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