Often what Spring Thinking means is solving strategic questions for people. Frequently they don’t even know what those questions are, because they don’t think in terms of strategy.
(This does not help my own business development if I’m honest – people rarely look for a solution to a problem they don’t think they’ve got.)
Medium-size companies have nevertheless often been good clients for me – I’m quick, my stuff is action orientated and I don’t care what companies do.
A while ago I researched 30 SME customers of an accountancy firm. These interviews revealed a picture, of UK business, I believe applies today to 95% of the firms and organisations out there.
My interviews revealed that engineering, manufacturing, construction and technology businesses were inevitably founded, and had grown in similar, even identical fashion. Which not only accounted for the fertile R&D tax advice environment, at the time of the research, but also for a much more general issue.
We can call this issue the ‘strategy gap’.
Basically, while the word strategy gets used to describe plans and Gantt charts, most businesses don’t have a coherent expression of their strategy, to use when going forward.
Mostly, my researched companies were founded by 2 or 3 people, rarely more. Let’s say they were Keith and Katie.
They were both reasonably experienced professionals in some field or other. Doesn’t matter which. Pattern is the same for advertising as it is architecture.
Working at the same place, Keith and Katie didn’t like their boss/line manager Neil. They were the sort of people who had always wanted to work for themselves, or at least had decided on this recently.
They got on fairly well and had discussed their ambition down the pub. That was it, until Katie identified a customer, perhaps from a historic job, who told her off the record “if you started your own firm you could have my business”. Keith thought he might know someone similar.
They started the business. The plan was ‘do what we know for the people we know and see how we get on’.
Several years later, Katie’s and Keith’s contacts had come good. The business had survived. In fact, it had evolved. One day, in the bar at a trade show in Frankfurt, Keith had bumped into a guy, got talking and discovered an opportunity related to their core business. They just needed to buy some more equipment and recruit somebody specialist. Something like that. They did this successfully and ended up with a satellite office in Holland. And went from there.
That last story is absolutely true by the way. One of my interviewees became a European operation purely by accident.
Businesses like Katie & Keith’s get into their second decade employing quite a few people and turning over a decent amount of money. They are in fact in a position to sell out at some point to the benefit of their founders. Nobody is sure what the plan is for this, if any, though rumours abound.
KatieKeithCo has a number of employees who have been with them a while. Such people have their own, identifiable coffee mugs in the kitchen cupboard. In management speak, teams in the organisation are probably norming rather than storming.
There is a feeling the company is a bit stale, could be more profitable, has some problem customers, but it’s doing okay. Crucially, future planning consists of some modest targets for growth, along with some general ideas of where they think new customers might come from.
When someone like me comes and asks about their strategy, their customer proposition, differentiation etc, they don’t really have one. Any company values will be obvious things like “professionalism” and “honesty”. In other words, hygiene factors without which the company will fail.
My hypothesis is that most SME businesses, at least, fit this description. Unlike Innocent Drinks, or more recently Hallo Fresh, they did not start with a carefully devised roadmap of how they were going to succeed and grow and why their products would appeal against the competitors and all that stuff.
The analogy I use is baseball – such businesses have started out around the baseball diamond and got to 2nd base. Unlike a baseball player however, they don’t know where third base is.
The truth? In any economy, boom or bust, we should all be grateful for Keith and Katie. Analytical people often don’t ever start a ‘dream venture’ because they can think of too many reasons why it won’t succeed.
Most business founders never hit that obstacle – precisely because they didn’t think forwards very far, thank God.
But they are limited by exactly the same thing. Leaving them driving into the dark at full speed with no satnav.
