Category Archives for "Analysis"

2 The Value Triangle

I’m not going to draw a value triangle because (a) everyone knows what a triangle looks like, and (b) I don’t find it particularly helpful. The value triangle is the forced compromise many businesses have to make between three aspects of their business:

Your customer can have any two but not all three. So, sacrifice any one and this is what you get:

The point is, as a customer you can’t expect to optimise all three. If you want something of high quality and fast, expect to pay for it. If you don’t want to spend a lot of money you must sacrifice either speed or quality.

For the business owner, the challenge is to work out what their customers want. My own business provides a non-directive consultancy or coaching service. My aim is a high quality service and I expect to deliver over 3 – 6 months or longer. This may seem slow but it is right for a consultancy service. My prices are relatively low when compared with Done for You website design and offers a service that integrates online and in-person activity, which many website designers do not offer. It is certainly cheaper than employing a worker to build and maintain a website, so long as there is someone who can dedicate the time to work with me. The client who wants a high quality website tomorrow will need a Done for You service. I offer a slower more considered and eventually more effective route to being effective online.

Cost is a real pitfall for many businesses. There is a tendency to under price offers. Think it through this way, are you going to sacrifice speed or quality? If you offer a service at a low price you will need more clients to break even. This will mean you will have less time to focus on your clients and so compromise quality. Or else if quality is essential you will need to extend your contracts over a longer time.

The first thing is to explore how your service compares with others. What alternatives might your clients be looking at and how are they priced? If you can cut the time you spend on each client without compromising quality or add to your basic offer in a way that enhances quality this may enable you to adjust your price. You will normally be aiming for the highest possible price your customers will accept that enables you to provide the highest quality service.

Some business activities have various options. For example, a cupcake business may offer celebration cakes at a premium price. Something really special for a special event. This would be high-priced, for example the business I heard of recently where the owner breaks even on 6 wedding cakes a year.

Another cupcake business might produce large numbers of cheap and cheerful cupcakes that are low-cost, quick to make and tasty. So long as it’s a good product, it should be easy to sell a lot and break even on the cheaper end of the market.

The first business offers high quality at a high price. Don’t expect to order a wedding cake anything other than months in advance. The other offers something over the counter at low-cost. Their quality may actually be fine but not wedding cake standard!

If you get a chance to interview potential clients, it may be worth asking which two out of the three, they would choose first and second. They can rank them in order of importance and then discuss, the implications of discarding their third choice. Sometimes customers will be more flexible when they understand this basic dynamic.

This post is part of a sequence based on the circuit questionnaire, the branding element.

0 Partners and Allies

Successful local businesses network. Some are natural networks of suppliers, for example. Other networks succeed because local businesses promote each other.

Sometimes businesses collaborate and form partnerships. These might be temporary, perhaps for a particular project, eg where a particularly challenging client needs co-ordinated support from more than one business. Or businesses might market a particular service jointly. Sometimes two or more local businesses form a partnership business and work together for the long haul.

Other partnerships resource businesses in a local area. So, for example, a group of otherwise unrelated traders might hire, refurbish and manage a building together.

Despite media rhetoric, businesses rarely compete. Most understand their success depends upon the success of others. Building relationships often unearths new possibilities for collaboration.

There are aggressive people who get their kicks from competition with others. They may claim to be successful but upon analysis their business will depend on others in dozens of ways. The competitive mindset is rarely effective, particularly into the long-term. People need to know, like and trust the people they do business with and fear does not help!

The idea of the niche might help us understand partners and allies. It comes from biology and shows how organisms adapt to their environment. What do you need to be successful in your niche?

All these require you to pay attention to other businesses in your locality. Asking for help, listening to potential customers or other traders who will help you find your niche. You may know what you want to do, eg cupcakes, but you need to know how your place sets the agenda. If people want celebration cakes, you may need to adjust your activities. The person who makes 6 wedding cakes a year, however, will have plenty of time to do other things. They have a niche where they can make a living through relatively little effort. The customer is not interested in how much time it takes to make and ice a cake – they care about the contribution the cake makes to their wedding.

Your place sets your agenda; an agenda dominated by its local businesses. So, your business relationships, your partners and allies, are not an afterthought, they are at the core of any local businesses’ practice.

This post is a part of the series based on the circuit questionnaire, the element about branding.

0 Authority

It is difficult to sell your offer if you are not known, liked and trusted. All three are essential for online authority. It is essential to tell your site visitors about yourself and provide evidence in support of your claims.

In real life, you meet with prospective clients and answer their questions. They can see and hear you. They make up their minds from what you say and how you say it; body language and other visible cues.

