The Business Stone Age - An Introduction
Written by Matt B · first published 11/03/2008
I want to outline here an introduction to an idea that I hope to expand much more extensively over the coming weeks. I am going to be addressing the business attitude and market environment of Thanet in general terms. I am aware there may be exceptions.
We are no living in the 21st Century and the technology readily at our disposal allows instantaneous communication with the entire market sector. It allows our records and our data to be analysed in minuets to a level that might take a team of experts a year or more. We can have meetings where attendees are in Rome, New York, London, Paris and Berlin (for example). Why, then, in Thanet are we finding it so difficult to engage in even the simplest ecommerce?
In theory we have the manufacturing power already operational in the area to be a world player. We have plastics, aerospace, electronics and dozens of other key industries right here in Thanet, more in Kent and the surrounding area. We have access via road and air to the rest of the world. What, then, is it that keeps us poor?
What keeps Thanet unproductive and weak is fear. In this article I will be looking at what this fear is and how we can overcome it. This answer is not for everyone.
Many business leaders are comfortable with the lack of forward motion. They would rather engage in practices of unproductive "manager masturbation" where lots of paperwork is completed and talking done but no actual profit is made. It's like a Jurassic Paralysis that is trying to suck us back through time.
Only those business men willing to evolve their business thinking are going to see their businesses flourish where others fail.
Let us take a fairly typical example of a market sector or to use a modern phrase "niche". Let us take the building trade. While this is not an industry I work in myself (I'm a programmer by choice and a business advocate by passion) I do have friends and family in sectors of this industry.
Let's think about the use of the modern world in this industry. Materials have probably change a little in the last three hundred years and he regulations have too. Letters are probably banged out on a dusty PC in the portable office and most workers carry mobile phones at least to work, if not on site.
Where do things like the Home Brew Media (blogs, podcasts and streaming videos) fit in to all this?
On the whole, they do not. With the average Thanet based building firm there is not likely to be even a website. If there is a website it is likely to be a few pages and a contact address. Maybe the firm uses email, but maybe they don't.
Why not?
The most likely answer a foreman will give you is: "no one has time to be poncing about with blogs when there is work to be done and I can't afford to pay some slacker to surf the web when things go slack."
Did you see it?
Read it again. The fear is right there in the answer. When the work is on we fear that we will fall behind and when it is not on we fear we will starve.
Summer and winter are no longer the times of epic harvesting and hunting fallowed by periods of starvation. They have not been like that since as long ago as the stone age.
Yet in our heads we are acting as if these cycles still threaten us in business today.
We are living in The Business Stone Age. The problem is while Thanet is still suck in the Jurassic Period settlements to the north have developed things like guns, central heating, supermarkets and helicopters.
Very shortly they will be looking to us and thinking how nice it will be to "tame those savages and take their land". Unless we are willing to evolve our thinking we are going to be at the mercy of bigger and stronger companies with skills and techniques that are beyond us. We will react but it will be far too late.
Even this change from the dinosaur ridden Jurassic Park approach to marketing is going to cost some businesses their existence. In any given niche when strong leaders emerge the weak inevitably perish. I urge the Thanet business community, therefore, to embrace the new and grow.
What is the new - is it websites?
No. It is not "websites". A large portion of websites that have been created for Thanet businesses have cost a lot of money but have been knocked up by a combination of Dinosaur Designing and HTML Harlotry leaving the average company with nothing more than pretty looking pile of mumpatry.
Websites are a tool that if used well can connect you to a world wide audience and ensure that no mater the physical location of your property you occupy the prime location for your audience or target market. Even done badly in a place like Thanet an industry could create the "Soup Kitchen Effect" locating customers right under your nose that you never even knew had the potential to exist.
This "Soup Kitchen Effect" need not be the thing that kills your business off (when applied by others) but could in fact be what allows you to grow during economic decline. To reach for this though you must be willing to Thaw Thanet. To unfreeze the lines of communication between your company (especially the management board) and your customers and market place.
But in ending the Business equivalent of an Ice Age you are going to face the next fear. Vulnerability. A fear from the time when huge great monsters might run up and eat you and the hunting party at any time.
There are no huge great corporation eating monsters in Thanet (at least none that don't offer lots of nice cash along with it). No one is going to savage you and your team and so there will be no need for your best "False Face Promoters". In another day and age we might have called them PR people.
We live in a fast flowing information age. People have become smarter and the masks you and other corporations have warn to hide from grizzly bears and lions no longer fool people. All they see is a fake that wants to sell something and they switch off.
To Thaw Thanet you will have to be willing to drop pretences and show your human face. To engage in a little honest person to person communication. Done right this should pull you from the dark ages and bring you kicking and screaming into the 19th century.
