Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Surviving in business by executing a pivot

    Surviving in business by executing a pivot

    One of the key skills in running a business is knowing when to change direction, to ‘pivot’ in the language of Silicon Valley.

    Yesterday I had the privilege of interviewing Jonathan Barouch, founder of social analysis company Local Measure about the service’s pivot from Roamz.

    I’ll be writing that interview up in more detail in a few days, but Jonathon’s observations about pivoting businesses reflected my own business experiences.

    PC Rescue was born out of a pivot and its ultimate demise was due to the failure of the company’s management, and my own, to move decisively when it was clear the business wasn’t working as planned.

    The founding of PC Rescue happened out of a virtual assistant service my wife an I set up in 1995. We’d been victims of the curiously insular attitude of Australian managers towards employing expats and starting our own business seemed to be the right option.

    So Office Magic was born.

    Office Magic was a good business, but in talking to clients it became quickly apparent there was a bigger need for computer training and repairs. Most small businesses were struggling to find reliable techs to help them out with their IT services.

    So Office Magic pivoted into PC Rescue.

    For  the next ten years PC Rescue was a profitable business, the problem I had was the classic small business proprietor’s dilemma – I couldn’t get the right people.

    The staff and contractors I had were good computer techs but I couldn’t find one with the skills or motivation to take over the day to day supervisor role so I could work on growing the business. I was stuck in the trap described by Michael Gerber in his book the e-myth.

    Originally, PC Rescue’s business plan had been a five year strategy — two years validating, two years executing and one year exiting. The exit I particularly liked was creating a computer support franchise operation.

    This didn’t happen because the company lacked the human capital required;  my wife and I lacked the management resources to move PC Rescue to the next stage.

    When this became apparent we should have pivoted the business. We didn’t because I was too busy with the day to day stresses of keeping customers and staff happy.

    Eventually we achieved an exit of sorts, ten years later than intended and not in a satisfactory way. The business remained under capitalised and the new partners turned out not to have the expertise or drive required to grow the operation.

    Which make Jonathan’s pivot of Roamz so much more interesting. He listened to customers, looked at the direction of the industry and realised where the company’s strengths lay.

    Rather that doubling down on a model which was struggling, he took the business in a new direction.

    Having that flexibility is probably one of the greatest assets for small and startup businesses as larger corporations struggle with executing massive changes.

    As markets evolve and the rate of economic change accelerates, having the skills and mindset to execute successful pivots could be the difference between survival and failure for many big and small businesses.

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  • The sport of racing dinosaurs

    The sport of racing dinosaurs

    The admission from Bud Selig, the US Major League Baseball Commissioner, that he has never used email raised lots of eyebrows around the world.

    As Business Insider notes, Selig is 79 years old and there are plenty of other sports administrators challenged by technology so it’s understandable that the commissioner might not see the need to use a technology that became common twenty years ago.

    Bud Selig’s story illustrates a much more important issue facing the professional sports industry, that it’s run on an aging business model.

    The last fifty years has been very good for professional sport as television and Pay-TV networks bid sporting rights higher across the world.

    In most nations, the dominant sport did extremely well as broadcasters fought each other; the Olympics, Soccer leagues in most of the world along with baseball, American football and basketball in the US, Cricket in India, Aussie Rules in Australia, Rugby in South Africa and New Zealand all became incredibly rich.

    There weren’t many competitive pressures on the managements of those sport as the dominant sports rarely had any competition, it was a matter of just playing the TV executives off each other.

    As a consequence, many sports are run by people with a somewhat exaggerated sense of privilege – they believe it’s their talent, not Rupert Murdoch’s or NBC’s money, that is responsible for their game’s riches.

    Bud can dismiss the disbelieving gasps of people in the real economy because for most of his career the only competition he’s had to deal with was from his colleagues has he fought his way to the top job which he won in 1998.

    In the real economy, there’s no such luxury. In fact, email may be becoming yesterday’s technology as social media and collaborative tools take over. David Thodey at Telstra and Atos’ Thierry Breton are two leaders in this field.

