It’s the people stupid!

I focused last weeks blog entry on the recruitment process and promised to follow-up this week on what happens after someone accepts our offer to join.

I’m completely biased as I believe that I now work for one of the best businesses on the planet. I’m not suggesting its perfect as that would be awfully boring. Instead it is an incredibly exciting place to spend my time and somewhere bursting with opportunities.

I guess it’s true to say that our track record and enthusiasm creates a good gravitational pull for talented people and most who interview with us are keen to become part of the business and journey. Having said that it is still a big decision to invest your time and entrust your career to our company. That’s why we like people to feel entirely comfortable before making that commitment.

A number of things contribute to people making a decision to both join us and then stay around:

• Exciting work
• Career development
• Reputation
• People
• Financial reward
• Work-life balance

Focusing on just one or two of these areas is a bit like trying to drive a car without using the steering wheel, brake, accelerator, gears and clutch. You don’t tend to get very far!

Most companies claim the most important bit of their business is its people. In reality many fail to understand that People doing exceptional work create exceptional companies!

A few years ago a highly respected global business withdrew all bonus schemes and salary increases as part of an initiative to reduce costs. Not surprisingly it had a major impact on morale and staff attrition rates. The good news didn't stop there either, it soon became public knowledge that the executives taking this action had been rewarded with promotions and an all expenses trip to Florida!

There are situations where we all need to pull together to get past a few challenges. It may mean working late, sacrificing a weekend to help out a client or accepting difficult market conditions. If you are going to ask your people to take a hit then be prepared to lead from the front. This can be as simple as getting some pizza delivered in at the weekend or taking a bit of financial pain along with your people. When the conditions change it is also important to reward those most affected first.

From time to time things don’t go to plan and its here that the truly great companies will differentiate from the herd. Do your people feel utterly comfortable to put their hand up and admit responsibility for a problem, and if need be ask for help to make good? I remember working in a bank many years ago when a small misunderstanding brought a system down. The senior manager went stomping round the floor demanding to know who was responsible. Not surprisingly no hands immediately shot up and it took a long time to fix the problem!

We recently had a problem getting a client plugged into their network. Not actually our fault but we always make it clear that we are their single ‘throat to choke’ hence there is no-one to hide behind. Only a very small number of people were affected in this case but it was very visible and embarrassing. The whole thing was also made worse in that one of our newest people just happened to be in charge of this project. Instead of burying our heads in our hands and pointing fingers we pulled together a short term solution while we fixed the network. The client was kept well briefed throughout and by way of apology we arranged lunch for the two people in the office the following week.

Some companies hammer into their people the need to bring them solutions not just problems. The key is to do this continually regardless of circumstances. The only way to build this behaviour is by being as passionate about your people as you are about your clients!

If we make sure that our people are treated well, get good salaries, a great work-life balance and loads of support, both day by day and in terms of career development. If we then focus on client satisfaction above all else and stand alongside them through thick and thin guess what happens?

Next Blog.....
A topic particularly close to my heart is mobile working. There is such a rapid pace of innovation here and it is starting to have a tremendous impact on our working lives.

Recruiting Great People!

As a business we’re now going through a period of rapid growth which means we need to find people with the right skills and experience and fit for our company. I appreciate it’s a stressful activity for interviewees but it’s also a tough time for the interviewer. I hope that a few of the readers of this blog are potential MINX candidates and recruiters!

I break out the recruitment process into three stages:

• Finding
• Interviewing
• The First Week

Finding

Throughout the day we field several calls from recruiters and direct queries from candidates so here is a bit of guidance. The majority have no real interest in our business or the way we work. If they did we sure wouldn’t have to wade through CV’s with appalling grammar, typos or candidates fielded that are just inappropriate. We’re polite but don’t give much airtime to these approaches.

We're also not interested in candidates that have or are being sent round to many dissimilar businesses for interviews, we don’t treat cattle this way so why do we do it to highly talented and valuable people? We’re looking for people who understand our business and feel that they would fit in and make a big contribution.