While that is good you must remember that we live in the 21st Century now. The age of Fast Flowing Information. In the Fast Flowing Information Age people now expect not only to have the company engage with them personally but they expect to be able to engage with the company. On their terms, in their own time. On demand.
How do you achieve this?
You must face, as a company another fear. Scarcity. In the cave dwelling days things were limited and what you had you kept to yourself. If you found a fruit tree the produced fruit in winter you kept it a secret so you could eat the fruit.
In the Fast Flowing Information Age knowledge is a shared experience. There is no scarcity of information where it is not first created by us. In the Information Age secrets are counter productive but when added to the pool of knowledge the pool grows in size and use exponentially.
The returns on sharing are good.
Think of Information as having a value. When you invest into the Market with your Information your return is increased information about your company and so following that increased attention, leads, trust and communication. From communication grows sales.
It's not the selling formula that the Jurassic Park Mentality would expect but to be honest with you selling is dead!
It is time to stop being Locked Vault Misers and to unveil the dread secrets of your industry. Rather than trying to squeeze a sale out of him why not let the avid DIY fan have the basic information to try it himself? It's seems counter intuitive to the Dinosaur fearing mindset but it is time to feed the needs of the market.
Doing this opens the "Soup Kitchen" and draws the attention and new market squarely to you.
Let me illustrate this with a story from my own industry. When I started out as freelancer I encountered a lot of people who had computers that had slowed down and web browsers that seemed to throw pop ups at them all the time. The cure to my mind was simple and could be completed in half an hour.
A set of simple, free downloads and four fifths of problems could be solved without touching the keyboard again.
I would explain at length to people the software solutions they needed and what they did. If anyone was interested I could tell them what the problem was too. I also discovered something else.
I found myself with more customers rather than less. On the whole people would rather pay me near enough whatever I asked to have me visit and do it for them. Aside from one lad who had really done some damage I was shaking their hand and taking their money while telling them how they could avoid needing me again inside an hour of arriving.
I learned something very important through that.
When people learn that you not only know what you are doing but are comfortable with sharing, in layman's terms, exactly what you do they develop trust in both you and what you can do. They trust that you are intimately acquainted with the topic and as we humans are, largely, lazy they were more than happy to pay me to do it anyway.
Often these people of all different backgrounds would only consider asking me to carry out the work after I had shown them how they could do it. Prior to that they just wanted to grab some free advice.
This can work for any Thanet business.
I call this "being Yoda to your Market" - it's not about being the strongest but about being open, honest and above all showing the power you wield and your control over it.
Like all secrets the greatest prizes go to those that grasp it first.
We are no living in the 21st Century and the technology readily at our disposal allows instantaneous communication with the entire market sector. It allows our records and our data to be analysed in minuets to a level that might take a team of experts a year or more. We can have meetings where attendees are in Rome, New York, London, Paris and Berlin (for example). Why, then, in Thanet are we finding it so difficult to engage in even the simplest ecommerce?
In theory we have the manufacturing power already operational in the area to be a world player. We have plastics, aerospace, electronics and dozens of other key industries right here in Thanet, more in Kent and the surrounding area. We have access via road and air to the rest of the world. What, then, is it that keeps us poor?
What keeps Thanet unproductive and weak is fear. In this article I will be looking at what this fear is and how we can overcome it. This answer is not for everyone.
Many business leaders are comfortable with the lack of forward motion. They would rather engage in practices of unproductive "manager masturbation" where lots of paperwork is completed and talking done but no actual profit is made. It's like a Jurassic Paralysis that is trying to suck us back through time.
Only those business men willing to evolve their business thinking are going to see their businesses flourish where others fail.
Let us take a fairly typical example of a market sector or to use a modern phrase "niche". Let us take the building trade. While this is not an industry I work in myself (I'm a programmer by choice and a business advocate by passion) I do have friends and family in sectors of this industry.
Let's think about the use of the modern world in this industry. Materials have probably change a little in the last three hundred years and he regulations have too. Letters are probably banged out on a dusty PC in the portable office and most workers carry mobile phones at least to work, if not on site.
Where do things like the Home Brew Media (blogs, podcasts and streaming videos) fit in to all this?
On the whole, they do not. With the average Thanet based building firm there is not likely to be even a website. If there is a website it is likely to be a few pages and a contact address. Maybe the firm uses email, but maybe they don't.
Why not?
The most likely answer a foreman will give you is: "no one has time to be poncing about with blogs when there is work to be done and I can't afford to pay some slacker to surf the web when things go slack."
Did you see it?
Read it again. The fear is right there in the answer. When the work is on we fear that we will fall behind and when it is not on we fear we will starve.
Summer and winter are no longer the times of epic harvesting and hunting fallowed by periods of starvation. They have not been like that since as long ago as the stone age.
Yet in our heads we are acting as if these cycles still threaten us in business today.
