UK Telecoms

The business community is buzzing with concerns of how firms will perform in 2011 after many experts have forecast a second financial dip. Jon Baker applies 25 years of training, coaching and observing behaviours to respond to the cloud of doubt.

Everybody has a choice. They can minimise risk and take a leaf out of the book of successful entrepreneurs or worry themselves back into start-up mode. It’s a bit like circumnavigating the globe, you can decide to sail the seven Cs: cash, concentration, control, cooperation, collaboration, culture and coaching, or give up, miss a few out and never accomplish your aspirations.

Cash

Cash is all about risk and the value or cost of potential outcomes. Successful entrepreneurs know they are never short of ideas, which exposes them to making 20 decisions in the hope one of them will yield a good result. This is not spreading risk. Lowering risk is about lowering the probability of something going wrong. You will notice that Lord Sugar for example, surrounds himself by conservative advisors, who appear to have an innate talent for ‘grilling’ ideas.

Write down your top 20 ideas, shortlist and refine them until you have three strong ones. Why make 20 bad decisions when you can make three good ones?

Concentration

Good entrepreneurs will have definite one, two and three year goals. Those who started setting clear goals a few years ago are far more likely to have reached their target size, revenue and/or customer base than those who have not set such objectives.

These entrepreneurs will manage their natural tendency to juggle too much and discipline themselves to concentrate on delivering or completing one thing well at a time. The most accomplished business people only take on companies or new offerings that are strategically linked, i.e. where one enterprise feeds another. If this involves risk taking, they will focus on the activities required to fill their sales funnel rather than focusing on the sales themselves.

Contact

It is very important to keep track of all calls that a business misses in a month. If many calls are being missed, it indicates a problem that needs to be corrected. Perhaps your call manger is not up to scratch? Perhaps the staff members are not responding to calls quickly enough? Perhaps training is required to ensure conversations with customers are handled efficiently? Or there may be hardware, software or network issues. get it sorted before it’s too late.

Control

Control plays a vital role in successfully navigating a company through economically uncertain times and often means controlling a natural appetite for adventure. In practice this means balancing risk and reward, so the approach to new opportunities and the ability to scale to accommodate increasing sales are of fundamental importance.

Those who have mastered the art of such a balance will be extremely sales margin conscious. Out-of-the-box thinking and flexibility will pave the way to more secure margins and customer longevity. Quieter business periods will be used to systemise business processes designed to make commercial headway. Watch out for self-acclaimed entrepreneurs who have not stopped to address systems weaknesses which can result in instabilities that are evident to customers and onlookers.

Cooperation

The proverb ‘birds of a feather flock together’ dates back to ancient Greek philosophy and has stood the test of time. Successful entrepreneurs will not be serial networkers, they will select the communities in which they build relationships very carefully to avoid those who could potentially let their business down. They will look for others who do not display panicked behaviour and innovate to help ensure high-quality service and product delivery. When an appropriate network has been established the fifth C comes into play – collaboration.

Collaboration

Although creating collaborations can be low cost, the consequences of getting them wrong can be astronomical. If all business owners were surrounded by commercially strong, honest and highly effective peers this would not be a problem. Unfortunately this is not the case, particularly towards the end of recession or if going into the proverbial second dip. This is why cooperation is crucial to collaboration.

The combination of the following two facts have generated disproportionally high risks to entrepreneurs looking to collaborate. Fact one: wave after wave of redundancies have fuelled the set-up of many consultancies. Fact two: entrepreneurial directors generally outsource the things that they are disinterested in or take too long.

Although there is enormous strength in understanding your own weaknesses and mitigating them through collaborating with consultants and other companies, getting answers to difficult questions before anything progresses has become pivotal to success. More importantly, getting it wrong reduces revenue while damaging your reputation and brand.

Those who used to work within larger organisations are not necessarily the best small business advisors. Ask about their achievements within your type of SME environment and where are the results? A recent change of career or accreditations without long-standing experience should ring alarm bells if you are about to collaborate with another business or entrust a consultant with your company’s direction.