We treat our recruiters as close trusted partners not suppliers and share our business growth plans to help them understand our needs. I like to feel that I can sit down for a chat without being constantly pressured to place people. Equally we have people who express an interest in us but are not yet ready to make a change. We keep in close contact and do not apply any pressure, they may turn out to be a great recruit at some point in the future or simply remain as a good friend.

Interviewing

People who turn up on time, look smart and are fully briefed impress us. It’s the exact same way we want to see them handle our clients. We also fully understand that there may be valid reasons for no-shows as in many cases our candidates are currently working for other businesses and their immediate priorities are higher than ours. There is nothing more irritating than a no-show. All we expect is a call or e mail as early as possible to let us know and then we can re-work plans.

In one recent case Tom, who looks after our Consulting business, had a candidate call to say he had been pulled into a major piece of work at his current employer and was both tired and scruffy. He apologised and asked if we wanted to re-schedule. Tom told him to come in as planned. Despite some very strong coffee there were probably a couple of matchsticks holding his eyes open! It was only fair to then let him get some sleep, throw a suit on and come back in. The second interview was really to give him a chance to ask us a few questions and confirm the fit in. One hour after the interview Tom got on the phone to hire him!

CV’s are a pretty poor benchmark for candidate suitability. In 2006 ResumeDoctor.com reported that nearly 43% out of 1,000 of CV’s surveyed included incorrect statements. This was backed up by nearly 400 HR execs in a recent study by the Society of Human Resource Management. We also have to appreciate that CV’s represent past achievements and do not help explain how the candidate works with people or their future potential. Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs lacked college degrees or senior management experience and Steve Ballmer dropped out of his MBA programme!

The US army uses an interesting approach to leadership selection based on ‘Be, Know, Do’. The technical Know skills are obviously key to Do the job but equally important is an underlying set of traits to Be the role holder of the post you’re interviewing for. This is where we have to look a bit deeper to see if the candidate will fit in with the team and has a passion for the role. I’m not suggesting that this is a bullet proof approach to selection. We have made, and probably will continue to make, the occasional blunder but it has resulted in some really talented people joining MINX.

The First Week

The first day in a new job and probably the first week is a stressful experience, lots of new people, different processes, standards and doubts. It's an important time to re-assure and impress our new colleague. I’m not going to pretend that we’re great at this because we’re not and have been working hard to get much better.

The first week should be fully scheduled with day 1 covering all the basics – kit, system access and basic training on systems. Alongside this we need to introduce all the key people including senior management. I also make a point of wherever possible taking anyone new out to lunch along with their direct manager. It’s important to re-enforce that we’re a close knit community and easy to approach. I also believe that it is important to get them working on some client focused work as early as possible to give them the buzz associated with making a positive contribution to the business in that first week.

Next Blog.....

I will probably continue on with this theme for one more entry with a bit more on our approach to people management post the first week.

The Final Three Feet!

The term Customer historically derives from "custom," meaning "habit"; a customer was someone who frequented a particular shop, who made it a habit to purchase goods there, and with whom the shopkeeper had to maintain a relationship to keep his or her "custom," meaning expected purchases in the future.

In a 2005 survey of several thousand customers in the US and UK 49% of respondents claimed that poor service had led them to change service provider in at least one industry during the previous year. A more recent UK survey in 2006 identified that 65% had taken their business elsewhere after a bad service experience. 25% of those movers expressed intent to never return to the previous service provider!

The stats are pretty shocking when you take into account that it probably works out at 7-10x more expensive to acquire new customers than retain existing. I guess it is also worth bearing in mind that a customer is far more likely to invest in a big purchase with an existing trusted supplier than a new one.

The importance of great customer relationships is recognised industry wide but we tend to emphasise the wrong approaches and look for a silver bullet in technology instead of people. The CRM technology market place grew from $23 billion in 2000 to $76 billion by 2005 and forecasts 11% pa annual growth thru to 2014!

Ironically much of the investment has been focused on reducing the costs of servicing customers, not building new or deeper relationships. Before managing a customer relationship you need to first build that relationship and that is not where data-mining or behavioural tracking technologies offer much help.

