, you spend most of your time dealing with problems – some small, some big – but most days are a never-ending stream of issues that need dealing with. If you are in a fast-growing business, then the speed at which they arrive and need to be dealt with quickly with an optimum outcome increases and so too does the pressure to get it right. So surely it makes sense to have as many views/ solutions as possible to achieve this. Why would you through lack of gender diversity instantly cut off 50% of the potential solutions?
As a parent you don’t ever say to your partner: “I’m sorry, but I have no interest in your view on this, I am going to make this decision by myself regarding our child/ children without any consultation with you”. Aside from not wanting to seriously annoy your partner, the reason we don’t do this is that it would be incredibly foolish and short sighted. It would also potentially produce an extremely one dimensional, narrow-minded child. So, why do we do the equivalent all the time in business and think it’s ok?
Every time we have an all-male board, an all-male management team, a male leader who doesn’t receive or listen to any female viewpoint, we are placing ourselves in a similar situation as the parent who says to the other parent “I don’t care about your thoughts or input on anything to do with raising our children!”. We don’t do this as it produces less than optimum solutions and can produce dysfunctional children and surely, for the same reason, we don’t want to produce less than optimum solutions for our business and ultimately produce dysfunctional teams/ businesses?
Gender Diversity is good for many reasons and diversity of thought is critical. Over thousands of years as humans we have learnt that diversity of thought produces the best, most balanced solutions to challenges of raising children, hence the well-known African proverb: 'It takes a village to raise a child'. For exactly the same reasons, gender diversity in business will give it an advantage over other non-diverse businesses, producing wider, better, more balanced solutions to every problem, as well as more balanced and effective teams.
If you like this blog, find it useful, or think it’s interesting, please share it and if you have any questions at all please feel free to comment – I am always open to a conversation.
Time for a personal change and why I’m so proud of our culture
Founder at RFI Global
September 28, 2023
After 17 adrenalin-fuelled years as the founder and CEO of RFI Global I am stepping down at the end of the week. It is almost 17 years exactly to the day since I sat down at the desk in my spare room in Bondi Beach and started calling banks to introduce RFI and to try and work out what value we could potentially offer. Since that day, it’s been awesome, exhilarating and non-stop. Fun at times, exhausting at others, but always a fantastic roller coaster ride as we’ve grown across countries, regions and industry segments to become a global leader in data and insights across financial services with now over 500 key banking clients globally. While I could write pages on lessons learned, challenges overcome and achievements and milestones I’ll restrict this to the one thing I am most proud of which is our culture. While there are many components to this, the key parts are a culture of no blame and gender diversity and equality – RFI is and has always strived to be 50/50 Male/Female at every level throughout the business and this I believe has been the key to our growth and success.
As you build a fast-growth business, I’ve learned that your ability to continue to grow at pace is determined by how quickly you can spot and solve problems. You have to accept that the faster you grow the more problems/ mistakes you will encounter as a function of that fast growth. Therefore, it’s no good throwing your toys out of the pram whenever these situations occur (as they inevitably will). Instead, you must understand that your ability to continue to grow is defined simply by how quickly you can spot these mistakes and then how quickly you can solve them. While it is a lot easier to write this on a piece of paper than to achieve it consistently over 17 years there are two key components.
Firstly, you must create a culture where it is ok to make mistakes and where no blame is attached. Ideally you want to create a culture where everyone constantly strives to improve things, to be constantly curious, to try to always achieve marginal gains, secure in the knowledge that only some of them will work. If your team aren’t willing to constantly try new things, to try and improve processes, products, the client experience, things will quickly start to unravel and fall apart. For this constant curiosity and experimentation to work you must have a culture of no fear of blame. The challenge for businesses is that when you grow quickly things need constant changing – processes become obsolete, communication plans no longer work or are no longer appropriate, controls and QA gets confused and ownership issues occur as people change roles – in fast growth businesses these things will happen. If the cultural norm is that people instantly call out a problem or error then, not only do you have immediate visibility of it, but you also have more brains working on a solution or potential solution…. which leads me to my second attribute to growth and success - why diversity and especially gender diversity is so key.
Genders look at problems and possible solutions differently and this has been well documented in all types of research. I’ve written before on why this is so important (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/diversity-imperative-why-small-businesses-ignore-gender-charles-green/?trackingId=rrwVpI5QRvyvcKjyuNJYYg%3D%3D) but in its most simple form the more potential solutions and diverse opinions you have to address an issue, the more likely you will eventually arrive at the optimum solution. Over the last 17 years there have been countless times when confronted with challenges and problems from the minor to the major it is our gender diversity throughout the business and the freedom and acceptance for everyone to voice their different and sometimes conflicting thoughts that has resulted in an eventual optimum outcome or solution. The numerous benefits of gender diversity and equality have been thoroughly documented but even if you were crazy enough to choose to ignore all those then I would strongly recommend to every entrepreneur and business owner to focus on this one indisputable fact – gender diversity and gender equality will ensure that throughout your business at every level on a daily basis you are solving problems with the optimum solutions and growing as fast as you can. If you want fast growth, then focus on gender diversity and equality. Our continual focus on creating a blame-free culture and on striving to maintain as much as we can a 50/50 M/F ratio throughout the business at every level is without doubt the achievement of which I am most proud.
Although I’m stepping down as CEO, I will continue to work at RFI focusing on our key global and strategic accounts and on some special projects. RFI has always been a both a client led business and a team driven business. The number of clients I would like to thank for their invaluable feedback over the years are too numerous to do so individually, as are all the team members past and present for their incredible hard work and dedication, but thank you all - it’s been an amazing journey! I look forward to welcoming our new CEO Matt next week and continuing to help grow RFI globally into the leading insight and data provider in financial services 😊