Business musings

Officially opened in April 2000, Crocus is an online garden centre offering over 4,000 different plant varieties – the biggest choice of plants in the UK. Loved by both top garden designers and amateurs alike and a regular at the Chelsea Flower Show, Crocus has an enviable reputation and has won many awards, not only for its gardens and plants but also for best practice in business.

Whilst Crocus normally only retails online or through its wholesale outlet, it opens its doors to the public on four special days throughout the year. The first of these days for 2011 was held Saturday just gone (16 April) so I headed off to Windlesham for a girls’ day out.

I had planned to track down some bargain plants and to have a day discovering what goes on behind the scenes but I also found myself being wowed by best practice in business and amazed by just how much we can learn from the logistics involved in growing and selling plants!

Much of what I gleaned was by and large thanks to a tour given by Mark Fane (one of the founders of Crocus) and Mark Straver (a top plantsman and member of the wholesale team).

Learning from plants

Aka process driven excellence

The organic nature of growing and selling plants creates a business model that is inherently dependent upon planning and logistics to an extent that is somewhat unusual within other business contexts. A plant is not a product that can be quickly manufactured and plucked from a shelf in a warehouse. Rather, it is a growing entity that literally has a life of its own, subject to nature and innumerable other factors.

To produce prize winning plants for Chelsea, the growing process must ideally begin almost a year in advance. Throughout the year, plants are juggled between the outdoors and 10 polytunnels each with slightly different climactic conditions (or even sent abroad to Spain as in the case of the 2010 Telegraph Garden) to maintain, speed up or slow down their growth as necessary, ensuring that they are in peak condition for the all important show dates. For the online store and wholesale, stocks must be carefully managed, rare and unusual plant requests sourced from around the world, buying trends predicted in advance and much, much more. To thrive and succeed in this industry, excellence in planning and logistics are an absolute must.

The challenges of Chelsea

Aka innovation and project management

The Chelsea Flower Show itself intensifies this need for excellence and Crocus’ results speak for themselves: in the last 9 years, they have won 3 Best in Shows and 11 gold medals for gardens that they have built and grown plants for.

Project management is vital and Crocus are now in talks with the Telegraph to begin planning their 2012/2013 gardens. In the 20 days running up to the opening of the Chelsea Flower Show, an entire garden (including hard landscaping and fully grown trees) must be built and planted from scratch.

Year on year Crocus perfect and hone their project management skills and develop innovative ways to manage the logistics involved. In April of this year, work began at the Crocus nursery to build the dry stone walls for the Telegraph Garden, ensuring that the sections can simply be transported to Chelsea and pieced together, potentially saving huge amounts of time on building the walls from scratch. Luciano Giubbilei (this year’s Laurent-Perrier garden designer) also visited Crocus to position the trees for his garden in advance, ensuring that they can simply be planted in their desired location at Chelsea and valuable time is not wasted. And this is just the tip of the project management and planning iceberg!

In an article published by the Telegraph, April 2009, Mark Fane described himself as “the control freaks’ control freak” and the author observed that “Those who don’t have Fane’s quasi-military discipline are often seen planting frantically the night before”. It is precisely such planning and discipline that wins awards!

Subject to the elements

Aka disaster contingency planning

Another factor that is intensified and brought into sharp focus by the organic nature of plants is the need for disaster contingency planning. To ensure that Crocus can supply exactly the right quantity of plants in peak condition for the dates of the Chelsea Flower Show, they are currently growing around 8,000-10,000 plants for this year’s show (for a garden requiring 30 specimens of a particular plant, Crocus will grow 100). Any plants not used in the show can be sold to consumers once they are ready.

Crocus also carefully monitor their polytunnels for signs of pests or disease – perils that become more of a problem in a warmer environment. Fans are used to ensure air circulation and at the first signs of any potential problems, action is taken. Any large scale problems of this kind that had not been nipped in the bud early (excuse the pun!) could be disastrous.

For a business that is dependent upon its living, growing products, the discipline of anticipating potential problems and ensuring that contingency plans are either already in place or can be quickly actioned is another absolute must.