Jan Carlzon who led the turnaround of the Scandinavian airline SAS commented that customer’s feelings about a company originate in the many small interactions including reservations, checking-in, boarding and the way they are served a drink or meal.

It’s useful to look to the retailing industry where the client interaction is at it’s most important to start to understand how the successful businesses create a great customer relationship. A particularly good example here is Starbucks. Things have been rough in this sector recently but it is worth bearing in mind that since 1992 Starbucks stock has risen a staggering 5,000%. One of its key differentiators in a heavily saturated and competitive marketplace is its ability to create a highly personalized and satisfying customer experience.

Starbucks recognizes that its customers expect any business to respond to routine requests but that when a business “colours outside the lines”, customers respond with loyalty and increased sales. One customer recalls calling into a local Starbucks an hour before opening time by mistake and resigned to a long wait in the car park. The door then opened and he was offered a coffee, as he put it, “Starbucks gets it”.

In an industry where we focus on high technology products it’s important to look a bit deeper. Unified Communication solutions are there to catalyse those human interactions, why else do we invest so much money into creating AV solutions that so closely simulate a face to face discussion and phone systems with a high quality service. The “final 3 feet” as one consultant referred to it is the most important area for us to focus on!

One Week In

I made a promise to myself to update this blog each week so apologies that I'm a few days late this week. In my defence I'll blame the pile of work that hit my desk after we completed our acquisition with Insight along with a bout of man flu!

In my last entry I talked about the decision we took as a management team to integrate the business with Insight to help accelerate growth plans and leverage some unique opportunities presented by our individual business models. One week in is probably a good time to write about how things have been going and our outline plans for the future.

Anyone who has gone through this kind of exercise will tell you that it is pretty gruelling. Essentially you need to do a hectic day job and take on a pile of additional integration work. On top of all this you also need to spend a lot of time with your people, partners and clients to ensure they both understand what is going on and feel an active part of it.

The reaction from our people has been fantastic, this deal makes an awful lot of sense and they are really fired up by the benefits of being part of a hugely successful global and agile business along with the opportunities now ahead of us.

Our partners are also equally excited by the changes. They see the potential for a much broader and more interesting relationship. The reaction from within Cisco has been incredible at all levels. We recently sat down to review our unique shared services partnership with Cisco and it was probably one of the most constructive meetings we have had to date. MINX is now seen as a major business partner and our working relationship is becoming closer and more collaborative.

We have invested a lot of care and attention in explaining the additional benefits that the change to our company will bring to our clients. Without exception they understand and fully support the changes. We will continue to focus on understanding our clients businesses and in delivering exceptionally high quality solutions to their requirements. In addition we will start to provide a deeper and a broader range of services and cover more geographies. It’s all upside!

I guess you could say that the future is bright, the future is Orange ;-)

Thowing a curved ball (Insight acquires MINX)

I was stuck in a garage getting a pair of rather well worn front tyres replaced just before we completed the acquisition of MINX by Insight. John was keeping me updated on progress re the paperwork via phone and it gave me a bit of time to reflect on my time with MINX and future plans.

I joined the company just over a year ago to work with a bunch of very smart people led by a highly charismatic and talented MD. My original role title was 'Technical Director' which was great for the ego but was not how I wanted us to shape this part of the business hence the change to Client Services Director the same week!

We have created a fantastic services focused business. Our Customer Sat scores are consistently running at 95% as scored by our clients and Cisco have us pegged at 'Customer Satisfaction Excellence'. Just as importantly we have great customer relationships. We don't just deliver stated requirements, we work hard to understand our clients business, drivers, aspirations and constraints. We then add in our own deep understanding of networking technologies and their best practical application to maximise ROI. We strive, wherever possible, to exceed our clients expectations!

I guess my favourite bit of customer feedback in recent weeks was from a City business that wanted to test the MINX 'hype' by getting us to run a major phone system upgrade. Having experienced a number issues to date with previous services partners they were prepared for the worst! The end of project summary read as follows: 'The only problem was.......there was no problem!' Decisions often have to be taken after we sign-off on requirements. Our project managers and highly experienced consultants work closely throughout the project with our clients to ensure that the right decisions are made and we deliver a great end result.

