My website ‘Vegemite’ test

My website ‘Vegemite’ test

 

 

When my kids dropped a piece of toast, or bread on the floor (almost always spread side down) we used to invoke the ‘3 second test’. This was simply that the bugs took three seconds to wake up and realise there was a feed nearby, so if it was retrieved inside that time, it was OK to eat.

Same with a website, almost.

We are all busy, our attention is stretched beyond reasonable limits, and we have no time to waste. So, when your potential customer is researching, or just loitering on the web, you have perhaps 3 seconds to engage them, such that they have a closer look.

In those 3 seconds, you must communicate three things if you are to get them to pay you any of their scarce attention:

  • What problem you solve.
  • Who do you solve it for.  In effect, a written ‘elevator speech’, what you do and why they should listen.
  • Call to action. What you want them to do next.

Pretty obvious?

Give yourself 3 seconds to look at most websites, and ask yourself those three simple questions.

How does yours fare?

PS. For my readers outside Australia, ‘Vegemite’ is a spread for bread and toast we Aussies are brought up on, which the rest of the world thinks looks and tastes like old axle grease.

I bet every ‘Matilda’ has it almost every day!

 

 

The rule of the niche

The rule of the niche

 

 

Standard marketing advice in this day of homogeneity, and certainly my advice for SME’s, is to ‘find a niche and own it’.

Be the only one that competes in a market niche that you define.

The deeper, darker and more remote the niche the better, because when you get engagement there, you will be alone, you alone will be able to address the needs of those few who inhabit the niche with you.

Kevin Kelly’s now famous quip from his 2008 essay:  ‘to be successful you do  not need millions of followers, you need only a thousand true fans’ remains as accurate today as it was then.

A true fan is one who will buy anything you produce, they will drive 200kms to see you in a bookstore signing, then buy a bunch of signed books to give away to friends.

The challenge of course is to find those true fans, or more accurately, create the circumstances where they find you, and move through the now standard journey of Awareness, Knowledge, Liking, Preference, Conviction, and Purchase, to Advocacy.

Marketing plays a role in each step of the journey, but the starting point must be ‘macro’. If you start at the niche end of the cycle, too few will be able to find you. There needs to be a filtering process from the macro to the micro for there to be sufficient opportunity for those in the niche who may become true fans to find you in the first place.

It also pays to consider the paradox: There may be a niche in the market, but is there a market in the niche? For you as an SME, the niche may be ideal, but too small for a larger competitor to bother with, or even see.

,Niches can be global, local, and everything in between. To some they represent a ‘Blue Ocean’, a market without competitors. The question now is whether there is a market in the niche, wherever it hides, that will generate an ROI on the resources you allocate towards owning it.

 

 

 

8 sources of competitive advantage SME’s have over larger rivals

8 sources of competitive advantage SME’s have over larger rivals

 

SME’s suffer in many ways from the lack of scale when competing against much larger enterprises. However, if you look hard enough, there are always benefits to be found that may outweigh the costs.

