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Mar 02

Community Entrepreneurs forge new business ideas – day 4

Posted on March 2, 2013 by colin

Day four of the Community Entrepreneurs programme – created by Tree Shepherd, LSx, and LCRN, and supported by the Small Business Research Initiative.

Day 4 – the Sony Music driving test and Learning the Power of Action

Day 4 started nervously. The Sony music team had spent 4 days in intensive training and they were keen to hone their newly learnt skills, but they were coming into an arena which they were unfamiliar with. On the other side, our resource entrepreneurs were worried that their plans would seem so amateur and too small to be of interest to the Sony people.

Neither need have worried. After a tentative round of introductions the two groups came together and as one said later “the two groups rapidly became one team.” Working towards addressing the key question for the day “what is their target audience and how will they get them to actually participate”.

The Sony people questioned and probed to build their knowledge, but with each answer our budding entrepreneurs grew in confidence. In one room the co-op was really being pushed to focus their ideas and decide what they wanted to be called and what feature amongst many was going to be the most attractive to their potential customers. By the end of a fascinating day the co-op was now New River and their “easy” logo summed up their approach to community recycling. For the co-op, LesleyAnne summed up the session “They could get to the point straight away, and we were just faffing around. We had the same leadership skills; they just knew what to pick out”

The style was different in the other room but no less effective for that. In that room, the whole group gave each project a concentrated dose of focussed attention. Where is your motivation coming from? What’s the big difference you want to make? How will your idea achieve that goal? Listening intently and asking very pertinent questions the combined group really helped each of our entrepreneurs get to an essential truth about what they were doing and why they were doing it. As that happened, you could feel the entrepreneurs making connections and linking ideas from other experiences. Dave from Richmond summed up the day for his group “They came with new ears and they could cut through the fluffiness”

For all the expertise that Sony brought to the day it was very definitely a two way street in terms of learning. One of the team said that “the thing that really struck me was that the community could have an emotional discussion and yet not get angry or shout whereas we are quite different and … well it gets heated.”

So at the end of Day 4, all of our enterprises had made some important discoveries about what they were doing and how they were going to go forward. The confident sense of purpose radiated from all of them. But it seemed we had also recruited another potential community entrepreneur to our midst – for the final comment from one of the Sony managers was “You guys are great – I’m inspired that when I go home I’m going to have to do something in my community – I learnt the power of action today”

Feb 26

Community Entrepreneurs forge new business ideas – day 2

Posted on February 26, 2013 by colin

Day Two report of the Community Resource Entrepreneurs programme – created by LSx, Tree Shepherd, and LCRN, and supported by the Small Business Research Initiative, a part of the Technology Strategy Board.

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Day 2 of the Community Resource Entrepreneurs course kicked off from where the first had finished. The delegates had clearly not stopped thinking about metal and how they were going to collect it. Their outline plans from last week had been developed and were really starting to take shape.

Colin reminded them that they had made tremendous progress; “most people don’t have one business idea in their lives and you have not only developed an idea but you have started to imagine yourselves doing it, and that is a long way along the road to making it happen”. And talking of roads, the group had each designed the vehicles that their business was going to look like and knew where they wanted them to go and who was driving them!

So having done the hard part – having the idea – day 2 was going to be about how to put it into action. Day 2 was about the business plan and about busting the myths that surround the “business plan”. No, it doesn’t have to be thousands of words using fancy, technical language. In fact it’s quite straightforward. The business plan is a way of ordering your thoughts around: What do you want to do? How will it make money? and who are you selling the service to? Oh yes, and remembering the analogy made by Simon May (from DesignIT) of the one zebra in a herd with his backside facing out: “What makes you stand out from the crowd?”

In other words, today they were going to make their vehicles roadworthy.

“What do you want to do?” is often a bit more complicated in a social enterprise sense than when you ask that question of a budding small businessman. Of course, you need to generate an income, but what is that income for? To create employment? To protect the environment? To raise funds for the community? It’s essential to have a very clear understanding of why you are setting up, as that will determine so much about how you manage and oversee the organisation, who you recruit to work with you, and how you market the business. One of the major issues for social enterprises is that they often want to achieve a multitude of objectives. Colin was clear – “You have to decide which objective is the most important and then focus your planning (and the income generated) on achieving that objective.”

Armed with the clarity of what you want your organisation to achieve, you can very rapidly start to envisage who you will need to recruit to help you and what sort of equipment you will need. Ben from LSx helped the group think through people issues and how they would manage them, and Mike from LCRN took them through the practical questions that they would need to address about transport, storage, health & safety and, of course, licences and red tape.

