Category: Innovation

Friday, 5.22am

Sheffield, U.K.

The path to our destination is not always a straight one. We go down the wrong road, we get lost, we turn back. Maybe it doesn’t matter which road we embark on. Maybe what matters is that we embark. – Barbara Hall

In the next few posts, as we continue with this Getting Started book project, we’ll look at different ways to map your past and squeeze out some insights.

Let’s start with a lifeline.

Drawing a lifeline

You’re probably aware of palm reading – the idea that the lines on your palms have something to say about your life in general.

One of those lines is called a lifeline.

Let’s use that idea of a line that represents your life to take a first pass at what’s happened so far.

Get a pencil and some paper and let’s get started.

The point you make when you first touch your pencil to the paper is when you’re born.

What’s happened since then?

Were you born into a rich or a poor family, or did you have no family at all?

Did life get better – did you have a warm, safe home and all the things you could want – or was it a difficult childhood.

Let the pencil make a record, as you run the past through your mind, going up and down as things get better or worse.

Was school good or bad, did you enjoy it or did you feel like an outsider, someone who didn’t fit in.

Keep going, playing back memories, and changing direction at key events as your life improves or becomes worse.

And stop when you reach the present.

What does your lifeline look like?

Every one of us will have a unique lifeline, the experiences accumulated over our lifetime.

But there may be patterns, the kind of patterns you see around you when you take the time to learn about other people and their lives.

Some might have had a very steady improvement – from being born into the right family to having access to opportunities and taking advantage of them.

In many cases, you have ups and downs – good experiences followed by bad ones – but as you learn from the bad ones and build on the good your life becomes steadily better.

Then again, maybe it’s not good news. Early tragedy or misfortune pushed you down and has kept you down even when you tried to change things.

Or you’ve had early success and an equally spectacular fall and have spent much of the intervening time since then trying to recapture some of that lost glory.

Why is a lifeline useful?

A lifeline is a very simple way of compressing your experiences into a compact image that you can critically evaluate.

Right now, at this very instant, you’re at the end of the line.

Every instant before that, each mark making up the whole line, has led you to where you are now.

It is your history, your story – and where you are now and why you are who you are now is captured in those up and down marks on that sheet of paper.

You could annotate the line if you wanted with the main events that make it up but you don’t have to, especially if the memories aren’t great.

Just drawing this line and looking at it is a start – a way of facing your past instead of hiding from it or glossing over it.

This is what is there and this is what you have to build with.

And maybe it’s amazing and you can go on to great things or it’s not so good and you have some rebuilding to do – either way you’ll get a sense of what you’re up against.

And some of these points, the ones that turn, are defining experiences – the times that have made you who you are today.

Let’s look at what that’s created in the next post.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Wednesday, 5.23am

Sheffield, U.K.

May the Great Architect of the universe enable us as successfully to carry out and finish this work. May He protect the workmen from danger and accident, and long preserve the structure from decay; and may He grant us all our needed supply, the corn of nourishment, the wine of refreshment, and the oil of joy, Amen. So mote it be. – Masonic Order prayer, Wikipedia

I’m nearly at the end of the first act of this. Getting Started book project

If you’ve been following along, what we’ve been doing so far is understanding where you are right now – because that’s the place from where you start.

What happens next depends on two things.

The foundation you start with and the structure you build.

So, to wrap up this first act let’s look at the idea of building and see what we can learn from it.

The foundation stone

What do the words “foundation stone” bring to mind?

I thought of it as something like the first brick, one that starts everything off.

But, it is much more than that.

It’s also called a cornerstone and in addition to being the first it’s also the one used to decide where every other stone goes.

The entire structure that’s built afterwards will be positioned with reference to this stone.

So, it matters. It’s important.

And it leads to the question – how will you lay your foundation stone?

What you’re trying to achieve

The Masonic prayer that starts this post sets out everything you need to keep in mind.

It asks for God’s help to start the work, carry it out successfully, have the resources needed to do the job safely, finish it, and build something that will endure over time.

Is there anything else you want for your project?

This overarching principle, expressed as a prayer, captures the essence of what you are trying to achieve when you get started on something new.

But, to actually get your build done, you need to do two things.

You need build on sound foundations, on ground that will support the structure you want to create.

And you have to have a clear idea of the structure you want to build, have a design that you’re going to try and make real.

When it comes to business that means you have to do two things.