  • Small budgets mean reliance on qualitative rather than quantitative research and market intelligence, which require deeper pockets. Go out and talk to a few customers, ex customers, and non-customers in your market, you will learn more in a couple of afternoons than the spreadsheet jockeys in the larger companies will learn in a year.
  • Make niche choices early. Rather than scanning the horizons for opportunities, pick a niche and own it. Chances are it will be something that the larger companies have overlooked, or is too small for them to allocate resources, but for an SME, they can be a great stepping-stone to profitability and growth.
  • Revel in being the underdog.  Avis Vs Hertz.: ‘We try harder’ the line Hertz used is the standard bearer for this battle of the underdog. We humans love to support the underdog against the impersonal giants.
  • Be very price sensitive. Pricing high is always a good strategy, as it is easier to come down than to go up, and avoid predictable and regular discounting like the plague. Your larger competitor is unlikely to be as sensitive to the difficult task of optimising price as you are, working off price lists that are updated in total, from time to time.
  • Pareto the pareto. Focus, focus. Bring all your resource’s to bear on a point of value you can deliver, don’t dissipate them by being all things to all people. This applies to customers, service offerings, communications, everything, focus on the points that will deliver the most bang for the buck. Be the king of ‘No’.  Warren Buffet noted that the one common feature of successful people is that they say no a lot. The larger your competitor is, the easier it is for them to be distracted, and gummed up by bureaucracy.
  • This point will seem inconsistent with the point above, but watch for anomalies. While focus is essential the risk is that you are so focused that you do not see things that will make an impact when they are just small points on the horizon. These small anomalies are the things that generate change. Large businesses tend to ignore them, or they get lost in the bureaucracy, SME’s have the opportunity to move quickly and decisively.
  • Balance the tactical and strategic. Small businesses tend to be seduced by the tactical stuff. Short term this is OK but not a good long-term recipe. Both are necessary, but you must resist the temptation to worry about the future when it comes, as it is already here in some form, so you have to build for it before it gets to you. Be specific about the breakup you deploy, knowing the big blokes are stuck deploying changes in either.
  • Be flexible and agile. They are different, flexibility enables you to move with the changes in the market, agility is more short term, enabling you to make choices that are outside the ‘brand architecture’ as they emerge. Pivot in the jargon, your larger competitors will find it hard to get out of their own way.

What have I missed?

 

 

The start-up’s 3 card cash challenge.

The start-up’s 3 card cash challenge.

 

A start-up funded with a cash stake from family, friends, and fools, supplemented by available savings has in its future one of only three options.

  • It runs out of cash before the end of the ‘runway’. Crash and burn.
  • It extends the runway by finding more cash, usually from equity injections. This generally requires that an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) has been produced. MVP is a term usually associated with a tech start-up, but is just as applicable to a local accountant or plumber hanging out their shingle.
  • It achieves ‘lift-off’ before the end of the cash runway. This makes it easier to attract the necessary second round funding to scale from further equity or loan funds based on the expected cash flow from the expanded enterprise.

Assuming the start-up succeeds at option three, it is no longer a ‘start-up’, it has become a business.

These are very different beasts.

The start-up by necessity is acting to attract further investment. This is available from funding institutions of various kinds, and from those very early adopters of a new product or service who value the buzz of being early adopters, the risk takers. Those running ‘start-ups’ need to be highly ambidextrous, as they must work on the ‘product-market fit’ as well as continually chasing the next round of finance.

Once it has become a business, ‘lift-off’ has been achieved, the focus must be wholly on serving the chosen customer set, or the pack of cards will fall, eventually.

 

 

 

The elusive formula for winning and managing government grants.

The elusive formula for winning and managing government grants.

 

There is considerable grant money being allocated to innovative solutions to technical and market challenges by all levels of government. Such a honey-pot attracts all sorts of characters with a whole range of motivations, along with the genuine applicants seeking help. In this environment, panels of disinterested departmental officials and sometimes so called ‘experts’ are called upon to make judgements. As has been demonstrated over the last few years, these judgements are not always followed closely when votes are in play.

Be prepared to acknowledge that there is a whole lot of ‘lottery’ involved. Judgements about your eligibility against a set of guidelines that can be ambiguous, convoluted, and occasionally contradictory, can be an enormously frustrating and time consuming exercise for applicants. In addition, despite what is said, innovation involves risk. No government wants risk, and bureaucrats are conditioned by their culture to be utterly risk averse. The most remote whiff of risk, an indication of potential failure which can be politically weaponised to end careers is abhorrent to project assessors, irrespective of the number of times the word ‘innovation’ appears in the literature and conversation.

Before you ever approach the process of committing the resources to apply for a grant, then managing it should you be successful, you need to understand 3 basic rules:

  1. Any grant funds will come into your P&L at the top line, so will add to profit assuming you make some, or reduce future tax losses. Most programs require cash co-investment, so make sure you discount the potential value of grant funds appropriately before you start.
  2. Notions of Commercial in Confidence, often a central driver of innovators is absolute poison to public authorities, whose whole mind-set is about levelling the playing field. Assertions of Commercial in Confidence, written or verbal are worthless, even when delivered in good faith, as the project proposal usually goes through multiple hands during assessment.
  3. To quote a senior bureaucrat during a conversation with me about the above two considerations: ‘when you get into bed with the government, who do you think is on top?” Recognise that grants come with strings, and managing pro-actively those strings, even when they seem somewhere between irrelevant and absurd, is essential to your ongoing sanity.

