A visit to The Climbing Wall in Sandyford, a 3 week old fledgling business already packed with happy customers on a freezing January night made me stop to think. What gets customers in this case to a business with no marketing or advertising budget? What separates success and disaster for a young business in the early scary days?
“The wall” is an indoor state of the art climbing wall in Sandyford industrial estate. So, your business is very different, but the same answers apply and will help you succeed early.
- Passionate attention to all customers, including the ones future customers. I dragged along a friend who doesn’t climb, and had no intention of doing so. She instantly felt welcome, even though climbing up the wall until then was something she only does at business meetings. Your customers may come in many forms and will have different needs. See the world from their perspective – are they confused? Scared? Stressed? Finding it hard to park? At the Wall you feel safe and at ease. And yes, of course, she climbed. And is now hooked.
- Create a happy place where staff are as engaged as you are in looking after customers with care. Your staff must feel like a really core part of your baby business. Get them on board and make sure to find ways of harnessing all their bright ideas about how to make your project a success
- Know your customers intimately before you start. Alan and Brian really understand their market, and are well networked. They already understood exactly what climbers want and immediately ran simple high impact events that have built up loyalty, traffic to The Wall and loads of Word of Mouth publicity, always the most powerful form of marketing. This also helps you create a sense of community and shared values among your customer base, so your customers stay longer and believe in what you do. Happy customers come back.
- Be clever about how to position and communicate what you offer: .The Wall makes canny use of social media and press coverage to get the story out in a more targeted and dynamic way than any ad ever will. Network, but be savvy about how you use that precious network.
- Know your competition equally intimately, know when to compete (and how) and when to collaborate. Sometimes collaboration is the right strategy – work together and instead of splitting a new small market you can grow it together, creating greater awareness by acting as a group and attracting more people to a new service or product.
- Good team - make sure all the practical stuff is under control. The top team here includes a marketing whizz and an employment law specialist. They have team skills to make sure the business is set up on a sound financial footing, property and planning skills and expertise to make sure design and operations are top class.
- Finally – do something you love. The chances are you will be very good at it!
RS: "Think like a biologist"
IMI: What does this mean? RS: There is a dangerous tendency for people to look at businesses and markets as though they were pieces of engineering: and should be managed and understood in Newtonian terms. Today more than ever it's more useful - at least most of the time - to use the mental models we use to understand complex and evolving systems.
Source:www.askabiologist.asu.edu
IMI: Where should we look for further information?
RS: A great first place to start is by reading Robert H Frank's book The Economic Naturalist, and his later work The Darwin Economy. Nassim Taleb's Antifragile is a long but mind-reshaping read.
The other areas of worthwhile study are evolutionary psychology and behavioural economics. These seek to understand how (and why) people - often unconsciously - make decisions in reality, and why this may differ from narrow and naive theories of economic rationality.
Where to start here? Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein. And The Rational Animal by Griskevicius and Kenrick.
Sapiens, by Noah Harari, Butterfly Economics by Ormerod, Adapt by Tim Harford and The Origins of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker would also be an essential read.
Rory Sutherland s a keynote speaker at the IMI National Management Conference taking place on Thursday 8 October. This event has now reached maximum capacity however if you would like to be added to the waiting list, please email your contact details and company name to conference@imi.ie.
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TDJ: Develop a digitally balanced business strategy
IMI: What does this mean? TDJ: Society, human behaviour, business: our world is rapidly getting more and more digital. But parallel to this development, the need for the real, the personal and the unconnected is growing. In the future, a successful strategy will cater both these trends with a digital balance in any part of business: products, services, marketing communication, HR etc. IMI: Where should we look for further information? TDJ: This fall, I will release a series of articles on this, published via LinkedIn and my website: www.whetston.com
Thimon de Jong is a keynote speaker at the IMI National Management Conference taking place on Thursday 8 October. This event has now reached maximum capacity however if you would like to be added to the waiting list, please email your contact details and company name to conference@imi.ie.
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Frances Ruane served as Director of the ESRI from 2006 to 2015. She previously taught in the Dept of Economics at TCD, and earlier in her career she work at Queens University in Canada and at the Central Bank of Ireland and the IDA. In Ireland, her current activities include chair of the Interdepartmental Group on Making Work Pay for People with Disabilities at the Department of Social Welfare, membership of the Public Interest Committee of KPMG, and an Honorary Professor in the Department of Economics at Trinity College, where she contributes to the MSc in Economic Policy Studies. She is also a Research Affiliate at the ESRI and a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
IMI: Based on your current work – if you only had 6 words of advice to give a business – what would they be?
FR: Look positively beyond the immediate.