You have to look back at your life and experience so far because that’s the foundation you will build on.

Then you look forward, create a design for the future that you want to build

Then you get started by laying the foundation stone, the one that will determine how the structure you build will be positioned.

And, of course, you want to build something that’s going to be of use, that’s going to be valuable for the rest of your life – because you’ll be around to see it and it’s something that you want to be proud of.

The importance of rituals

The laying of a foundation stone has, over time, become a ritual act.

That’s why there is a prayer and a ceremony.

And this makes sense, when you think about it.

When you do something as important as positioning the first stone, you need to get it right.

And you get things right by paying attention to the details, by focusing on getting it right.

And what better way to do that than in full view of everyone, under scrutiny.

In that situation, everyone involved wants to get it perfect, and will check and double check everything that needs to be done.

In the Freemason ceremony they check and declare that the foundation stone is “duly and truly laid.”

I’m not suggesting that you start your project with a prayer.

But, having some rituals makes it easier to get started.

For example, when you’re writing it’s hard to start with a blank page.

One of my rituals is to start with freewriting – getting down three paragraphs of anything which I’m not going to use anyway.

Once that’s done the words I’m going to use start to flow more easily.

Whether it’s going into an office, the morning cup of coffee, working in the same place every day – all the small habits and rituals make it easier to get started on your project every day.

And it’s with these small acts that you will eventually build the grand structure you have in mind.

But before you do that we have to check the ground you’re building on.

We’ll start looking at that section next.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Monday, 5.23am

Sheffield, U.K.

Making money, it seems, is all about the velocity of moving it around, so that it can exist in Hong Kong one moment and Wall Street a split second later. – Richard Dooling

In my last post I looked at how taking the time to understand your customer’s customer could help you create a better sales pitch – one based around how you could help them rather than what you could sell them.

I said I would look at risk next, but before that I think I want to look at money.

Your and my money.

And I want to just see how we go about spending it when we’re getting started and whether the way we do that makes sense.

How can you spend your money?

There are many ways to lighten your wallet, but only a few of them result in money coming back to you as well.

It seems to me that there are three good ways and a whole bunch of not-so-good ways.

The first three have varying chances of making a profit while the remainder will usually lose you money.

Let’s see why and how.

Spending on production expenses

One of the conclusions I have come to while writing this blog is that we should start thinking of ourselves as producers.

If you think of yourself as a creative or a writer or a photographer – then you’re thinking about things in terms of what you do.

The only problem with that is no one really cares about you – even your immediate family – who have to pretend like they are interested, but what they’re really doing is waiting for you to finish talking so they can talk about their problems.

I think that when you go into a situation and talk about yourself – your skills, track record, ambitions – people are really not listening at all.

But they get interested – sit up and become alert – when they hear about what’s in it for them, how it relates to what they do and want and are interested in.

If you really want to get their attention you have to start thinking in terms of what they are interested in.

And if you also want their money you have to think in terms of what you’re going to give them – what actual “thing” are you going to hand over.

And then you have to produce that “thing”.

Which is why production is a good mental model for this kind of work – your task as a producer is to take resources and transform them to produce the thing that your customer needs.

Now, this works if you’re your own customer.

If you want to be something – a writer, an actor, a businessperson – then all the thinking in the world will not help.

You have to produce words, acts and products to improve your craft and create a market for your work.

In this kind of situation what you have to do is match your costs to your income, to revenues.

When you have no revenue, keep your costs low, spend as little as possible and focus on producing what your customer needs.

As you start to sell and the revenue comes in, you’ll start to make a profit.

But still, you’re best off investing money only when it’s helping you produce that “thing” your customer wants.

Unless you’re getting something else out of the process.

Test and learn

The one exception to spending money to produce something is when you’re focused on also learning something.

We usually don’t know exactly what needs to be done when we get started on a new project.

There is a period of trial and experimentation and finding out what works and what doesn’t work.

This can take a while – and it will not always make money.

But it will almost always produce learning, if you’re looking out for it.

In this model you’re putting money into a project in the expectation that revenues will come in and you’ll make a profit.

But if you don’t, that’s ok because you will also get some learning out of it.

But you would be wise not to try and get things perfect at this stage – learn to live with imperfections because you can always get rid of them when you’ve learned what’s going to work.

Paying for success

Another spending model you will come across all the time is a commission model – where you pay for success.

The simplest case is when you pay someone for an introduction that later generates some business.