I'm incredibly proud of the close relationships we have built up with Cisco and our other trusted partners. All of who share our focus on integrity, quality and high customer satisfaction. It really has been a team effort that has helped us to differentiate MINX in a very competitive marketplace.

We have been able to attract some incredibly talented people to come work with us over the past few years. We recognise the long term benefits of investing in people and create fully funded and custom fit development programmes. MINX has a remarkably flat company structure and we are all held responsible for maximising the quality of our end product . We also look after each other, at times people do drop the ball and it's important that we're all there to help out and turn any problems into a solution.

It was interesting to look at the many different reports of our decision to integrate MINX with Insight. They all seemed to simply repeat the standard communications that were issued. These communications are intended to satisfy the various legislative requirements around company reporting but it might be useful to share my personal perspective here.

Looking ahead we had a number of options on how we could grow the business. Over the past year our revenue and margins had been steadily increasing along with our client base. We could have continued to grow the business organically albeit with a very tough market very slowly for the next 12-18 months. Another option would be to throw a bit of a curved ball (hence the image to the left!).

We have had a close relationship with Insight for a long time and I guess you could even argue that we had been dry running this for a while before we considered formalising the arrangement. They have a fantastically successful business and are a lot of fun to work with. The logic behind our decision to integrate is absolutely brain dead simple, put a business with a large sales team and highly sophisticated operations back-end together with a business that works closely with its clients to create large complex programmes of change. The only question really is why didn't we do it much earlier!

Will we get lost in the bowels of a large corporate and lose the agility and client focus that has helped MINX become so successful? If we were simply merging two similar businesses that might have been a risk. Insight and MINX have great chemistry but are very different businesses, there is little if any overlap. Stuart Fenton the EMEA President and Angelo Di Ventura the UK MD are on exactly the same page as John, Clinton, Chris and myself. We're going to build on the existing model and dramatically accelerate our existing growth plans.

MINX was a great place to be last week and it is an even better place to be today!

A better way to work

In spring 2003, 17.7% of men and 26.7% of women were employed with flexible working arrangements in the United Kingdom, (Office for National Statistics 2003).

In 2003 the UK Government introduced legislation that gave parents of children under 6 or the parents of disabled children under 18, the right in law to request a flexible working arrangement from their employer. A survey in 2005 by the National Office of Statistics showed that 71% of female workers and 60% of male workers were aware of the rights created under the 2003 legislation. Between 2003 and 2005 more than 14% of all workers had requested a change to flexible working. From 6 April 2007 the law will extend the right to request flexible working to careers of adults.

For employers, flexible working can aid the recruitment and retention of staff. It can also help provide staff cover outside normal working hours and reduce the need for overtime. Additionally flexible working can also improve the provision of equal opportunities to staff unable to work standard hours.

Flexible working can give employees greater freedom to organize their working lives to suit personal needs. In addition, travelling can be cheaper and easier if it is out of peak time.

MINX Flexible Working

We support flexible working for a number of reasons:

• Improves the morale of our people and improves the quality of life for their families by providing them with greater control over travelling and work-life balance
• Removes excessive hours working culture driven by overtime, hence our people are less at risk from stress and accidents through fatigue
• Allows us to fully leverage and demonstrate to our clients that we ‘walk the talk’ by using collaborative and mobile worker technologies
• Reduces our overall carbon footprint by doing away with travel where not necessary. Where travel is required it can in many cases take place outside of peak hours which is a much nicer time to take a train!

Changing to flexible working means taking a very different approach to the way we measure productivity. Coming into the office at 9am and leaving at 5pm is a pretty poor way to control the amount of work we do. At MINX we look at the amount of time we can spend productively across a month and break it out into billable and non-billable activities. Our time management systems are web based hence people can log on and update their task information throughout the day and their managers can keep on top of work assignments, progress and ensure our people are not working excessive hours or are under-utilized.

It’s a much more effective way to get the most out of your work force and more closely reflects the way people want to work!