    The danger for sporting organisations is that they are ripe for disruption, so far broadcast media rights have stood up well while revenues in other parts of the entertainment and publishing industries has collapsed. There’s no guarantee though that broadcast sports will remain immune from those changes.

    Should disruption come along, even just in the form of sporting rights stagnating, many professional codes will suddenly find inefficiencies like Bud Selig are an expensive luxury.

    While Bud’s story is amusing, in reality there’s little the rest of us can learn from how Major League Baseball’s senior executives run their offices.

    Image of Bud Selig courtesy of bkabak through Flickr.

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  • Could 3D printing be lurching up the hype cycle?

    Could 3D printing be lurching up the hype cycle?

    3D printing is undoubtedly a game changing technology that changes the economics and scalability of manufacturing. But is it possible the technology is becoming over-hyped?

    Two stories today illustrate the opportunities and potential of 3D printing; a home made SLR camera and NASA manufacturing their own rocket parts.

    NASA’s experiment shows how precision, low demand components could be made. One of the problems with procuring parts like rocket engine injectors is that the production runs are low so the manufacturing costs are high given there are no economies of scale involved.

    Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing also has the advantage that components can be manufactured in one piece rather than requiring assembly from a number of different parts. In turn this reduces production times and errors.

    Printing your own camera seems a bit of waste of time and money seeing that cameras aren’t particularly expensive and the one printed isn’t a digital SLR – your have to find somewhere to buy and process the film.

    The point though with Bozardeux’s project is that it is open source – anyone can modify or adapt the design and that is where the potential lies.

    While the possibilities are endless with 3D printing, it may well be that the technology is being overhyped. Both the rocket engine injector and the SLR camera are early stage proofs of concept, neither are ready for full time use.

    It also has to be kept in mind that traditional manufacturing methods aren’t going away – there will always be products more suited to mass production or using materials that can’t be fed through a 3D printer.

    Right now we’re on the early stage of the hype cycle with 3D printing and while the potential is clear, the immediate future of the technology being oversold is also becoming apparent.

    That of course means opportunity for many entrepreneurs and their investors, but it also means you have to be very careful in choosing technologies or where to place your bets.

    In poker it’s said if you don’t know who the patsy is at the table, then it’s probably you. The same is true when a new technology is being hyped.

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  • Politics, business and leadership

    Politics, business and leadership

    I’ve covered the New York Times’ interview with Google’s senior vice president of people operations, Laszlo Bock previously in describing what the business has learned from its scientific method of hiring people.

    One striking aspect of that story that deserves further discussion is Bock’s thoughts on leadership;

    We found that, for leaders, it’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive.

    This is something that applies in all walks of life — whether you’re coaching a kids’ football team, running a corporation or leading a nation.

    Sadly in many of these fields we’re lacking the consistent leadership Laszlo Bock describes. That could turn out to be one of the greatest challenges for the 21st Century.

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  • Driving change from the top

    Driving change from the top

    One of the hallmarks of the PC era was how  innovations in workplace technology tended to be driven by the middle ranks of organisations.

    The PC itself is an example, it’s adoption in the early 1990s was driven by company accountants, secretaries and salespeople who introduced the machines into their workplaces, usually in the face of management opposition.

    Many of the arguments against introducing PCs at the time are eerily similar to that against the Internet or social media over the next twenty years.

    Sometime in over the last few years that pattern changed and the adoption of new technologies started being driven by boards and executives.

    The turning point was the release of the Apple iPad which was enthusiastically adopted by executives and directors, suddenly, Bring Your Own Device policies were in fashion and the pattern of the c-suite driving change had been established.

    Now a similar problem is at work with social media, the story of David Thodey driving the use of Yammer in Telstra is one example where executives are leading the adoption of services in large companies.

    The lesson for those selling into the business market is to grab the imagination of senior executives and the board, with competitive pressures increasing on companies they may well be a receptive audience.

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