And throughout the day the group was reminded to think about their target market and how they were going to persuade that market to use their service rather than anyone else’s.

The afternoon session started with a salutary tale from one of Colin’s early recycling businesses as the group was asked to consider the risks involved in setting up and developing their enterprise. A worrying way to kick off the afternoon you may think but as Colin said “thinking about risks now can bring forward a lot of creative ideas of how to do things differently, and of course will reduce the chance of things going wrong” and being frank about risks also enables you to focus on getting things right from the start.

The group was now ready to start to think about the money. They all knew what they wanted to achieve, how they wanted to do it and who they were going to do it with. In the final session they started to put costs to their model and to gauge their income.

The room buzzed with intense discussion as everyone thought through their business model and how it would work. Their plans were really coming together and the questions were all focussed on the realities of getting a business off the ground.

The programme moves now to a more intense “one 2 one” phase where each group starts to make their vehicle ready to drive away. The LSx-led team will help them to make sure they have the right driver and navigator, the right fuel and that the suspension is sturdy enough for the road ahead.

In the final group session, they will road test their vehicle past some senior blue chip company executives to make sure that it’s attractive to their chosen market and that it catches the eye.

Watch this space to find out how they all get on.

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To see Day One’s report, click here.

Feb 12

Horsemeat or expansion – the supply chain conundrum

Posted on February 12, 2013 by colin

Horsemeat or expansion – the supply chain conundrum

When Laura Weidinger from the Beyond Profit Business Course asked me to speak at King’s College, Cambridge I was delighted – and for 3 reasons. Firstly, here is a group of students self-organising in a very entrepreneurial way and in their own time to put together their own business programme. Secondly, they have attracted a class of twenty four students who see the value of the social enterprise approach – that is encouraging for all us maturing social entrepreneurs who want to see the spirit of socially useful business being continued but finally I was delighted because Laura wanted me to talk about Supply Chains.

Supply Chains? I hear the exclamation. Isn’t that dull stuff about buying ingredients – how can that be either critical or interesting? Well, for me Supply Chains are critical to any business but they are especially so for social enterprises. Unfortunately however, I see too many social enterprises try to go it alone without a supply chain and that causes real problems for them as they try to expand or improve their service.

So my opening gambit to the Beyond Profit (much better name than “not for” profit by the way) students was if you thought the supply chain wasn’t important or critical think of horsemeat lasagne. A quintessential supply chain crisis if ever there was one. The whole reputation of each of the major food brands caught up in this crisis (and I predict there will be a lot more implicated before it calms down) is bound up in the quality of the meat they get from their suppliers. And yet they have signally failed to properly monitor and check that what they received is what they ordered. That neglect will cost them millions and may even put some out of business.

So managing your supply chain is critical. Each company should think carefully about what it buys from others and how critical to their business each purchase is. If the answer to the question “Would something going wrong in this supply chain dramatically impact on our reputation and our ability to do business?” is “Yes” then you should be taking every step possible to ensure that the supply is up to the standard you need it to be. Site visits, inspections – whatever it takes. If the answer is “No” but it would be inconvenient then a less assertive checking regime would be appropriate. And always have an alternative supplier ready in the wings!

So the horsemeat scandal is yet another warning that properly managing supply chains is absolutely crucial to any business; but that should not put off social enterprises from having one! I have met so many social enterprises who try to do all the main aspects of their business themselves. Homelessness charities that collect furniture, store it, sell it and deliver it. Each phase requires very different skills and processes. Each phase has different customers ranging from middle class people disposing of items to very deprived people being rehoused in very difficult circumstances to council officers and landlords. Each one requires a different language and assesses performance by different measures. Typically, organisations are very good at one and possibly two parts of the process but consistently struggle with the other aspects. Trying to be a jack of all trades and master of none restricts how much you can grow and means that you are always frustrating one or more important parts of your business. And it’s precisely those frustrations that give competitors a way in to your market.

So as I said to the students in Cambridge – the supply chain is a double edged sword. If you manage it badly it will hurt you but if you don’t have one you cannot protect yourself from the competition and you will struggle to grow.

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Happy to report that my session was well-received. Laura’s feedback was “You amazed our participants – 80% of them gave you 5/5, 10% a 4/5 rating. Thanks again for the session and we hope you enjoyed it as much!” I enjoyed it very much, thanks Laura!