Winning awards

Aka end-to-end excellence

And finally, as evidenced by Crocus’ award-winning Chelsea pedigree, Crocus are in the business of creating and delivering excellence. However, their attention to detail doesn’t just start and end with either plants or gardens; rather, it extends throughout their business.

Not long after they started out, Crocus won the Yell.com Best Commerce Site Award in 2001, beating the likes of Sainsburys.co.uk. In the same year, they won the small business category of the Sunday Telegraph’s @chievement Award, alongside other category winners such as Tesco.com and Majestic.com. And more recently, they have also collected a design award for their custom-designed packaging.

Crocus deliver excellence in customer service throughout their shopping experience and are rightly proud of the fact that their return rate is currently under 1%. Whilst their success and reputation are enviable, once you begin to look behind the scenes these results are also understandable. Excellence in business really does make a difference and we could all learn a great deal from the lessons Crocus has to teach us.

To keep in touch with Crocus’ journey to Chelsea, check out their Chelsea Flower Show blog

Update 25 May 2011

More excellent results for Crocus as they are the proud winners of not only two Gold Medals at Chelsea (one each for their two gardens) but also Best in Show!

We had the privilege of interviewing Adam Bird, Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Esendex. Having established themselves as leaders in business SMS in the UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Australia and now America, Esendex seeks to transform business communication.

Adam describes Esendex’s experience of going international and offers his insight and advice to other companies looking to internationalise.

Given the recent backtrack by Gap over their new logo, it would seem that Twitter, Facebook and social media have won a victory for the people.

But, is it really a victory or is the feedback from the online community just noisy resistance to change?

Gap obviously felt that the people had a point and promptly withdrew their new branding, apologised and went back to the old logo with immediate effect, “[bringing] it back across all channels”.

On the one hand…

Given that Gap must have invested significantly in designing the new logo, getting feedback and re-branding (all of which has presumably now been binned), why did they not stick to their guns and let the noise pass?

Whilst a wealth of opinion was undoubtedly expressed online with more than 2,000 comments on Gap’s Facebook page, such a figure must reflect only a small proportion of those who actually shop at Gap and it can take time for people to come to terms with anything significantly new.

If Steve Jobs was prone to changing his mind when the crowd gets noisy and had he read posts written about the iPad before it was launched, we may well not have the iPad now.

On the other hand…

Gap’s change of mind may be a closely averted PR disaster and proof that listening to your customers is vital to ensure that customers join you on your journey of brand development.

Had Gap gathered more consumer feedback during the logo design process, it may have become clear that the public strongly associated with the blue square; so strongly in fact that the logo seems to be the square and many expressed opinion that the square shouldn’t be relegated to second place behind the name.

If Gap had pushed ahead and ignored the sentiment of the crowds it is possible that they may have ended up in a scenario similar to that of Coca-Cola and new Coke, with an embarrassing brand re-introduction.

So the answer is…?

That’s a good question! Personally, I can see the intention behind the new logo and understand how Gap is looking to bring a fresh, clean, modern take on their previous logo. However, I can also see that people so strongly associate Gap with the blue square that relegating the square to such an extent was likely to produce strong emotions – Gap not only got a new logo, it lost its ‘Gap-ness’.

At the same time, branding is often very personal and subject to personal taste -  it can be difficult to be impartial or objectively ‘right’. Presumably Gap management know where they want to take the brand and what brand image Gap needs to reflect. Ultimately, the management must decide the brand direction for Gap whilst listening to their customers as best they can. Unfortunately, it is not possible to design a brand by committee and no matter how hard you try, you will never keep everyone 100% happy.

It will be interesting to continue to watch what the management decides to do as they move forwards (once they’ve finished licking their wounds!): “There may be a time to evolve our logo, but if and when that time comes, we’ll handle it in a different way” (Marka Hansen, President of Gap Brand, North America).

Hello again – sorry for the rather long pause in blogging! I do have a number of excuses including a heavy work load, working on an updated website (almost ready to launch in the not too distant future) and the arrival of a rather high maintenance police sniffer puppy in training called Herbie. He has now moved to live with his new handler for his next stage of training and we have a new sniffer dog in training called Jess who’s a lot lower maintenance!  Anyway, excuses over, back to the blog!