This is not so easy online because you are dependent solely upon your content. You can use video and this may provide some visible cues people need to decide but it is still nothing like personal encounter.

It is hard to avoid concluding online marketing is more difficult than face-to-face marketing. For larger investments, your aim is to move prospective clients from your website to a face-to-face, phone or Skype meeting. The last two are perhaps not as good as face-to-face meetings but if you are selling something people want and they cannot find anything similar closer to where they are, they do work.

So, the question is how to marshal evidence on your website that will encourage visitors to explore your offer further or for low-priced products make a first purchase.

Is your site full of useful, reliable information? People impressed by your knowledge may give your offer a try.

Closely related to this is generosity, where you provide useful information free of charge. If you can show you are the hub of an online community that exchanges ideas, so much the better. This can be difficult if you are starting out but established organisations can encourage their members to contribute to their sites. A blog can have several authors who should respond to comments on their articles. A strong community of authors and plenty of comments can do more to contribute to site authority than just about anything else.

If this does not work for you, for example if you don’t have time to blog, it is inappropriate or you are not established, what can you do?

Sources of Authority

Here are examples of things you can include on your site to increase authority. Be aware, it is better to integrate these items into your pages and not relegate them to their own page. However, if someone does want to know more about you it can be helpful to have an about page with detailed information in one place.

Authority on Your Website

You don’t want pages of tedious material. You need somewhere (and a Linked-In profile is ideal) where you can marshal this material and clear links to it on your site. Some visitors who are really interested will seek out this information, so it needs to be available.

Where you can, integrate testimonials into your copy. Mostly people need to know they are there and scan them. If someone is really interested, they will read them.

For organisations with history, the challenge is how to convey your authority on your website. If you are starting out, it will take time to grow authority but persevere; small incremental improvements can lead to a more convincing website over time.

If you are clear about what you want to convey, you can adjust some of the above items to meet your needs. For example, you can ask clients to write testimonials to a template that asks them about aspects of your work where you need evidence.

This post is a part of the series based on the circuit questionnaire, the first element about branding.

0 Compromise

Don’t compromise your business. Why not? Because it sends out mixed messages. If people struggle to understand your offer it can be because you are not clear about it or your market.

However, compromise is hard to avoid. You develop a package for your consultancy service and someone comes along and wants something different. They want to work with you and so it is hard to resist their requests for a specially tailored service.

Is this compromise or simply responding to your client’s reasonable requests? Surely you need to be flexible, if not why shouldn’t your client seek something more suitable?

This is the issue. Is there someone who could deliver what your client wants better than you? Maybe it would be better if you referred them on? Think of the advantages:

1. the client gets a good service, will thank you for sending them there and may be inclined to recommend you to others;
2. the other practitioner will be grateful for the support from you and may seek some way to return the favour, and
3. you don’t dilute your message and have time to improve your packages and market to the right clients.

If you’re not sure about your package or market, try different types to find the best fit for you. I suspect whilst the best businesses don’t compromise, they needed to compromise to work out what they should not compromise! Once established some businesses find they can relax their rules a little.

What Works for Me

So, I compromise by underselling my business.  I charge less than my support is worth and as a result find my work undervalued.  This is a common issue for new businesses.

Clarity about what I offer, makes it easier for prospective clients to say “yes” and the reason they say yes is they understand the value of my offer.  If I don’t charge enough it means I undervalue my work!  Obviously there are several factors involved in what I charge.  Too much and people genuinely can’t afford it and too little they may not feel committed to working with me as a coach.

My Offer

I offer a Done With You (DWY) service to help clients sort out their organisation’s online presence, fully integrated with its in-person activities.  It would not make sense to charge more than Done For You (DFY) website designers, of course.  However, DWY has advantages over DFY for some organisations and so it is not just a way of saving money.  Ultimately, I do not offer a website; I help clients develop and carry out a marketing strategy for their organisation.  What they get is something the website (with other activities) delivers in terms of new supporters, partners and income.

And from my point of view I balance what I charge with capacity.  I can manage only a few clients at a time, so it is crucial I find clients who are right for me, perhaps passing on others who need a different service to the one I provide.

How have you compromised your business or community activities?  Did compromise work out for you or against your best interests?

This post is one of a series exploring questions in the circuit questionnaire and addresses the branding element of the questionnaire.

1 Strengths and Weaknesses

Most people are familiar with the SWOT analysis, even if familiarity causes us to run a mile from it! SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats and the idea is we brainstorm them in turn.  It is best to work through in that order, starting with the positives.