Calls

It is a competitive world that we live in. Businesses must constantly innovate just to stand still! If you are not concerned about improving your performance, remember that your competitors will be improving theirs and will surely overtake you in no time. In such a competitive climate, businesses cannot afford to miss any enquiries. They cannot ignore any sales leads. For any business, a missed call might be a potential business enquiry that they missed. No business can afford to let this go unnoticed or employ a quality call manager.

Culture

The most successful directors of 2011 will be those who have recruited well and optimised all employees. They will have involved staff in quarterly milestones, explained how various achievements link together and each employee will have bought into the company direction. When things go well, this approach delivers a sense of achievement across the workforce. The days of restricting the objectives within your business plans to a few board members are over.

Coaching

The final C is the importance of coaching. Think back to those who supported the progress you have made in your own career and business. Who has taught and guided you well? Regardless of if they are a passive mentor or professional business coach, think about how they have or can help you attract and retain the right people, customers and suppliers. If they enthuse about the direction you set, people power will propel your company forward.

They say life begins at 40 but in fact it’s the over 50s who are making their mark as entrepreneurs.

As more over 50s find themselves redundant thanks to strained economic conditions, a growing number are opting to go solo and start their own businesses.

The employment market is tough for most people at the moment with an estimated 2,500 people being made redundant every day in the UK, but the situation is even tougher if you happen to be over 50. According to research by Prime, an organisation that offers business advice and support to over 50s embarking on their own enterprises, those who lose their job aged 50 have just a one in ten chance of securing a new position.

Rather than battling it out for the few jobs that remain, more and more empty nesters are using the situation to their own advantage. Enterprise Nation’s Home Business Report (compiled in October 2008) found that there are now over 2.5 million businesses operating from homes across the UK, an increase of 16% on the previous year, with over 50s being one of the fastest growing groups among these.

Older and wiser
A study commissioned by Yellow Pages revealed that senior start-ups contribute an impressive £24.4 billion to the UK economy each year, with over 50s at the helm of one in six of all new businesses.

“Over 50s are in a better position than most because they’ve got more experience and typically have some money behind them to start a business. Things like finally paying off a mortgage, or children leaving home can all be prompts for people to reassess their lives and decide that they want to branch out on their own,” says Paul Green of Saga.

As well as having years of experience over their younger counterparts, mature entrepreneurs, or ‘oldrepreneurs’ are they have been dubbed, possess a range of qualities that stand them in good stead to succeed in business. “People over 50 are generally more realistic”, says Laurie South of Prime. “They have a better self knowledge: they know what their strengths are and what they’re bad at. They also have more experience of interacting with different types of people and this helps in business”.

Seeking support
There are a range of support and advice services out there for mature entrepreneurs looking to start up their own business. Prime offers free information, workshops and business networking events to help over 50s on their way to success. The organisation also offers a start up pack which contains practical information about how to start up a business, as well as details of other support networks that can help.

“We really try to help people understand what the enterprise journey involves. If you’ve been an employee for more than 30 years, starting your own business can be a bit scary. We can provide mentoring services to help people make that cultural leap”, says South.

Business Link has also created an online guide for over 50s thinking of starting their own business, which can be accessed at www.businesslink.gov.uk/50plus.

“You don’t have to be Richard Branson”, argues South. “A lot more people can start an enterprise than they think, but you have to feel confident about it”.

An increasing number of people starting their own businesses are choosing to work from home. This can be an attractive option, especially for people with family commitments, as it enables you to work in a way that suits you and your lifestyle.
The tips below provide advice on how to make a home-based business work:

• Do the paper work. Talk to the experts about tax implications, home and contents insurance, planning permission and whether there are any restrictions on running a business in your mortgage or rental agreement
• It is easier to run a business properly if it’s separate from your home life – a room that is used solely as an office is essential. Your workspace should have all the equipment you need and be a pleasant place to work
• What level of commitment can you give to your business? Decide how many hours you want to work per week and what holidays you want to take, and then build them into your business plan. Once you have established a routine, encourage family and friends not to interrupt you ‘at work’. But try not to work when you are unwell – it’s important to know when to turn the answering machine on and switch off
• If you find yourself with more work than you can handle, find a solution rather than working long hours. Subcontract some of it, employ a temp or just learn when to say ‘no’
• Don’t let work pressures affect your family life – loved ones aren’t the best outlet for your business frustrations. Find a local network of business people who understand what you’re up against and can offer friendly advice from their own experiences

The three key lines as taken from the works of Stephen Covey as well as the Neuro-linguistic programmers (NLPers) run along the following lines:

1. Take responsibility and control – be proactive.
2. Start with the end in mind – if you know what your endpoint is, then you can work towards achieving it
3. Prioritise – do the really important things first

These lines are a really powerful message for businesses.
Taking control of your destiny – Every successful business must, to a greater degree, take control of its destiny – you cannot simply be like a cork on the ocean, waiting for the next wave to sweep in the direction of success. Too many businesses have gone bust because they refused to accept responsibility for what was happening to them – they would not raise their head above the parapet.

I am loath to admit it, but as a child, I used to collect frogs and put them in saucepans of water. We would then place the saucepans on top of the cooker – we would then turn the gas rings on under the saucepans. Frogs do not notice changes in the temperature of their environment – the water gets hotter and hotter, until eventually, the frogs explode.

Businesses are often the same – if they do not make themselves aware of the environment then they run the risk of blowing up – “strategic” planning is about planning bearing in mind the context and the environment that you are working in.

Starting with the end in mind – businesses must decide their course and understand the obstacles and barriers. If you start with the endpoint you can often see what needs to be done more clearly than when you are simply looking ahead.

And here we can bring in exercises such as ‘writing your own epitaph’. The sort of epitaph that might be written is a direct result of the way we have run our businesses (or lives). Our behaviour to date determines our epitaph to date. But the good news is that if we want a different epitaph, it is up to us to behave in the way that will bring us the new epitaph. The issue is whether we are able to decide what the epitaph should say and whether we are able to live it out in our daily lives,

Prioritising – clarity about goals brings with it clarity about what is really important in a business.

Carpe diem is about doing and achieving things – don’t let the people who say that things can not be done stop those who are doing it. Sometimes we need to ‘go for it’. My belief is that if we are clear about what we are trying to do (in general terms) then we can recognise the opportunities that are in front of our eyes. And remember, that failure and success go hand in hand.

And another naff quote is ‘I wish I’d…’. What’s interesting about ‘I wish I’d’ is that in interviews with elderly people, they do not regret what they have actually done – what they regretted was what they had not done. They ended up wishing that they had seized the day.

In the ‘New World’ the winners will be those who stand out from the crowd – but to do this, they need to be opportunistic and take some risks:

• Tom Watson – the founder of IBM was asked by a young employee, ‘How can I improve my success rate?’. The reply was ‘Double your failure rate!’ because as long as we learn from our mistakes then we are progressing into new territory.
• Thomas Edison – had 1052 patents in his name, had 7,000 failed attempts at designing a latex rubber plant and 11,000 failed experiments to design the filament light bulb. At his 5,000th light bulb failure, the newspapers referred to his work as ‘Edison’s Folly’. When asked why he kept on trying, Edison responded that he had simply found 5’000 ways that it did not work and so he was getting closer to success. Persistence is often everything.
• Colonel Sanders – had to visit over 1,000 restaurants before he could find one that would give him a royalty for his chicken recipe.
• The Wright Brothers – who would have accepted their invitation to go up in one of their first aeroplanes? – often new things seem crazy!
• Sylvester Stallone – to prove that persistence (and not even talent, it could be argued) is all that is required, he attended 292 film tests before he was given his first part.

We cannot separate failure from success – I’ll give a fifty-pound note to the person who could ride a bicycle on their first attempt.

Given the right culture, it is attitude that really matters – they do say that your attitude determines your altitude – or to put it another way, success is 15% about skills and knowledge and 85% about attitude!