Assuming you have come to terms with these three factors and want to continue, following is a check list of what you simply must do, and not do.

Do’s

  • Ensure you have very clear objectives and project path before you set about filling in the forms. Adjusting your project plan, time frames, or objectives in order to meet program guidelines and make your application seem better, is a common and serious mistake. Ensure your project fits their guidelines perfectly, never adjust your project to fit. A bit of nipping and tucking may seem like it will enhance your chances, and it may, but most often it comes back to bite.
  • Clearly understand the objectives of the program. This sounds pretty obvious, and it is usually reasonably clear. However, there are always implicit objectives such as inclusion, equality, job generation, and most importantly re-election prospects that play an often unstated role.
  • Reflect back the words of the stated project objectives in your communications, and add in some that reflect positively on the implicit objectives.
  • Most programs work in rounds driven by dates. While this is often very inconvenient commercially, it better suits the bureaucracies. A project that is rejected in one round might be successful in another less populated by applicants, as the tendency is to break up the program funding into equal parts. So, persist. Ask for and take the advice on why your application failed this round, (‘the money ran out for this round’ will never be one of them, although it will often be the case) and work that advice into your application in the next round.
  • Be prepared to have some well academically qualified person without any relevant experience of your industry, and indeed life outside the bureaucratic bubble, believing they can and should give you strategic and operational advice. You will be well advised to politely acknowledge and follow this advice, at least superficially, if your application is to be favourably reviewed.
  • Always be prepared to report as per the schedules, preferably a day or two before the deadline. Be explicit in your application about the importance you place on these milestones and the attached KPI’s. These milestone reviews will always be a part of the grant contract, embrace them. Set about making auditing your project progress easy for the granting body.
  • When you are not successful with an application, try and find out why, so you can do better next time. This can be a hugely frustrating process, and rarely will you ever know for sure, as those trying to explain it will be paranoid about telling you anything that may be used against them. I once prepared a grant application for a regional manufacturing innovation program for a client, where the guidelines were an absolutely perfect fit. My client was located in a regional town, had two patents on parts of the process he proposed to use, so we appeared to ‘nail’ the innovation requirement, would have generated a number of jobs, and was value adding a waste agricultural product, but we missed out. I spent considerable time and energy trying to understand why, but failed. I ended up receiving a number of 4-page emails that were absolutely incomprehensible, and could not get through on the phone. The ‘official’ up to whom my questions and protestations had been pushed simply stonewalled me. Eventually, as I am sure was the desired departmental outcome, I and my client gave up to invest the time and energy in something useful.
  • Document everything, they will, and you might need to refer back at some point.
  • Ignore the preponderance of verbs and adjectives that will adorn the guidelines and accompanying material. They are simply a manifestation of the bureaucratic instinct to complicate everything, using 3 words when one would suffice.
  • Offer cream biscuits at the very least with the coffee in the unlikely event that they drag themselves out of the Canberra bubble and come to your offices. Lunch is better still, call it relationship building.

 