Shamrock Organisations

Ten years ago Charles Handy in his seminal book, The Age of Unreason declared that we humans were entering an era of rapid and highly discontinuous change.

In such a world - of unreasonable, discontinuous change, all the established rules are vulnerable. We need to respond with discontinuous, upside-down thinking. We need new kinds of organizations, new approaches to work, new types of schools, and new ideas about being in the world.

Alongside a number of interesting paradigms including 'inverted doughnuts' and 'portfolio lives' he talked extensively about 'Shamrock Organisations'. Essentially the idea is that each business should only do the things that represented core capabilities, everything else should be shared out to specialists. It's an incredible concept and 6 years on is evan more valid

Many companies use these principles today through partner alliances bound by Non Disclosure Agreements (NDA's) and inter-company service level agreements. My personal view is that this is akin to signing a pre-nuptial agreement and a contract for services prior to getting married. It doesn't bode too well if you have to plan for failure at the start!

MINX is a rapidly growing business with a reputation for delivering great service at incredibly high levels of quality. I'm really proud of our achievements and we constantly strive to improve and broaden our capabilities.

Frequently our customers ask us to help them with things that are simply outside our core field of expertise. It's a fantastic compliment and shows real trust in our business. We have to make sure that we can fully support their requirements and deliver a result that both the client and MINX can be proud of.

We have been truly fortunate over the years in finding great businesses partners where the management teams have similar values to MINX. We don't need to worry that they will look after our customers and we fully reciprocate this when they ask for our help. This close working partnership has to be seen as a long game, not project by project. At times we will forward an opportunity where we know a partner has a real good chance of securing some business evan where our company has been ruled out, it's what friends do and it pays dividends for our relationship and the consideration is often reciprocated.

A key part of a great relationship is monogomy, if we have several partners in any one area it's going to create tensions as we choose who to work with on a particular project. We can also fully expect the same treatment back! It's much more effective to have one close partnership than several weak relationships.

It's also important to accept that, occasionally, things go wrong and this is where a good partnership can make all the difference. We can be open, honest and focus on making good rather than pulling out the T&C's. We had one example recently where client, partner and MINX all under-estimated the amount of training required post-implementation. The project had been signed-off but the client was experiencing a degree of pain. We arranged a three way call, route-caused the symptoms and immediately planned out additional on-site support from MINX and top-up training from our partner. The client was not asked to pay any additional costs and we didn't get into a game of contract trumps with the partner which would probably have worked out far more expensive!

Delivering Great Projects

Over the years an awful lot of literature and technology has sprung up to help us manage work more effectively but it's important to remember that all we're trying to do here is deliver a great end result to a client. The most elaborate project schedule and comprehensive project methodology is pointless if the end result fails to delight the client!

In one of my previous roles I used to look after an awful lot of concurrent projects, the last time I counted they numbered 816! Each followed a rigorous internal set of standards intended to assure success. I also had a large team (around 100 Project Manager's) to look after these projects, each had been accredited and was reasonable experienced. Despite this many went off the rails and only a few could really be deemed a real success by the client. Perhaps interestingly, some of the most successful ones were those that had not only left the tracks but had demolished several buildings en route! In each case I set up a 'War Room' with all the key stakeholders to understand what had happened and what we needed to do to re-track.

The key characteristic of these sessions was the breaking down of organisational boundaries and an honest appraisal of not just the stated requirements but the business drivers. Essentially we sat down with the client to work out what we all wanted to achieve to be successful. It didn't just feel good to us, our clients were initially cautious but soon loved being this close to a real project. No more sanitised project reports or filtered issues and risks, we all saw the full picture and worked as a team to deliver the end result.

I won't try to kid anyone here, working for an outsourcing business does put up a number of boundaries, this approach only worked where we could wheel in some senior people and the client was prepared to meet us half way. However, it did open my eyes to how a project delivery organisation could work!

It should come as no surprise then that we apply a very unique aproach to running projects at MINX. We don't try to nail our clients into a set of T&C's that will protect us in the event of a dispute. Instead we try to build a deep understanding of requirements, business drivers and add our own input in terms of deeply skilled and experienced consultants to help define the best end result we can. We accept that things change but rather than just protect ourselves with a change process we help our clients to factor in room for those changes.