There is usually little or no up front cost but you do have to give the person a share of any income you make as a commission.

What you’re paying for here is a leg up, a little bit of help in climbing a wall, finding that customer, making those sales.

That’s an old and perfectly justifiable way of doing a deal.

Except when it’s not.

There are many business, with financial services among the most egregious, that take commissions on transactions without creating value.

That’s because they make money on the number of transactions that happen – not on the value that is created for you or your customer.

The difference is not always clear cut.

Take estate agents, for example.

If you pay them a commission on sale, are you paying for success?

Well, it turns out that agents aren’t interested in what you make – they want a sale to happen as quickly as possible – because that’s how their incentives work.

You’re better off paying for what they do for you – advertising your property and showing it – rather than linking it to the sale.

Production costs rather than success based commission, in other words.

But as you can see the distinctions get hard fast.

Which is why hoping and praying is a big thing

All the other ways of spending money seem to fall best into a hope and pray category.

Advertising and marketing can be viewed as test and learn in some cases but all too often it’s hope and pray.

Every single get rich quick scheme is in this category.

As are all the ads you see for whatever magical course is on your media feed for the day.

Not for the people promoting the scheme, of course – for them these are legitimate production cots, or a test and learn model.

But if you put your money into something hoping for a fast return, then you’re in this camp.

And the one thing to realise is that if you don’t fully understand how it works then you’re best off staying far far away.

Put your money to work in the right way.

Focus on what you get

The first three ways to spend your money produce something.

They produce a “thing” that people want, learning for you or sales and results.

They also keep you costs low – which is crucial when getting started on any project.

And they help speed up the process of getting results – another crucial element.

But what you have to do is learn to recognise the ways that don’t do that – that trip you up, cost you more and waste your time.

Those ways you have to avoid – you need to see the risks and get around them.

If you can’t manage your own risks, how will you manage them for your customer?

We’ll carry on with this topic the next time.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

You’ll find the YouTube version here with some additional hand-drawn footage.

Saturday, 5.35am

Sheffield, U.K.

You are not getting because you are not giving. For example, you can get sales orders only after you give attention, admiration or information first. – Meir Ezra

In the last few posts, as I continue this Getting Started book project, I looked at how what you can do is limited by your resources and how you should then do what you can do in a way that creates value for your prospective customer.

You’re doing all this to get a customer, and so the earlier you start thinking about that customer acquisition process the better.

What does the basic cycle look like?

First you need a way to get new leads – and this is the first element of the venerable marketing model AIDA, which stands for attention, interest, desire and action.

How do you get the attention of the kind of people who will be interested in what you do?

It’s easy to start by saying that everyone will be, or should be interested.

That kind of approach always leads to a vague, general message that rarely gets any one person’s attention.

The more specific you are, the more you limit your market but it is also more likely that the people who will eventually become your customers will notice what you’re doing.

The next thing you need to do is develop that initial interest into a contract for services – and this is where being innovative helps.

All that thinking you did previously about what makes you different will help you here.

But innovation isn’t just about what you do – it’s actually more about what the customer needs.

And the way you have that conversation is going to make the difference between getting to a signed proposal or losing the customer.

Once you’ve gotten a customer you have to do what you said you would do – deliver value through operations and make sure they get a lot more from you than they’re paying for.

When you do that you’ll start to build a base of happy, satisfied customers who come back to you and give you repeat business – and these old leads will turn into the long tail, the bulk of the value you create over time.

This is a very simple cycle and most business get every stage badly wrong much of the time.

Why do we fail at doing these simple things?

The main reason we struggle to make what looks like a simple system work is that just because something is simple to understand that doesn’t mean it’s easy to do.

Unless you’ve lived through a startup, the chances are that your own expertise sits in only one of these spaces.

You may be very comfortable doing marketing, or good at selling, or great at crafting proposals or an amazing operator.

But that’s the role you play.

Imagine a scene on the Starship Enterprise, with all the characters doing their assigned roles and the Captain orchestrating and making sure that every one does what they should do.

That kind of smooth operation is only possible when you know what you need to do – travel there, escape that attack, fix that problem.

That entire system of people and machinery actually does quite a simple thing.

Your business, however small, actually has a much more complex task overall – to acquire and delight customers.

And it’s not surprising that people with expertise in a role fail to see what needs to happen as a whole.

People tend to believe that because they are smart at one thing that means they are smart at everything.