Don’ts

  • Do not get annoyed by constant insistence that you nominate the electorate and postcode where your project will take place.  Just give them something that serves as press release fodder, irrespective of how accurate it might be. Usually this will be your ‘head office’ even if there is absolutely no relevant activity beyond governance being conducted from that address.
  • Do not ever miss a deadline of any sort. When implementing a project, if it looks likely you might miss one, forewarn them, with the reasons, then, preferably, meet the deadline. The added effort to recover to the deadline will deliver brownie points. Any variation to the terms of a grant agreement are treated differently when they are a surprise, than when they are forewarned. This is really just common sense and courtesy, but I have seen tiny molehills blow up like Vesuvius in their absence. Such misses can motivate an audit. The right to audit will be written into the grant contract, but will probably never happen in the absence of some sort of catalyst that motivates action. When they do audit, they are usually ‘tick and flick’ exercises. However, noncompliance with the reporting schedule, or obvious inconsistencies that emerge from a cursory look can lead to deeper audits that are seeking to find the inevitable breaches of the guidelines and grant contract detail. Responding will be a time consuming, frustrating, and resource hungry exercise. You have things to do to move the project forward, and manage the rest of your business, while they have as an objective, finding out where you have cut a corner, adjusted priorities, or spent in a way that is even marginally inconsistent with the agreement.  Best to avoid that sort of scrutiny by overt compliance.
  • Don’t expect them to be as responsive as you expect. The sense of urgency you feel will have no effect on the pace of progress of your application. Don’t let it frustrate you, too much.
  • Do not counsel them on the challenges faced in filling in their demonic templated application forms. Somebody who may be commenting on your application designed it, thinks it is perfect, and might take such criticism personally. When they are difficult, as they normally are, ask for clarification, pointing out the deficiencies as inhibiting the quality of the information you are giving them, rather than pointing out their idiot template was generated by Satan.
  • Don’t become annoyed at the constant communication required by different people who ask the same questions as the previous incumbent. This is nothing compared to the changes in personnel that will occur during the project implementation. It will often feel like you were put on earth to train a seemingly endless stream of apprentices.
  • Never forget that most grant programs are competitive. Therefore, you are not only seeking to demonstrate to the assessors that your solution to challenges being addressed is worth supporting, but it is more worthwhile than any of the ‘competitive’ applications.
  • Don’t forget that those doing the assessing are just people, trying to do a job in a culture that will be entirely different to yours. Generally they do not set out to frustrate your ambitions, that is just an unintended consequence of the culture they must operate in, so do not overreact.

 

The benefits of grant funding.

  • Obviously, when appropriate, and well executed, the cash. Almost always this is the primary reason a grant is sought. However, it often becomes secondary to the following point.
  • Recognition, networks and the next grant. Governments live and die by the communication they generate, and networks they can leverage. Generally they are pretty good at it, having brought in communication professionals who do know their jobs. (I exclude advertising from this comment. Public servants generally know absolutely nothing about advertising effectiveness, but insist on their right as the client to dictate the ads, which is why there is so many wallpaper ads thrown at us) Once recognised as a compliant, PR friendly grant recipient, the networking opportunities are significant, and often prove to be the best outcome of a grant. Being a recipient, and having that good record of co-operation, gives you a head start the next time, as you are a known quantity, which reduces risk.

I hope that all helps, good luck, you might need it.

Header cartoon credit: Tom Gauld

 

 

 

The misleading myth of work/life balance.

The misleading myth of work/life balance.

 

The term work/life balance seems to have been taken into our commonly used language. It pops up everywhere there is a discussion about stress, personal development, post covid back to work, and many others.

To me it is a deeply flawed metaphor.

The term ‘Balance’ immediately brings to mind the mental picture of the old-style balance, as in the header.

Our lives are not binary, there is way, way more than just work and life involved. How does family, ambition, community, workplace equality, financial comfort, and a host of other factors we all face come into view and play a role?

Depending on the context in which we think about these things, the weight we put on all these factors will change. Therefore it is more like a complex jigsaw puzzle where the size, shape, relative weight, and manner in which the pieces fit together is a far better description.

I have a friend going through the process of selling his small, successful business to retire and find greater work/life balance. From the time he told me he was going to sell a year ago, to our most recent conversation a few days ago, the shape and relative weight of the pieces in his ‘jigsaw’ have continued to evolve with his changing state of mind.

Selling a business you have worked your arse off to build can be a deeply emotional decision, subject to uncertainty about the way hindsight might score the decision.

As he has progressed through the various stages necessary to ensure he maximises the sale value to him, while keeping faith with his client base, I have observed a wide range of emotions. These have been completely at odds with the initial reason he gave me of finding more work/life balance in semi-retirement, whatever that might look like.

So, do not believe in binary absolutes, ever. They are just put there to appear to simplify complexity, but which inevitably lead to uncertainty and miscalculation.