I was musing the other day about the fact that I use rather a lot of web 2.o style applications for my business. As I find these applications so useful and have made my selections based upon fairly extensive research and comparisons between products, I thought I’d put a list together to give you a headstart if you’re looking for similar tools.

Project management with Basecamp

Basecamp is an online project management tool created by 37signals. I had looked at other project management tools but in the end, and once 37signals had introduced dates for tasks, I felt Basecamp was a good fit for various client projects. Basecamp really comes into its own when all parties use it to collaborate and use it to make notes and upload shared files. It has been well developed and remains intentionally unbloated from complex features, instead providing useful to-do list style actions and milestones – just enough to organise a collaborative project.

Awesome presentations with Prezi

Here at Matt Stocker Ltd, we’ve just finished putting together a presentation for a client in Prezi. The client’s brief was to ‘out present’ for an opportunity they had been offered and Prezi offers the wow factor that other conventional presentation tools such as PowerPoint just do not deliver.

Prezi is a fairly new tool as it was only launched in April 2009 but it is already capturing the imagination of many. Rather than using the conventional slide format, Prezi provides you with a virtual blank canvas upon which to lay out your ideas and design your presentation. Having added text and images to your canvas, you then create a storyline by adding a path that zooms in and out, focuses on key ideas and conveys the message that you want to present.

Not only that but Prezi makes collaboration and sharing particularly easy as you can invite others in your team to edit prezis with you and, to share them, you simply need to email a link to the online version of your prezi or download a version that can be played offline. Simple!

Online questionnaires with Wufoo

As I run workshops to explore, develop and define vision, values, purpose and mission, I need to obtain input from everyone prior to a workshop to get an idea of the existing level of consensus. I chose Wufoo mostly due to the formatting options it provides – many other options seem to forget that questionnaires need to look nice at the end! The interface is very easy to use and you can quickly build a good looking form with ease. Wufoo also allows you to easily review the data you’ve collected and notifies you when someone has filled out your form. Sharing a survey with somebody ready for completion is as simple as emailing them a link to the online form.

Not only that but Wufoo provides fairly extensive functionality – whilst this isn’t something that I have yet had cause to use, Wufoo can be used for a whole host of tasks including the collection of payments, donations and simple online orders.

Web copy wireframing with Jumpchart

A recent discovery of mine, Jumpchart is an interesting program that helps to wireframe web copy. Here at Matt Stocker Ltd, as part of our work in marketing we are regularly involved in helping clients to develop their websites. Copy is a key part of this and using Jumpchart really helps by taking the focus off the design and placing it onto the copy itself along with the all-important menu structure. Jumpchart is the only tool I’ve found that is effective in allowing you to simply plan a website with ease.

Email and more with Google Apps

A basic business requirement but one that I’m very happy with. Google Apps has been rock solid in terms of reliability and it has all the syncing and connectivity I need (with the small exception of calendar syncing between computers for which I use Spanning Sync). I can easily sync my email over IMAP and Exchange across all devices so I can always see what I’ve read and deleted whether I’m using my iPhone, laptop or desktop.

Whilst Google Apps obviously consists of far more than just email, I personally tend to make most use of the email, Calendar and Reader. I tried out Google Docs for a while but found issues with formatting, so for collaborative copy I’ll tend to use Basecamp’s Writeboard function instead. That said Google Apps is expanding and improving all the time and, on the whole, I’d highly recommend it – it is by far the best solution I’ve found for email.

Time tracking with Tick

I looked at a lot of options for time tracking, some of which were great products. However, the thing that swung it for Tick was their multi-platform time tracking applications for iPhone, Mac, PC and so on. Many of the other solutions relied on widgets or web pages and I was bound to forget that I’d left a timer running with these! Tick makes it easy to see how much time you have spent on a project and how your time has been spread over the past week or month, which is vital for producing invoices at the end of a month. The one thing that Tick doesn’t really offer is in depth analysis on exactly how and when your time has been spent; at present, this isn’t really something I need but if I wanted greater visibility, I would be tempted to look at an alternative product such as Freckle.