The result has been consistent Cisco Excellence achievement from the Customer Satisfaction programme. We also measure our own performance via a comprehensive questionnaire. Across the past quarter we have averaged 97% across all categories. We use these scores to help us target performance improvements. Its also a great way to measure people as its a measure that they can directly relate to and affect.

Nice to meet you!

I had a great meeting recently with some business colleagues from India. It was the first time we had met but, after a few coffee's and travel stories we all quickly built a lot of empathy and a lot of interest in each other that will help us work together more effectively.

It never ceases to amaze me how much we can communicate through non-verbal mechanisms. I guess in this respect my 5 year old daughter is probably streets ahead of me. By the time I have managed to get past the initial introductions with someone she will be off with their kids to find out where all the toys are!

There is some interesting science here, Dr Albert Mehrabian, a professor at University College of Los Angeles, provided us with the much cited 55:38:7 ratio. That translates to 55% of our message impact is visual, 38% vocal (e.g. tone, rhythm and inflection) and just 7% verbal (i.e. the actual words we use). That means in any meeting 93% of your message is non-verbal! It also suggests that my dog is probably a better communicator than me, he certainly makes it very clear what he wants by a simple glance at the remains of our dinner on the table that casually moves to his food bowl.

Seriously though it underlines the importance of effective communications, particularly where we're meeting someone for the first time or with audiences from different cultures. This will become increasingly more important as we all enter a phase of corporate travelling restrictions and rely on lower cost mechanisms to keep in contact. The key is to effectively use the various mechanisms available to us.

I learnt a good lesson here at a previous company I worked for. My team were scattered across Europe and in some cases I had to work with some very difficult end clients. One particular client was based over in Paris and for many weeks we had communicated by e mail and the occasional phone call. To put it mildly we had a tense relationship underpinned by mutual distrust. It didn't take long for this to spread across his team which made our job difficult.

I eventually took a flight over and arranged a meeting in an attempt to sort out our problems. I had envisaged a cathartic exchange of viewpoints followed by an agreed way to move forward. On meeting up he warmly greeted me, made a fresh coffee, and took a genuine interest in how my trip over had been and where I was staying. I then received a personal tour of his offices, was introduced to his colleagues and invited out to a meal in the evening.

It was a great evening and we didn't discuss work once. I got to know about his family, friends and interests. The next day we had a series of meetings and not one issue appeared. We shook hands and I flew back to London. Over the months post that meeting we had numerous e mail exchanges, conference calls and video conferences. All were friendly and constructive. I occasionally flew back across for a face to face and each time ended up in a fantastic restaurant with a great bunch of guys and no talk about work!

I guess I had failed to appreciate the need to understand other people's requirements. The social customs and requirements vary per country and person but we all need to understand the need to engage with people on a number of levels to build trust and an effective working relationship. Getting the balance right now means using face to face sessions selectively along with the best possible collaborative technologies to improve the effectiveness of our messages.

Get big and collaborate with your customers

Over the past few years there has been massive investment in networking technologies across the world and we're rapidly getting to the point where every part of the planet can plug into some form of broadband connection.

Alongside this computers have become cheaper and more dispersed with an explosion of associated software - e mail, search engines and workflow engines that can slice and dice packets of work across multiple geographies and then re-assemble them into a product for a particular customer base. These changes have been revolutionising the way we live our lives and do business. We are coming to terms with a very different competitive environment that is knowledge-based and geographically distributed across the globe. Our great big round world has become very flat!

Businesses take advantage of all this through their ability to leverage all the new tools for collaboration to reach further, faster, wider and deeper. A few years ago most sceptics discounted companies like Amazon ($10.7Bn in 2006) and Google ($16.6Bn in 2006) from ever becoming major players in their industry. They lacked physical premises and a few thousend employees, they would never compete with the more established corporations. What they lacked in bricks and mortar they certainly made up in vision and and ability to exploit the internet to reach each and every one of us with some exciting new products and services.

