Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • The benefits of an unsexy business

    The benefits of an unsexy business

    Being a startup in an unsexy industry can have its advantages believes one founder, particularly when your only competitors are sales and marketing focused corporates that struggle to innovate or execute on new ideas.

    “There are some advantages of being in a non-sexy industry,” says Ziv Kedem, co-founder and CEO of Israeli company Zerto, “It means there are not too many people doing it and not too many can convince VCs this is a multi billion dollar market.”

    Kedem was speaking to Decoding the New Economy during his recent visit to Sydney about Zerto, a disaster recovery software company – a distinctly unsexy business – which is his second startup following the sale of his first, Kashya, to storage giant EMC in 2006.

    The advantage with being non-sexy is often the only competitors are large corporations, a prospect that doesn’t phase Kedem. “If the competition is only coming from the large vendors then there won’t be any innovation there,” he smiles.

    Sales and marketing focus

    Kedem’s view is many large companies are focused on sales and marketing, which means they don’t have the skills or the motivation to execute business plans in new sectors.

    In many respects this echoes the experience of Seth Godin who expected Google becoming a competitor to his Knol business would be the fledgling company’s death knell. Instead Knol survived and Google’s notoriously poor attention settle upon another shiny, sexy industry to disrupt.

    The problem for those non-sexy industries is raising investor money as the presence of a Google, Microsoft or Amazon in the market tends to scare VCs, private equity firms or retail investors away.

    Crowdfunding downsides

    Unlike his compatriot, John Medved, Kedem doesn’t see crowdfunding as a way around an investment drought as smaller investors are attracted to the ‘sexier’ businesses as well and raising the substantial amounts necessary for enterprise ventures is difficult on those platforms.

    When a startup can find an investor, Kedem recommends not being shy about raising funds. “It’s rare to meet someone who raised too much,” he states.

    Kedem also recommends investing in the team and looking for skills that the company will need in the future, not just today. Talking, to everyone from investors to customers to peers, is also important and he believes this is why Silicon Valley and Israel are so successful as technology hubs.

    Believing in yourself

    The most important aspect for an entrepreneur is self belief says Kedem, particularly when raising funds. “You’re doing the investor a favour when you go to them,” he says.

    Ultimately that self belief is probably what everyone in business needs, particularly when facing a huge competitor.

    Regardless of how unsexy your business is, believing it addresses a problem that people will pay to solve, may well be its greatest asset.

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  • London’s black cabs fight back against Uber

    London’s black cabs fight back against Uber

    Like many cities’ incumbent taxi industries, London’s iconic black cabs are suffering from the ris of Uber.

    Now a consortium of operators, drivers groups and the manufacturer of black cabs have devised an action plan to attract Londoners back to their services.

    The proposals include fast Wi-Fi, better integration with tube and bus services, access to bus lanes and – depressingly – tighter restrictions on more lightly regulated minicabs.

    London’s black cabs are unique in having high standards for both driver and vehicles which results in them being ludicrously expensive, the reason why many locals use minicabs.

    Those high standards though should be an advantage against Uber, however some of the tight regulation and the industry’s culture put the black cabs at a disadvantage.

    Uber’s supporter and advocates of the gig economy would, correctly, cite the black cabs raising their game as the main benefit of disrupting the market although the advantage of ignoring many of the rules that apply to the incumbents is a big advantage as well.

    Londoners will be happy with the improved services, but for the black cabs this is a fight for protecting their industry against a worldwide disruption. Regulations will probably not be enough to protect them.

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  • Interesting times as the global steel glut bites

    Interesting times as the global steel glut bites

    For all the talk of digital disruption, who would have thought the old fashioned steel industry would be the industry causing the greatest upheaval in today’s economy?

    Globally the steel industry is in trouble. In China, the UK and Australia steelmakers are facing a painful time as chronic overcapacity bites.

    Beyond the immediate domestic problems of having a major part of its manufacturing industry shut down, Australia faces an added problem as the nation’s economic policies were based on a never ending Chinese demand for iron ore and coal.

    OECD “Excess Capacity in the Global Steel Industry" (2015)
    OECD “Excess Capacity in the Global Steel Industry” (2015)

    The impending collapse of Bohai steel shows the Chinese industrial boom is now in the past and the onus on Beijing’s rulers is to stimulate a domestic services economy.

    For the UK, the collapse of their steel industry adds further uncertainty to a nation that’s already putting its global role at stake with the referendum to move out of the European Union.

    Should Britain turn away from Europe, they will need to find some compelling reasons to be competitive in the global economy. Fantasies of some sort of Anglo-centric Commonwealth of Nations won’t be enough to sustain the Little Englanders and their high cost of living.

    In fact, the British problems of high costs and decades of underinvestment are common across the English speaking world – although Canada, New Zealand and Australia are particularly at risk in the current economic climate given their dependency on commodities and Chinese markets.

    That Chinese curse of may you live in interesting times is proving true again, we are about to enter a fascinating economic period. Our business and political leaders, along with our resilience, are about to be tested. The steel industry is the first test.