We are living in The Business Stone Age. The problem is while Thanet is still suck in the Jurassic Period settlements to the north have developed things like guns, central heating, supermarkets and helicopters.
Very shortly they will be looking to us and thinking how nice it will be to "tame those savages and take their land". Unless we are willing to evolve our thinking we are going to be at the mercy of bigger and stronger companies with skills and techniques that are beyond us. We will react but it will be far too late.
Even this change from the dinosaur ridden Jurassic Park approach to marketing is going to cost some businesses their existence. In any given niche when strong leaders emerge the weak inevitably perish. I urge the Thanet business community, therefore, to embrace the new and grow.
What is the new - is it websites?
No. It is not "websites". A large portion of websites that have been created for Thanet businesses have cost a lot of money but have been knocked up by a combination of Dinosaur Designing and HTML Harlotry leaving the average company with nothing more than pretty looking pile of mumpatry.
Websites are a tool that if used well can connect you to a world wide audience and ensure that no mater the physical location of your property you occupy the prime location for your audience or target market. Even done badly in a place like Thanet an industry could create the "Soup Kitchen Effect" locating customers right under your nose that you never even knew had the potential to exist.
This "Soup Kitchen Effect" need not be the thing that kills your business off (when applied by others) but could in fact be what allows you to grow during economic decline. To reach for this though you must be willing to Thaw Thanet. To unfreeze the lines of communication between your company (especially the management board) and your customers and market place.
But in ending the Business equivalent of an Ice Age you are going to face the next fear. Vulnerability. A fear from the time when huge great monsters might run up and eat you and the hunting party at any time.
There are no huge great corporation eating monsters in Thanet (at least none that don't offer lots of nice cash along with it). No one is going to savage you and your team and so there will be no need for your best "False Face Promoters". In another day and age we might have called them PR people.
We live in a fast flowing information age. People have become smarter and the masks you and other corporations have warn to hide from grizzly bears and lions no longer fool people. All they see is a fake that wants to sell something and they switch off.
To Thaw Thanet you will have to be willing to drop pretences and show your human face. To engage in a little honest person to person communication. Done right this should pull you from the dark ages and bring you kicking and screaming into the 19th century.
While that is good you must remember that we live in the 21st Century now. The age of Fast Flowing Information. In the Fast Flowing Information Age people now expect not only to have the company engage with them personally but they expect to be able to engage with the company. On their terms, in their own time. On demand.
How do you achieve this?
You must face, as a company another fear. Scarcity. In the cave dwelling days things were limited and what you had you kept to yourself. If you found a fruit tree the produced fruit in winter you kept it a secret so you could eat the fruit.
In the Fast Flowing Information Age knowledge is a shared experience. There is no scarcity of information where it is not first created by us. In the Information Age secrets are counter productive but when added to the pool of knowledge the pool grows in size and use exponentially.
The returns on sharing are good.
Think of Information as having a value. When you invest into the Market with your Information your return is increased information about your company and so following that increased attention, leads, trust and communication. From communication grows sales.
It's not the selling formula that the Jurassic Park Mentality would expect but to be honest with you selling is dead!
It is time to stop being Locked Vault Misers and to unveil the dread secrets of your industry. Rather than trying to squeeze a sale out of him why not let the avid DIY fan have the basic information to try it himself? It's seems counter intuitive to the Dinosaur fearing mindset but it is time to feed the needs of the market.
Doing this opens the "Soup Kitchen" and draws the attention and new market squarely to you.
Let me illustrate this with a story from my own industry. When I started out as freelancer I encountered a lot of people who had computers that had slowed down and web browsers that seemed to throw pop ups at them all the time. The cure to my mind was simple and could be completed in half an hour.
A set of simple, free downloads and four fifths of problems could be solved without touching the keyboard again.
I would explain at length to people the software solutions they needed and what they did. If anyone was interested I could tell them what the problem was too. I also discovered something else.
I found myself with more customers rather than less. On the whole people would rather pay me near enough whatever I asked to have me visit and do it for them. Aside from one lad who had really done some damage I was shaking their hand and taking their money while telling them how they could avoid needing me again inside an hour of arriving.
I learned something very important through that.
When people learn that you not only know what you are doing but are comfortable with sharing, in layman's terms, exactly what you do they develop trust in both you and what you can do. They trust that you are intimately acquainted with the topic and as we humans are, largely, lazy they were more than happy to pay me to do it anyway.
Often these people of all different backgrounds would only consider asking me to carry out the work after I had shown them how they could do it. Prior to that they just wanted to grab some free advice.
This can work for any Thanet business.
I call this "being Yoda to your Market" - it's not about being the strongest but about being open, honest and above all showing the power you wield and your control over it.
Like all secrets the greatest prizes go to those that grasp it first.
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