These changes are continuing to gather pace. The current credit crunch and backdrop of a carbon sensitive world will only serve to further accelerate events. We're moving into an era where the small can act big through both evolving technologies and by exploiting collaborations with other businesses to extend products and services beyond their core competencies and become global businesses.

Some businesses take this one more step by collaborating with their customers. A prime example here is Starbucks. Howard Schulz, the founder and chairman, reckons that it is possible to make 19 thousend variations of coffee based on the standard menu. Their branch staff are encouraged to act like it was their business and when many customers started to bring in Soya milk from their coffee they soon rolled this out as a new menu option. Starbucks understand that no matter how big they get their customers want them to listen and give them what they want.

I suspect that many people will argue that this is ok for a business like Starbucks but what else? I used to work in banking and one of the biggest assets was the local branch where the bank met its customers. The local branch manager had a comprehensive view of his customer and flexibility to advise and shape products to fit their requirements. When the financial markets started to look a bit less bullish many banks looked to reduce costs by offshoring services and closing local branches. I don't need to spell out what a huge mistake this was, you just look at how they all now market their services as being highly personalised and promise a long term relationship for their customers.

It's an interesting time to grow a successful business by exploiting technologies that increase your operational efficiencies and help you to reach out further, faster, wider and deeper into your global customer base, while your completitors are 'battening down the hatches'!

Black Swans

These are hard to predict, large impact events that are rare beyond the realms of normal expectation. Some people believe that all significant consequential events in history originated as Black Swans!

Who would have expected a series of what appeared to be unrelated events such as the Sub-Prime mortgage lending exposures, Northern Rock and concerns re long-term oil availability would give rise to such far reaching economic issues. It does remind us all that financial markets are based largely on a foundation of faith rather than something a bit more substantial.

It is, however, a bit encouraging that we appear to have avoided the degree of panic that devastated the markets in 1987. Whatever we feel about the current state of UK politics, the government and Bank Of England didn't just stare into the headlights of the car crash heading their way and were able to take some measures to take some of the initial sting out of this large market correction.

However, many businesses that built on the back of a long bull market came crashing down. Silverjet became the latest airline to collapse when oil prices hit $130, levels that simply wouldn't have been factored into it's business plan and banking arrangements. It joins six other airlines that have gone into receivership in the past 6 months. The only remaining dedicated business-class airline is France's L'Avion.

I used the term correction earlier rather than recession. If you believe that global marketplaces are self-correcting this is a much more logical term to apply. It also lets you look a bit deeper into the opportunities rather than just getting depressed about the state of the economy and possibly taking a course of events that just make things worse.

Before we feel real sorry for all those highly paid derivatives dealers who built careers around Sub-Prime loans and oil prices it's worth noting that they are already generating a lot of new wealth by changing the nature of those instruments to bet on the direction the market is now moving. Perhaps we need to look at things a bit differently.

We have had many years of very cheap airflights. I seem to remember that you could get a flight into Europe for as little as £10 if you booked at the right time. All of us enjoy travelling, seeing new places and burning a bit of business expenses but it is hard to reconcile the sense when we look at the real costs, efficiencies and inevitable contribution to global warming. I was really encouraged when Heather McGregor, principle shareholder of head hunter Taylor Bennet, who had booked a £1,000 seat on Silverjet, was interviewed. She commented to the journalist that "video-conferencing is looking good".

I remember early in my career with IBM having to go into a large video conferencing room for a global meeting. The camera was sound activated and slowly swung round on a turret when it detected a sound. The image quality was truly awful and out of sync. Aside from the huge amounts of fun to be had by the occasional clearing of ones throat it was a pretty useless communications tool.

Since then the quality and ease of use of video solutions has been getting really good. It's never going to replace the benefits of a firm handshake or 1to1 lunch but it is pretty damn effective for most business meetings and significantly reduces operational costs. Many companies now have the networking infrastructure to support these technologies but have still not taken that first step. I'm guessing that with cheap air travel and low key environmental drivers we all lacked enough motivation to embrace these opportunities.