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  • Government in a digital era

    Government in a digital era

    Governments are struggling with the new channels of communication and the structures that will manage our societies are far from certain.

    Last night the University of New South Wales’ School of Computer Science and Engineering in Sydney held a panel discussion about Digital citizens and the future of government. The group looked at how the open government movement is progressing and how public servants and politicians are dealing with a data driven world.

    The panel featured Dominic Campbell, the founder of the UK’s FutureGov who are currently advising the Australian Digital Transformation office; Penny Webb-Smart, the Executive Director of Service Reform for the NSW Government’s clumsily named Department of Finance, Services and Innovation and Amelia Loye, a social scientist who worked on Australia’s first Action Plan for Open Government.

    Centralising decision making

    One key question for the panel was how governments use data which gives rise to two views. The prevalent view is information systems tend to centralise power – something that has been a feature of the last two centuries – while access to information is a democratising forces that hands control back to individuals and local communities.

    Amelia made the point in some respects we’re already at the point where individuals can take control, “the tools for participatory government are already available, we have to start looking at – and talking about – how to use them,” she said.

    That conversation certainly isn’t happening at the moment despite the odd blurting of fine words from ministers and public servants and while in some areas government data is being freed up, in others it’s increasingly being hoarded for political purposes or due to ill thought out privatisations.

    Commercial in confidence

    Private sector data is another problem for the open data movement as many of the functions carried out by governments are outsourced to companies which generally reluctant to share information with the public. This leaves communities with an incomplete picture of the data affecting them.

    The main unanswered question in the discussion was the relationship between local and central governments, the panel’s consensus was central government would become more dominant and in the Australian context the states would become irrelevant. This however may not be true.

    Centralised government is by no means a given, as the prevailing corporatist ideologies of Western governments strive to cut services it’s likely communities are going to increasingly find ways of delivering those services independent of national bureaucracies and politicians in capital cities.

    Cumbersome central governments

    Another unspoken aspect was the increasing cumbersome nature of central government. In fast moving economies it’s hard for the decision making structures based in capital cities to quickly react to societal and political changes. National governments may simply be too big to manage the data flows coming into them.

    The main conclusion out of the evening’s discussion is there is great uncertainty about the structure of government in the digital era.

    Uncertainty over how governments will be shaped by today’s changes isn’t surprising, increased communications and the change in public finances radically altered the role of government last century – the wars and economic downturns of the first third of the century saw the introduction of central government income taxes which central power in capital cities.

    Changing communications

    Similarly mass media communications, the radio and television, dramatically changed the politician’s role and how citizens interacted with government.

    One great mistake today is many of our political, public service and business leaders think the current models are inviolate and fixed when in actual fact they are dynamic systems which are evolving with technology.

    Governments are a reflection of the societies and economies they lead. Just as both the economy and society are changing so too will the structures of the public service and politics. We may not recognise some of those changes until well after they’ve happened.

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  • Telecommunication’s lost tribes

    Telecommunication’s lost tribes

    This week saw Australia’s telecommunications industry gather for the annual Comms Day Summit at Sydney’s Westin Hotel.

    A constant in the telco industry is change and new technology – few industries have had to reinvent themselves in the same telephone companies have had to over the last 30 years.

    For telcos, that period of change has been immensely profitable as the switch to mobile networks proved to be a river of gold for the industry as consumers enthusiastically moved away from fixed line networks and into lucrative products like SMS services.

    Missing the passion

    So it was notable how the Comms Day summit was missing a sense of excitement or vision about the approaching opportunities such as 5G networks, the Internet of Things and other new markets. Much of the conversations were mainly focused on the dysfunctional Australian industry and the flawed regulations that got it to where it is.

    As an Australian event it’s not surprising that much of the focus would be on domestic failings – thirty years of misguided policy, political opportunism and schoolboy ideologies have left the nation facing the prospect of the “world’s most expensive broadband”  in the words of Megaport founder Bevan Slattery – however the stasis in the telecoms sector betrays a far deeper uncertainty in the global industry.

    That uncertainty was on show at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona where most of the conference’s buzz was around virtual reality headsets and connected cars, areas where telecommunications providers are, at best, a ‘dumb pipe’.

    We are not a utility

    Being relegated to being a ‘mere utility’ is the fear of every telecommunications executive, which is why they spend so much on abortive Pay-TV, online and sports rights acquisitions. In the Australian context, Telstra’s acquisition of PacNet and Slattery’s own East Asian ventures are possibly the most interesting developments in the local industry yet they were barely mentioned at the Comms Day event.

    While the Comms Day Summit told us much about the insular nature of modern Australian business – and the depressing mess three decades of poor regulation has left the local telecommunication industry – the bigger message is the global communications industry is struggling in a world of commoditised bandwidth where the opportunities to make huge profits is not immediately obvious.

    It’s hard to see how telcos can be completely disrupted in the way media companies have been given how regulated their markets are – although the same was being said of the taxi industry five years ago – but it is clear their managements are struggling to find new business models.

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