Accounting with FreeAgent Central

I love FreeAgent Central! Whilst not the cheapest solution available, it is a pleasure to use and makes my life so much easier as it tracks and calculates everything I need for running my business – invoices (pending and overdue), PAYE, dividend vouchers, tax owed and much more. I can upload my bank statements with auto-recognition and create formatted invoices. The customer support FreeAgent provide is also second to none.

As an added bonus, FreeAgent also run a great referral scheme so if you are interested in signing up with them and would like a 10% discount on your subscription, simply click on any of the links I’ve provided here or feel free to use my referral code 314yalfc.

One last word and a couple of desktop solutions to wrap up!

So, I think that’s it for online apps! Whilst using apps can work out more expensive than the traditional software purchase model, all upgrades are included and working online means that collaboration is easy, whether you’re working with clients, accountants or partners. That said, I do still use a number of desktop software programs such as Things (task management for Mac) and Daylite (contact and lead management) which also sync with my iPhone and tend to work very well.

At the beginning of this year, few people - and certainly few businesses – would have imagined that we would now find ourselves in the midst of extreme travel disruption due to the eruption of a relatively unknown volcano in Iceland.

The Eyjafjallajökull volcano first began to erupt in March of this year but it was not until its second, more dramatic eruption in April that we saw the unprecedented move to shut large swathes of European airspace due to the dangerous volcanic ash that it was spewing high into the atmosphere.

Globalisation reliant on air travel

This loss of air travel has certainly highlighted how reliant we are on modern air transport and the degree to which it facilitates the level of globalisation we have come to expect. We have effectively been transported back in time to an age when flying was unknown and the main forms of transport were sea and road.

The halt of UK and European air travel has left thousands of people stuck in limbo, unable to come or go, stranded where the pause button deemed fit. Many businesses and business people have also been affected, unable to get back from holidays or business trips, struggling to import or export much needed goods, and unable to attend important meetings abroad.

Global implications

The extent of the disruption has not only been felt in the UK and Europe but also worldwide.

Yesterday, Nissan suspended production at two of its factories in Japan due to the fact that it could not get hold of crucial air pressure sensors.

Kenya’s economy faces devastating losses as it “haemorrhag[es] $1.3m a day in lost [flower] shipments to Europe” and “there is no diversionary market [as] flowers and courgettes are not something the average Kenyan buys.”

Fujitsu has temporarily suspended exports of notebook computers to Europe and has been unable to say how long its European stocks will last or how much it stands to lose if the disruption continues.

The UK premiere of Iron Man 2 has been moved to Los Angeles, and many sporting, music, movie and other entertainment events face schedule changes and disruption.

Not to mention of course, the financial impact upon European airlines and tour operaters, with the International Air Transport Association stating that losses in the European airline industry had reached £165m a day.

Business continuity

The complete lack of European flights has certainly reinforced the need for business continuity planning.

Stephen Cross, CEO of Aon Global Risk Consulting, observed that “as economies contract or competition increases, lean manufacturing becomes the name of the game… Such an approach might be highly efficient when things are running smoothly, but in the event of a major disruption event such as this, it can lead to significant delays in key materials and inputs being delivered, or in a worst case scenario to a systemic failure in your supply chain” (Continuity Central).

As the volcanic disruption has highlighted though, it is not only suppy chains and operations that can be affected.  With many business owners, directors, managers and staff stranded, a business also needs to be able to continue in the absence of its people.

Not only that, but as the plight of the airlines emphasizes, a business also needs to have contingency plans in place for times when the very service it provides cannot be delivered.  As Jan Husdal rightly pointed out, “a flight is not something you can produce and stock somewhere. It is produced and instantly consumed at the same time… Without passengers and without flights, no airline can survive.”

Yet, in A Decade of Living Dangerously – The Business Continuity Managment Report (produced only a year ago, in March 2009) The Chartered Management Institute reported that (of the businesses they surveyed and received responses from) only 52% had specific business continuity plans covering their operations and that generally managers within organisations remained complacent about continuity.

Obviously there are some eventualities that are almost impossible to predict and therefore to plan for – the black swans of this world – but that is not to say that we should not be building robustness into our businesses and systems now.

Have you been able to run your business without access to flights?

What would happen if other transport systems were unavailable to you?  Does your business have alternative transport plans in place?

Were you or any of your staff stranded by the flight disruptions?