Perhaps the Black Swan has helped us all to now see a bit of sense here.....

Successful companies in a tough markeplace

It's interesting to see how businesses react to the much talked about 'Credit Crunch', the usual response is to reduce costs and thin margins to encourage as much cash flow as possible.

Interestingly you would think that with money being that much tighter people would cut back on the little luxuries in life, I also thought so when I confidently tried to book the family into one of the many local restaurants where I live early in the evening this Saturday. Guess what? every half decent place was fully booked across the entire weekend! It kinda suggests to me that people will always pay for both good products and services.

I have never met Tim Steiner, the CEO and founder of Ocado (that's him in the van!), but, being a rather fussy customer I recently got in contact to ask why I was experiencing a few problems with product availability and substitutions (I missed a few beers and Bagels on a Friday!). Tim didn't need to reply, he could have delegated to one of his capable team members, but he did! He apologised for the errors and explained that he has 3,000 people making over 60,000 deliveries per week with a average fulfillment levels running at 99.8% against an industry average of 96%. That's an incredible statistic and Tim could have just left it at that, but he didn't! He also committed to taking a good look at this part of his business to see if it could be further improved. I'm convinced he will do just that and he also increased my customer loyalty level just by taking a bit of his time to write to me.

I appreciate that Ocado and MINX are very different businesses but I firmly believe that the principles that Tim applies to Ocado are as relevant to our business. We invest a considerable amount of effort in listening to our customers and believe passionately in delivering a level of service above and beyond what may be expected. All our services teams are focused and measured against quality performance indicators, this ensures they focus on doing the right things - looking after our customers!

There is always demand for a quality products and services. Cutting costs inevitably results in lower customer perceived quality and higher churn rates. At best this path leaves a company poorly positioned to exploit a market upturn and at worst it will run out of things to cut back on before the market turns!

Anthony

How Green is MINX?

All large scale changes reach a point where a tipping point kicks in. Enough people are engaged and the change moves past the early adopters to wash over the rest of us.

Climate change has been a topic that has been around for a long time but most of the debate had been around getting to a general agreement that it was a reality and not just another scare story. We're still not sure about the exact causes or what the future holds for us but we at least now accept that we are all playing a part in its development.

It's such a daunting topic in terms of its sheer scale that the temptation is to resign ourselves to the impacts of our rapidly warming planet.

However, we can all take steps to change the way we personally consume energy and this can be extended to our businesses. These small changes, if replicated across the globe could add up to a very big impact. It's also worth bearing in mind that with rapidly escalating costs of energy these small changes make a lot of sense!

At MINX we accept that we need to 'walk the talk' and have already started to set some aggressive targets for reducing our Carbon burn rates by 2010. We can achieve these reductions in a variety of ways including 'good housekeeping' (e.g. eliminating unnecessary consumption) and through the use of smart technologies such as rich media solutions to reduce our need to travel. We also believe that these smart technologies will help to improve the level of communications both within MINX and between MINX and its customers, partners and suppliers.

We are also actively integrating energy management across our service offerings as part of our 'Green Squared' initiative to ensure our customers both achieve their personal environmental targets and realize a tangible Return On Investment (ROI). Both John and I will be updating our blogs as we take MINX down the green road and would welcome input from the business community on how they are working to address their own green agendas.

Anthony

1st post

At the end of last week John casually noted that he had already put his blog up and within 48 hours had received just over 200 direct hits. He then suggested that both Clint (Sales Director) and I needed to get ourselves on-line as soon as possible.

So, here I am in the early hours of Sunday morning, having just put the site together, struggling to get a few sentences together to kick my blog off. I'm still on a bit of a leaning curve here so please excuse a bit of a delay while I get to grips with the best way to use this new medium. I also need to think through the type of content I want to share.

Meanwhile if there are any topics that you would like me to start with please feel free to suggest them to me. Meanwhile please take a look at both John's site (http://johnpepper.squarespace.com) and our company website (www.minx.com). My only head start here is that by default I seem to have a much larger picture than John ;-)

Thanks,
Anthony