IMI: What does this mean? FR: After a period of rapid growth, the global financial crisis meant that Irish businesses had to concentrate on handling immediate challenges. They managed that disruption well and this contributed to the strength of Ireland’s recovery. But the focus on the immediate has left many businesses with legacy issues (debt burdens, under-investment in innovation, poor staff morale). And now businesses need to prepare for the medium term when we discover what is really meant by ‘Brexit means Brexit’. Forward looking businesses leaders need now to ask: what could Brexit mean for my market and company? Where am I exposed to risk and how can I mitigate it? [post_title] => "Look positively beyond the immediate" Six Word Wisdom from Frances Ruane [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => look-positively-beyond-immediate-six-word-wisdom-frances-ruane [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2020-05-11 19:52:32 [post_modified_gmt] => 2020-05-11 19:52:32 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.imi.ie/?p=16052 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [6] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 7017 [post_author] => 32 [post_date] => 2014-05-08 15:28:31 [post_date_gmt] => 2014-05-08 15:28:31 [post_content] => [post_title] => 3 slick selling techniques you should take from the Time-share Salesperson [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => can-learn-selling-street-vendors [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2020-05-11 21:12:04 [post_modified_gmt] => 2020-05-11 21:12:04 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.imi.ie/?p=7017 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) )
Tadhg Nagle
Tadhg Nagle is joint Programme Director of the IMI Diploma in Data Business.
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What Chief Data Officers could learn from Jurgen Klopp
Data is an important component for success in today’s world. We may not know how much value it has, how to value it, or even what data we have, but we do have that overall sense that it is important.
It’s fair to say that everybody knows that data is an important component for success in today’s world. We may not know how much value it has, how to value it, or even what data we have, but we do have that overall sense that it is important.
Sports is one area where the impact of data is immediately visible to all.
(Photo source)
From data devices on the backs of rugby players to the use of hawkeye to the insane stats that flash up on TV screens during a game, data has also been used in the strategic management of sports clubs and their performance, to which Liverpool F.C. are no strangers.
Alongside being taken over by the Fenway Sports Group (FSG), in the process Liverpool also acquired the concept of sabermetrics. Made popular in the public’s conscience by the movie Moneyball (based on a book by Michael Lewis’s), sabermetrics was first applied by the Oakland A’s baseball team with great success. The concept was later brought to the FSG-owned Boston Redsox.
An old problem with a new lens
Not surprisingly, defense and offense is a fundamental concept in sports, if not the most fundamental aspect, and sabremetrics is an example of what data (or a Chief Data Officer) can do in finding the right strategy for a team to use.
Teams map out zones in playing arena’s, they have separate coaches for each area, they have specific roles within teams to carry out detailed defensive/offensive tasks during a game and they measure the effectiveness of both sides using different metrics.
At Liverpool F.C., Jurgen Klopp has adopted a strategy called “gegenpressing” that leans towards a more offensive style of playing. The strategy is underpinned by a very strong compliment of strikers and emphasised with the philosophy of not being afraid to defensively concede goals as the offense will score more.
Sports and the real world
With defense v offense being such a well known concept in managing sports teams, it is interesting that is has only been very recently applied to managing data capabilities. An article in Harvard Business Review in 2017 by Leandro DalleMule and Thomas H. Davenport outlined the need for organisations to balance both their defensive and offensive data strategies.
In the article it details a defensive strategy as one that focuses on control, good data quality and a single version of the truth. On the other hand an offensive strategy is one that emphasises flexibility and the ability to deliver different views (e.g. a marketing view, an operations view) depending on the needs of the business.
To visualise defensive and offensive data capabilities I have taken the ‘Data Value Map’ we’ve developed, which in some respects can be used to represent a playing pitch, and overlaid what a data defense and data offense looks like.
The result is a much more defined focus that details data acquisition to data integration as defensive tasks and data analysis to data delivery as offensive tasks. In data terms, poor data quality and having data scattered in all corners of the organisation are the biggest causes of a leaky defense. You may be familiar with the feeling that while you have loads of data, very little of it is usable. This is a common symptom of a poor defensive capability.
With regard to offense, many organisations have invested in advanced analytical technologies, which can deliver fantastic insights into the business. However, without fully understanding what the organisation needs this investment may be under utilised or poorly focused. In addition, striking the balance between defense and offense is of paramount importance. If you favour an all out attack type strategy at the expense of your defense you may end up with nice visualisations that present inaccurate data, leading to poor decisions.
A good defense is the best offense
Lastly, if you are intending to make data apart of your competitive advantage, you cannot afford to have weaknesses in your defense no matter what way it is balanced. This is something Jurgen Klopp was fully aware as Liverpool just missed out on the Champions League last year, and one reason why in January 2018 they spent £75 million on Virgil van Dijk, a world record transfer fee for a defender.
Weaknesses get exposed very quickly when the stakes are high and with the business world facing up to increased scrutiny through GDPR, organisations need to start focusing on their data defense to provide a stable foundation for success.
Tadhg Nagle is joint Programme Director of the IMI Diploma in Data Business.
He is also a lecturer and researcher in Information Systems at University College Cork.
With a background in financial services his expertise is in strategic innovation and emerging and disruptive technologies.