SWOT works just as well if you attempt it on your own although there are advantages to working in groups because more insights are likely to be shared and the outcomes are more likely to be owned by an organisation that has shared its analysis.

What tends not to happen is the analysis part of SWOT analysis. Having brainstormed each of the four lists, it’s easy to move onto the next thing without asking questions like, how do we:

I find, as a lone worker, my strengths and weaknesses come out as about me. My personal strengths and weaknesses are the strengths and weaknesses of my business. This is one reason opportunities and threats are important because they encourage the sole trader to look beyond their own limitations. Mind mapping can be very helpful for the lone worker, using an online application such as Xmind.

I suppose larger businesses will tend to more impersonal results, although it may be helpful to record personal strengths and weaknesses somewhere. Appraisal systems can be one way of doing this.

Ultimately, it’s worth attempting a SWOT analysis at this stage but be aware of its limitations. It is a small part of the circuit questionnaire and the other questions can lead us to a deeper analysis.

0 Finding Followers

The next question on the circuit questionnaire is about finding followers.  Every business or cause seeks people who may become customers or active supporters. Many people, interested in your business or cause, do not commit to it as a customer or activist.

I’ve sat in many meetings where people complain they cannot get supporters to become active members. I spoke to someone the other day who offers a monthly free event for a local group and they have a mailing list of 600 from which about 15 turn up for meetings.

That is a conversion rate of 1 in 40! How can you improve this? It suggests the meetings will increase by 1 person for every 40 who join the mailing list. Are there ways to encourage more people on the list to attend the meetings? It will still be necessary to build the list because there is likely to be a turnover as new people become interested in the meetings and others lose interest.

So, if cake decorating is your thing, who do you want to follow your group? Are you looking for people interested in cake decorating technique or designs for cakes, or recipes for cake and icing? Or what about people who enjoy looking at beautiful cakes (or eating them!). Or a more specialist group around  a type of cake (eg cupcakes (formerly known as buns)) or particular techniques or types of icing.

So, your global proposition might be “All things cupcake!” if you specialise in cupcakes. But what if you’re actually more interested in the right cupcake for the job? The way you present cupcakes at a wedding will be very different to the display for a children’s party. Your global proposition might focus on the celebration and finding the right cupcakes for it. Alternatively, how many jobs in various business networks does a cupcake business support?

Promotion of ingredients and the tools of the trade on the one hand and enhancing formal celebrations on the other might suggest a business that values its impact on the local economy. A cake shop, for example, that specialises in special events might value its impact on the local economy. Everything from the supplies it uses, to the impact on local parties, the increased footfall in the area as people go there to get the cupcakes they need (if anyone ever actually needs a cupcake).

My followers

My aim is to build a list of followers through my website. I have an ebook (see below) as an incentive and my invitation is to join the conversation. People on my list receive a weekly blog update and I hope this will result in comments about experiences and insights about local economies and how they can be supported online.

This will be a place to share ideas and insights with like-minded people. If you commit to a project you will have many ideas and most of them are lost because there is no time to implement them. Shared, they may inspire others to action.

One thing I’ve noticed in reviewing these thoughts, is I have not promoted joining my email list to local contacts. This would be a means to keep in touch and build the local dimension. Maybe with more local groups, I can encourage more participation on my website.

0 Your Global Proposition

Your global proposition is a short, clear statement of your business purpose. Every business activity should meet the standard set by your global proposition.

If you are a social entrepreneur then it will bring together your social and business aims. This is just as true if you use a community organisation or a business as your vehicle.

Some social entrepreneurs begin with a cause and discover they have a business that funds their cause.  Sometimes such businesses set up as social enterprises. Typically they have Trustees / Directors who represent the beneficiaries of the cause, local residents for example.  Others might set up as conventional business.  This latter course has something to commend it as it allows an idea to be tested.  The time to move to a formal social enterprise is when a sole trader might consider incorporation.

Another route is where a local business begins with financial objectives, and later embraces social aspirations as its purpose. Local businesses may grow in solidarity as a network and in time understand its role in benefiting their locality.  The discovery that “I benefit when everyone else benefits” is the core experience at the heart of mutuality.

This type of business will typically be structured as a business where the owner does not have to refer to a committee for decision-making. As businesses become established and incorporated, they will have a Board of Directors, although a Chief Executive is likely to retain individual decision-making powers.

Both community and businesses are collaborative.  The difference is community organisations are usually collaborative internally, encouraging members to be actively involved in running the organisation.  This is why they tend to become bureaucratic and less able to relate to partners.  Local businesses are usually externally collaborative, seeking partnerships that establish a niche for the business in a supportive environment.  They typically depend on personal decision-making and so can lack transparency.