That leads to a number of mistakes.

First, people tend to optimise locally without making any difference globally.

What that means is that you could spend a huge amount of money building the best marketing system but your sales conversion could be useless, or your operations less than perfect.

Those leaks in your system will cause customers to flow away, often faster than you can bring in new ones.

So then you have people blaming each other and most of the time goes in infighting and turf wars.

In such situations the only way to make decisions is through the use of power – whoever has the power makes the call regardless of their competence in that area.

These dynamics are invisible to most people and even those who are a part of the business will only see a part of this.

The most visible parts of a business are the marketing and sales content and the operational delivery.

But all around you, hanging in the air, are the effects of culture and politics – and although they are as real as the things you make few people acknowledge they exist or take them into account when making decisions.

How can you change that?

Most people don’t – they work harder and struggle and get stressed.

That’s why most business people and most managers are increasingly tired and exhausted as they grow their business and operations.

But there are a few simple ways to make things easier.

They are, however, counter-intuitive and you will struggle to implement them in most organisations.

But that’s ok – it gives you an edge when you’re getting started.

The first is to do less – just stop doing a whole bunch of things.

After all, you can’t get something wrong that you don’t do at all.

Most people believe that the way to fix a problem is do implement a correction – do something to make everything better.

Few people ask whether they need to do the thing that cause the problem at all.

The way to decide what to do and what not to do is to focus on things that add value to the customer.

Throw away anything that does not directly result in improved quality and value to your customer.

That means things like internal reports, busywork, pointless analysis.

But, you argue, surely it’s important to be prepared, to have all the facts, to do your research.

I’d argue that it’s much more important to spend that time with your prospect, giving them your attention.

If you do that well they will tell you all you need to know about what they need – and then you can give them that.

And that reduces what you have to do.

Once I got better at doing this I went from writing 20 page proposals about how good I was to writing a one page proposal about what I could do for them.

I spent less time writing, they spent less time reading and the conversion rates went way way up.

What next?

So far, we’ve covered resources you have, the edge they give you and briefly considered the sales process.

In the next post we’ll look at how you can supercharge that sales conversion bit before we take a deeper look at the problems you will face and what to do about them.

Nearly 25,000 words on over 21 posts and we’re about a sixth of the way through the book plan – and there’s a fair amount of editing to do eventually.

Apologies to those of you that are getting these long posts in your email – hopefully there is still something of value in there, even if it’s buried in the rubble of a first draft.

I do plan to start the draft of the next book as soon as I finish the rough drafts here though, while editing happens on the side – so this may be the new normal for a while.

The next thirty years or so…

Cheers, Karthik Suresh

Friday, 5.23am

Sheffield, U.K.

Successwise, you’re better off being good at two complementary skills than being excellent at one. – Scott Adams

In my last post I wrote about the difference between being really good at one thing versus making things happen.

I want to continue on that theme today and see if we can make some progress towards understanding how to make something valuable happen.

The difference between creation and value

I was talking to one of the small people in the house the other day about the difference between creating something and producing something.

There are lots of things you can create – and kids do a lot of that kind of stuff.

Or they used to, when they still went to school.

They’d come back with clay creations, monstrous little dumpy blobs studded with stones and toothpicks.

Of course, no one would buy them or want them to keep.

Even as parents, looking proudly at what they’ve made, we probably would keep a few for the sentimental value but in general most of them will have to go.

The point I’m driving at is that value mostly depends on what other people think about what you create.

Anybody can “create” something – you could create a toy out of the mud in your garden.

But, that thing you make starts to get valuable when someone else thinks it is.

And the idea I was floating with the small person is that creating is open ended – you could go anywhere with it.

But producing is about getting a result, making something happen or making something new.

And the question we’re trying to answer is how do we make that something that we make valuable in the eyes of someone else.

Building value by layering qualities

One way to create value is by being the best at the world at the thing you do.

Or, in any case, being seen as the best out there.

This is the principle behind Google, being first to market and “blowing up” on social media.

Winners take everything in these situations.

But, almost by definition, there can only be a few people or businesses up there at the top, and being in the right place at the right time with a heavy dose of luck plays a big part in getting there.

For the rest of us success is more likely through a simpler and more achievable strategy.

And that’s layering.

For example, let’s say your business is producing videos for other businesses.

If you’re a person with a camera and editing software and access to stock footage – then you’ve made a start.