If you have not experienced any disruption, have you designed your business in such a way that it could continue in your absence, should you ever be stranded in the future?

Can you and your staff access emails, documents and telephone services remotely if you are unable to get to the office?

Although the impact of the volcanic ash disruptions is expected to be relatively low in Europe, (RBS has predicted an impact on GDP in Europe of 0.1%), history warns that we are not necessarily out of the woods yet.  According to the Telegraph, the last time Eyjafjallajökull erupted (in the early 1820s) it blew intermittently for 14 months and on each occassion of its previous eruptions it has been followed within months or a year or so by a major eruption at Katla (a nearby volcano that is known to be more violent).  Presently there are no ground rumblings at Katla and the conditions that have led to the unprecendented closures of air space are rare, but this event has very much highlighted the vital and urgent need for business continuity planning. Without it you risk the future well being of your business.

The ‘app’ concept continues to gain ground not just within IT but also in industries such as automotive industry.

LSN Global featured the new Trexa ‘car development platform’ – a fully electric vehicle-development platform that provides designers and manufacturers with the capability to design and develop unique designs without incurring the expense of developing new platforms. The resulting ‘app’ designs dock onto the platform and are fully interchangeable (i.e car to van to flatbed).

Key challenge

Whilst this looks like a great idea, I think that the key challenge with this technology will be pricing. It is likely that vehicle ‘apps’ will be produced in fairly low volumes and as a result it may be difficult to achieve the economies of scale needed to bring the price down. This could well mean that the resulting vehicles on sale are actually quite expensive compared to traditional vehicles from the volume vehicle manufacturers, rendering the ‘app’ proposition uncompetitive.

It has often been the case in the past that for ‘interchangeable’ products the resulting ‘options’ are actually just as expensive as buying another, brand new, fully functional product, thus rendering interchangablity as pointless.

So the key to this product’s success?

For those manufacturers already competing effectively in the niche electric vehicle market, this platform could be very good news indeed, resulting in significant R&D savings, access to the latest upgradable technology and a faster, more flexible, product development cycle.

In terms of the ‘interchangeable’ aspect of the vehicles, the keys to success are likely to be innovative, high-quality products, produced using low volume, low cost manufacturing, thereby ensuring that the designers of vehicle ‘apps’ really do have a significant price advantage against main stream solutions.

Would I buy one?

Well, if I could design my own vehicle online that I could fully specify from modular components and that was delivered direct to my door, that would be very cool indeed. However, for me, an Audi R8 or Tessla might be slightly higher up my wishlist!

Chances are, if you are anything like most businesses, you have a lot of paper to deal with in your office and in your job. The fact is, we rely to a large extent on paper: to communicate, to record, to remind, to sell. The promise of a paper free office remains a technological fantasy for many.

However, it is important to recognise the scalability issues of paper as a technology: paper can only be in one place at one time so it doesn’t work well across multiple sites; revision control is tricky; and it can be hard to back up – do you have duplicate copies of everything if worst came to the worst?

Even if we cannot remove paper entirely, there are things we can do to consign it to a supporting role rather than the main deal within a business.

Steps to creating a paperless office

1. Analysing your processes

The first idea to grasp is the fact that paper usually relates to a process or processes within your organisation. Understanding this will provide a solid foundation for beginning to deal with the paper as the processes themselves provide the structural foundation for creating a paperless office. By analysing the papers for clues about the activities the paper itself represents and following this paper through the system, you can outline your processes, giving you an accurate view of ‘now’.

2. Revising your processes

The next step is to revise your processes in order to maximise efficiency. This includes:

• Eliminating bottle necks and their resulting backlogs
• Removing unecessary steps within the process(es)
• Assessing crossover and interdependency of processes within the wider organisation to ensure integration
• And, overall, designing as lean a process as possible.

Value stream mapping may be a good tool to use at this stage. The people involved in each process within your organisation will also be a vital source of information and feedback as they are the people on the ground who are involved in the processes day-in, day-out.

3. Integrating paper and technology

Having created a coherent set of lean processes, the next challenge is to reduce the use of paper where possible. This can be done by assessing the processes to find out which parts of them can be automated and then developing an IT and technology solution that has your best practice processes inherently embedded into its system. In other words, the IT and technology solution reflects and is built around your processes, rather than the processes being built around the technology.

4. Sustainable continuous improvement

Once you have found a solution that works for your organisation as a whole and that maximises your efficiency and effectiveness, it is important to maintain the momentum of improvement. Ongoing assessment and revision will ensure that as your organisation grows and develops your processes continue to support the delivery of your organisation’s objectives. New technology is also continually emerging that may provide a solution to paper based systems where a solution did not previously exist. Staying abreast of these developments allows you to continually improve organisational performance and efficiency.

5. Reducing risk

Although it is not always possible to eliminate the use of paper completely, you should not be relying on paper for mission critical functions. However, neither should you be relying on technology without a business continuity plan in place. Whatever system and solution you are using, you should always make sure that fail-safes and redundancies are built into the process(es).

If you would like any advice or support in creating a paperless office for your organisation, please contact me or call me on 02476 100 193 – I would love to help!

Cars and coffee. Both subtle indicators of your brand…

Too flashy a car and clients might feel they are paying you too much. But, if you drive an old banger, you could well be perceived as unsuccessful and therefore hardly a safe bet to work with.

And what about your coffee? In a world where establishments serving real coffee lie on every street corner, might your coffee be undermining your brand? Increasingly, I find that people expect the same quality coffee in business meetings as they can get on the high street.

I’m not saying these criteria are fair judgments but they do seem to happen. Might be something to think about.

I went to the Barclays ‘Let’s Talk More Profit’ seminar in the latter half of last year and have been meaning to post this blog for a while. Robert Craven, author and consultant, spent half a day talking to around 200-300 companies about how to increase their profits. I found it really useful and practical, so thought I’d share the key message.

There are only 5 ways you can increase your profits…
and not all of them are created equal!

Here are the only 5 ways you can increase your profits:

1. Raise your prices
2. Lower your direct costs
3. Fix the underperformers
4. Increase volume
5. Lower your overheads

And the winner is…

We looked at each of the five methods of increasing profit, and looked at how effective they each were. In reality, increasing your prices is by far the most effective way of increasing your profits.

Let me give you an example:

If you sell a widget at £100, with a cost of sale of £70, this creates £30 gross profit
However, if you reduce the price by just 10%, and sell it at £90, with the same cost of sale of £70, this only creates £20 gross profit.

Therefore, you would have to sell 50% MORE widgets just to make the same amount of profit you had been previously.

So, raising prices has the opposite effect. Sell at £110, less cost of sale £70 = £40 gross profit. A 33% increase in gross profit.

The counter argument is that, based on the supply and demand curve, you would expect to sell fewer widgets if you are charging a higher price, therefore making less money. The bit about selling fewer is true; the bit about less money depends on the demand curve. There is more profitable flex in this than you might imagine.

Say you sold 100 widgets at £100 making a total gross profit of £3000 (£30 profit on each widget x 100), then increased your prices to £110. You would now only need to sell 75 widgets to make the same profit (£40 profit on each widget x 75 =£3000), resulting in less work (and therefore overheads) for the same amount of money.

In addition, it is likely that your ‘worst’ customers are also the most price sensitive and will take up the majority of your time.

So, let me put it this way…

If you would like to work less, earn the same, and get rid of your least favourite customers… consider putting your prices up!

You can then spend the time you have saved looking for new, higher paying customers. When you have found these new customers and returned to selling 100 widgets, you will now be making £4000 profit instead (an extra £1000).

The only proviso is to be aware of demand sensitivity: if your business’ particular demand curve is very price sensitive (for example, if you were raise to prices by 10%, you would lose over 25% of your customers) you will then end up making less money, not more. That said, this sensitivity may be counteracted by upgrading your branding, customer service, or product/service differentiators to justify the price increase and thereby retain more existing customers. Raising your prices might mean raising your game, but then when has that ever been a bad thing?!

And finally, what about the other 4…?

The other 4 listed above are also very valid. Robert Craven suggests you work down in order, from 1 to 5. Implement each element and then move onto the next. By working in order, you ensure that you start with those that will have the most impact on your business’ profitability.

So, why not consider giving it a go!