Your global proposition should work within any of these structures. Whether you see your work as primarily a business or a cause, your global proposition combines your business and social aims.

It is essential it does. The global proposition is public and you will return to it as your activities grow. Is this new activity or proposal in line with the social and business aims in the global proposition?

Like anything else, your global proposition is a tool, it helps you communicate the role of your business or organisation and keeps it on track. It can be reviewed without fear of losing its radical edge! If you have found a proposition that works for you, revisions in the light of experience will strengthen it and broaden its appeal.

My Global Proposition

This is a global proposition I drafted a few months ago:

I discover and share online marketing methods to help social entrepreneurs who are seeking sustainable approaches to finding their place in a localised economy.

Note the focus is on sustainable local economy, not accumulating personal wealth. Whilst I don’t take a view about the amount people earn, my clients will want to invest in supporting other local businesses or some cause. How they do this, eg with money, time or in other ways is something we can explore.

Whilst I am not unhappy with this statement my thinking has moved on. I have returned to my earlier idea of community development online.

I offer a full community development support service to social entrepreneurs in community and business organisations who aim to build and sustain their local economy, integrating traditional offline approaches with a constructive online presence.

This version places community development where marketing appeared formerly. It underlines my offer is to community and business organisations and emphasises I work both offline and online.

This post is an introduction to the global proposition.  Element 3 in the circuit questionnaire shall explore this in more detail.  I have recently found more information about how to write and use them.  I shall go into more depth when I get to element 3.

Do you think this works? Have you examples of your own global proposition?  How has it evolved?

2 Your Business Story

Your business story is not necessarily the same as your origin story  . It is about how your business came about, whilst your origin story is about you. Sometimes they are the same; you need to tell your origin story to explain your business story or else they are independent stories.

If the two seem independent, ask why that is. Has your business story no relationship with the event you believe to be central to your personal story?

Sometimes the story of your business is less interesting than your origin story.  It can be about the daily graft out of which a business slowly emerged.  But this does not mean the story is without value.  You were patient and stuck with it until the business worked.  Working out how to tell a story is just as important as finding the right story to tell.

My Business Story

I was made redundant a few years ago and found the lifestyle of self-employment attractive but I didn’t know what I could offer. I retrained as a web designer and discovered most web design agencies do not offer the support people need, particularly for the voluntary sector and local independent businesses. Technology has moved on and today it is possible to do for yourself work for which you previously paid agencies thousands of pounds. The problems groups encounter online are similar to real life problems pre-Internet and today! Lack of strategic insight is very common online just as it is offline;  and many groups do not co-ordinate their online and offline work. Anxiety about the technology still distracts from the human arrangements behind the website!

As a development worker I’ve learned how to support key people using situation analysis, project development, participatory methods, soft systems as well as dealing with challenging issues and the inevitable disasters! So, I am bringing together three insights:

The idea of “Community Development Online” has been growing over the last couple of years. It is still under development and includes these elements:

Community development online is complex and as I researched it, I saw the need for vision and not just an offer for technical support. I particularly want to help groups seeking sustainable local economies. The idea of social entrepreneur is just as valid online as off and so my focus is helping individuals and groups who want to build this approach.

Conclusion

My business story as it stands is not as dramatic as my origin story!  One reason I place the business story in a less important light than my origin story is that it is still under development.  It is harder to tell a story when I am so close to it and I don’t know how it ends!  Will it be a story of success?

It’s possible I will experience something that makes a good story.  At that point I would make my business story more prominent on my website.

The main point to take away is the difference between a business story and an origin story.  Perhaps the business story is essential in the sense that it may answer questions in the mind of site visitors and potential customers.  However, I agree with many others the origin story is important because it is an opportunity for site visitors to get to know you as a person.  It stands in for your personal presence (as far as it is possible).

Many people designing their site go overboard describing their business or organisation, presenting masses of detail about their mission, aims and objectives and the products and services they offer.  Whilst there is a need for some of this material, it is so easy to forget the human story behind your offer.  How do you get the balance right?

Do you have examples of origin and business stories?  It would be interesting to see some examples.  Why not put a url into comments and say why you think it’s a good example (or a bad example if that’s what it is)?

2 Your Origin Story

The central and most important dimension to your brand is your origin story.

Think about the websites you visit. How many are full of tedious material lifted from their business plan? Do they tell you in great detail about their mission statement, aims and objectives? How do you react?  Many businesses have learned this lesson and don’t info dump from their filing cabinet onto their websites.  Third sector organisations are perhaps prone to this mistake, often because they do not have access to examples of good practice common in the business sector.