You could probably pitch for work and get a few gigs, set up a profitable business.

Now, in a Covid 19 world, everyone needs to move to digital marketing – we’re seeing an explosion in home videos from smaller businesses – as tradespeople and personal service businesses realise that they can no longer go out there to knock on doors, sit in living rooms and talk business.

Everyone needs video.

And they’re going to start with a DIY approach.

They’ll use the cameras they have, free or cheap software and little editing.

But eventually, if they do enough, they’ll get better – they’ll start adding animations, transitions, maybe start using some stock footage.

What makes you different from those DIYers?

Well, to start making that difference more visible, you have to tell us about what you do and how the combination of all that creates value.

There’s your experience, of course, your portfolio.

The tips and tricks you’ve learned over your career.

Your ability to craft engaging, compelling storylines.

Your access to a library of curated content material you’ve filmed yourself that you can use in client projects.

The investments you’ve made in high quality cameras and lighting that let you create cinematic style videos with depth of focus.

The automation you’ve put in place to speed up your workflow.

The way you’ve created a proposition that reduces costs for the customer even when compared to DIY.

What? You’ve done some of those things but not all of them, or much much more?

Well, that’s the difference then.

If you do one thing, like point a camera and shoot – everyone with a smart phone can compete with you.

But, when you start doing a few more things, the number of people competing with you falls off dramatically.

It doesn’t take many – in the case of Scott Adams, he’s taken elements that many people can do to some extent.

He draws pictures, and tells stories. About engineering.

And those three circles, when overlapped, created Dilbert – a one of a kind comic series.

And when you start looking you’ll recognise this everywhere.

The people you see on social media putting out content are doing what they do for their core business and one more thing – creating relevant content.

And so, they stand out.

You could do it too, but the vast majority of people don’t.

And so they miss out on an opportunity to create value in the eyes of others.

Making value defensible

One of the things people worry about is what if they do all this and someone copies their idea or business.

This is less of a problem than you might think.

Usually, when someone copies something, they copy one element of it.

If your business is all about that one element then you’re going to have a problem.

But if you’ve layered enough things to create something of value, then it gets harder to take away.

Of course, it’s best when you actually have a barrier to entry – and the best one is a monopoly.

The best example of this is creating content, writing a book or making a video.

That material is protected by copyright – no one else can use it without your permission.

You have a monopoly on its use.

The only way people can take it is by stealing it.

And these days the best defence against that is to drop your protections – give away stuff for free on your website and add value – make it easier for people who want to buy your stuff to get it through other means.

For example, Shawn Coyne created the Story Grid method and I read his stuff for ages on his website – where he told you that you could find much of the stuff in his book.

And eventually I ordered his book because it added value by setting out the material in an easy to read form and in a physical package that I could put on a shelf.

If you don’t have a monopoly the next best thing is to dominate the space, be first to market, be the largest in there, have the most material.

Be the best.

And as we’ve already worked out only a few people get there.

And then, third on the list, is to build value by layering things anyone could do but where few people do all at the same time.

Create combinations of activities that create something people want and do it faster and cheaper than they can get elsewhere.

This is the thinking behind Lean and the Toyota Production System – the kind of approach behind the Japanese economic engine.

Strip out waste from your processes, make things flow better.

It is possible to make thing that last for longer, use better materials and which are cheaper than other options.

You can have quality, deliver fast and reduce costs.

Or at least, some people can, and those people will start to capture market share.

Start thinking in terms of production

The thing to take away from this section is that you should go from thinking about what you create to thinking about how you produce something.

Production is about the process, the steps that take you from start to finish, to the point where you hand something over to someone else.

And you can add value throughout that production line – by adding things that make it better and taking out waste.

Each item you add or subtract sets you further apart from the people who don’t do those things, and it’s amazing how quickly you can start to differentiate between what you do and what others do.

And if what you do is what people want, then you’re on your way to getting started.

It seems simple but it will require time and experimentation on your part to get the mix right for you.

You have to draw the circles that match your situation, your skills, your approach, to get something that’s unique and different about your proposition.

If you just copy what someone else does – they will always be better – because they were first, because they do more, because they’re already well known.

You have to do something that sets you apart even from the people that first inspired and drove you to have a go at your thing.

And once you’ve figured out what those things are, then you need to focus your attention on doing more of them until you do stand out.

We’ll explore some of those ideas in subsequent posts.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh