Who do we sue?
I had never thought of the question 'Who do we sue' as being of strategic importance until a few weeks ago. Having coffee with a friend who has worked for a long time for a US multinational corporation that developed and commercialised a very useful...
Sell or nurture?
Every piece of research I have ever seen puts the conversion rate of an initial sales contact little higher than 2%. It does not seem to matter if it is the old style letter box stuffing or sophisticated email outreach, 2%. Does that mean 98% are not...
Every change has unwelcome side-affects
Change has side-affects, like any medicine. Usually those side-affects are not palatable, and sometimes the medicine does not work. However, not taking the medicine never works as a cure. I am 65, so have had a few friends 'pop off' from various ailments...
The value of effort compounds
For the first time in 8 years of blogging, my rhythm has been disrupted. I have not posted a blog now for almost 2 weeks. Over the 8 years, I have averaged 3 posts a week, a real effort, that has just become part of my routine. The last two weeks have been...
11 growth strategies for small businesses
The last 23 years of working with, reconstructing, and observing small businesses in all sorts of situations has resulted in a pile of insights on many areas of business. A common fact or is the desire to grow, even when in the darkest times, almost all...
A simple way to value your SME
The value of your business is absolutely dependent on its ability to generate free cash flow, which in its simplest terms, is the cash required to keep the business running, after necessary capital expenditures have been considered. It is a measure with...
The excruciating paradox for the innovator.
Successful innovation generally comes from being small, with little baggage, no institutional 'downside' and few inhibitors to the ability to be truly agile in response to weak feedback signals from customers. Innovation is also a consumer of cash, rather...
The one rule to ensure you attract attention.
The real fight out there, the one that is for most businesses 'make or break,' is not for likes, or new friends, or how many social media feeds you showed up in, it is for attention. The problem with attention, is that it is transient, hard to get, and...
9 questions for a ‘quick and dirty’ StrategyAudit.
In 1712 the British government started taxing newspapers by the number of pages they printed. The predictable response was that newspapers started printing on what became known as 'Broadsheet' paper to minimise their tax. A rational commercial response,...
The real measure of marketing effectiveness, and how to deliver it.
Marketing is a functional silo on an organisation chart, as is Sales, Operations, Finance, HR, but unlike the others, marketing deals with unknowns, the future, whereas all the other functions deal with the past, or what is immediately in front of them....