There is a place for this type of material on your website but that place is deep within it, where anyone interested can find it and where most people, not interested, can ignore it.  Someone intent upon making a purchase may wish to study the details.  For some the fact it’s there is reassuring, even if they don’t read it!

Your purpose at the front end of your website is to charm your visitors, so they may opt to stay in touch with you and ultimately make a purchase or support your cause. If you are not trying to reach people and stay in touch with them, what exactly is the purpose of your site?

What is Your Origin Story?

Your origin story can be central to your message. What is an origin story? It is the story that explains why you’re in your business. What experience led you into this business?

Why have an origin story?  If most of your customers meet you in person before purchasing your services, you may not need one on your website, although you might for public speaking.  If your website visitors don’t know you, your origin story can be the best way to help them know you better.

Your origin story can be presented in different versions. Shorter and longer versions can be used in different places on your website or in social media. It can be recorded as a video or audio account and of course it can also be presented in real life meetings. As you tell and retell the story you will receive feedback and so your story will evolve. You will get better at telling it!

Transformation

Your origin story need not necessarily show you in a positive light. If it is a story of transformation, it is likely to show you making a mistake. It doesn’t even need to show you solving the problem, just that you understand it.  My origin story is about an experience that was a professional triumph for me and a personal defeat. Many development workers have been in that situation (or at least the personal defeat part of it) and I want them to know I’m familiar with the territory. I know the toll this work can take on your health, your relationships, your self-esteem. I know how long it can take to recover from such setbacks. Many entrepreneurs know the same feeling.

When events go wrong are you going to be crushed by them or bounce back? Sometimes the bounce back can be painfully slow and this is when you need support. The entrepreneur (social or business) is perhaps someone who keeps going despite the pain of failure.

The best origin stories go beyond accounts of transformation and touch something deeper in the heart of its readers or hearers.  These are the stories that go viral.  A story passed on will bring visitors to your site.  This is why the call to action is so important.

0 Building Your Brand

This post about building your brand in my series about the first element of the Circuit Questionnaire, you and your brand.  These posts will soon be assembled in a logical and coherent fashion.  In the meantime, read and enjoy them as they are!

My brand stands out because it is political. If you are building your brand you may wish to copy me in this respect but would that be wise?  Being political is not a good idea for a business and indeed some business support networks do not allow political or religious bias. So, why a political brand?

You see why branding is important? It is partly about me and how I convey my experience and what I have to offer. But it is also about how I want to be seen. I’m seeking lasting transformation of society and so seeking people who seeking similar change.

I am at the centre of my brand. If I am successful and find I have a legacy, other people will take my place. They will be there because of my brand.  Brands evolve naturally and so,n the distant future, they may be able to trace a line back to me, even though I would not recognise what they are doing. Would I approve of what they’re doing in my name? Possibly not.  Would Mr Kipling (if he existed) think the cakes sold under his name today are “exceedingly good”?

So far I’ve written about my brand but I haven’t said what it is! Here are my notes from a few months ago under questions from the circuit questionnaire:

What does my brand stand for?

Money flowing in the local economy is far more important than personal wealth. So, I aim to change the mindset, encouraging investment in localised economies and discouraging offshore accumulations of vast sums of money.

The first sentence is crucially important to understand my political position. Note this is not opposition to personal wealth. It is a statement about the nature of money. Money’s value is through its use to build community. It builds community as it changes hands and so the flow of money is where our focus should be.  When money accumulates it is not put to work building community.

This has profound implications for the ways in which we understand our roles as participants in the economy. The decisions we make have profound effects on the economy. Wealthier people have more power and so more responsibility. This is why integrity is an important personal value and why transparency and accountability are paramount political values.

What does it stand against?

Goliath is the corporations and the political system that has handed so much of the country’s assets to them.

Need to resist this mindset from (1) a pro-business perspective because businesses keep money flowing, and (2) community associations who care for their place and tackle disadvantage.

We elect governments to protect us against the power of large unaccountable corporations. When we find governments are selling out to them, not safeguarding our interests, then there is a need for a greater democratic input into politics. I believe this will come from an alliance between community organisations and local businesses. Businesses and their customers, if you prefer.

In what ways is my brand contentious?

Capitalism has been a boo word on the left for many years but it is true there has been no more democratic approach found. The communist experiments in the twentieth century demonstrated the dangers of enforced solutions.

There are capitalist models of the left. The old retail co-operative movement is a brilliant example of how bottom-up economic approaches can co-exist with massive corporate systems. Is there a modern alternative, equivalent to the retail co-ops? I think there is and I blogged about an economy for the common good recently.