Category: Blog

When I left school in 1979, I knew there was not such thing as a job for life. With un-employment at 25%++, it was obvious.  So every time I meet one of these people who still believe its their human right to stay in the same job and expect my fellow tax payers to keep them, I try and find out as much as I can from these people. How did they get this mindset? How do they deal with every day problems and issues? How do they see the future? What are their real life expectations?  Just as you would if you had the opportunity to spent time with Elvis, Marlyn or Mr Hughes.

I seem to have come up with four groups:

• Some people are very good at dealing with multiple issues, variable and accepting(no thriving) on change. Change is their fuel, their life blood.

• Some people don’t like risk, so reducing the variables in their life to those they can deal with, tea or coffee, catch the 5.30 or 5.45 train home.

• Those who are extremely happy with their status, power and empire. They will do anything to stop anything changing.

• And then you get those who are just lazy.

The more and more I deal with our educators, those people who are developing our young, I fear we are recruiting the wrong people to teach the next generation of world leaders. These educators are some of the most risk adverse people, cannot accept change and more importantly did not understand what happened in 1979.

We still run courses which educators ‘can’ and want to teach. Just take a quick look at reed.co.uk and look at the jobs available and then go to UCAS and try and spot how many courses would lead to one these jobs. Over 25% of jobs are sales related, yet there are no courses. Then we wonder why UK industry is not selling to other countries.

We are not competitive in our education system and then don’t understand why our young are not successful in a competitive global job market.  Every person in this country is competing with over 6,000,000,000 other people for their job. Even if you want to work in the local corner shop, over 340,000,000 in Europe can just as easily work for that shop. At other levels of industry, software can be developed and used anywhere, manufacturing can be transferred within weeks to any part of the world. Its all competitive, even education (oops! sorry maybe that’s just too radical for 2012).

Someone this week told me we still use an education system developed for the industrial revolution and he was right. We should be able to create an education system which fits everyone, what ever age, what ever mental, physical capability and most importantly their aptitude. This also mean allowing people to finish full time education at 12, allowing 50 year olds to gain new skills, allowing university/college students to develop their own business whilst studying.  We live in a highly competitive portfolio working, global market place.

Education is all about the experience, (see: Morrison’s, Walmart, Google) and not about the quality, content or having the biggest building. It about the industrial relevance, networking opportunities and space utilization.

Lets go back and think about how we are going to lead the world and re-define what education is and how our society interfaces with it throughout their enterprising lives.

As we come closers to clocking off for this year, I always start to review what has happened and more importantly try and understand how I can do things better next year.

The major concern I see is that the majority of people have not tried to be more enterprising this year. They have tried to do their business as usual, using the same business models, trying to hang on to the same funding models, dead end public sector jobs and even running the same university degrees which lead to zero employment prospects (unistats.direct.gov.uk).

We all have to make changes everyday to continue to develop and it through this development we can ensure we stay with the flow. This should be every person’s manta.  I am always amazed at why we think that doing the same thing for hundreds of years will provide prosperity in this country, whereas there are billions of other people in the world who are constantly looking at how they can develop faster, higher quality, cheaper, more effective methods to do what we have done for hundreds of years. These people are taking advantage of the global economy.

Its only through using innovation, our technology advance, our amazing communication advantage and selling in real time to the global customer we can move the economy forward. Its not through spending money we don’t have on goods we don’t make.

Our resistance to change is shown in the way the UK deals with Europe, the way we run our national infrastructure and how we educate our people. I am a great believer in if its not broken don’t fix it, however sometimes you have to take some hard decisions based on the rest of the planet and not just on the few who can’t be bothered to change (especially when their pension means the young will be paying for it in taxes for the next thirty years).

So lets make 2012, the year that we embrace change and especially entrepreneurial change, making sure that we develop new forms of income, new business models and creating a network of like-minded people who are developing a prosperous future.

So here are some New years resolutions for you for 2012:

• Make 2012 you most enterprising year!

• Become a self made Entrepreneur in 2012

• Employ someone else in your business in 2012

• Start a new business in 2012

• Develop multi streams of income in 2012

Had the great opportunity to work with Linkedin, SVC2UK, and GEWUK in the last few weeks and just wanted to share what Reid Hoffman, Linkedin’s Executive Chairman and co-Founder had to say.

Thanks to Tech Europe for sharing.

My advice for students thinking of starting their own business…

An interview at Aston Business School.

Great speech from serial entrepreneur and RSA chairman Luke Johnson visits the RSA to share some key tips on the creation of successful, inspiring and ingenious enterprises.

Last week I heard that the electricity companies were making more profit per customer than in the previous year. This is a very important lesson for us entrepreneurs, one which we should take note of in these times of low economic growth.

The easiest way to make more profit is make more revenue to you existing customers.

Everyone knows this yet we seldom take our own advice and here we are looking at the big utility providers and see that this is just what they are doing. In the previous weeks we have seen that worldwide growth is almost nil, the banks are still not in a state to lend to businesses and international markets are looking more like a fun ride than places to invest your life savings.

The utility companies have a core problem, that they have a fixed number of subscribers (with limited house building the growth potential is negligible), they have had a very warm summer (average spending per customer has reduced) and unit costs of the raw material has increased and is set to continue. So with shareholders, waiting for our dividends, they can only do one thing, increase the profit margin per customer to show any form of growth. Without the shareholders, they can make electricity and we cannot buy it.

In many other markets you have many more options. The first is to up sell on the current produce. So if the customer has already purchased the Ford KA, then maybe they are ready to buy into the Fiesta or Focus. The great thing with this is you then may buy their used car and re-sell that, creating a double selling opportunity.  Lets not forget the finance, insurance and servicing options which continues the revenue stream for years.

Another option is used by the fast food industry. Normally you are asked if you would like to go ‘large’ for 30p. This means they put more ice in your slightly larger drink container and add a few grams of fries in your slightly larger fries container. This going large, gets them 30p for spending around 3p in materials. However, over the period of one month with several hundred stores, this provides million of pounds for the chain of outlets.

Yet another well know tactic is used by the supermarkets, you may come in for the milk and bread but leave with a box of chocolates and a bottle of wine, therefore intending to spend £3 and acutely spending £20. Most supermarkets make sure you have to pass the higher margin products to get to the essentials. Online stores are also becoming very good at this, especially Amazon, who provide recommendation and product placement based on your previous purchase, current search and seasonal trends.

The loyalty card is yet another opportunity to make more from your current customers and coffee shops around the country, small and large have all now desperate to this. Providing you with a card, which them love to stamp and them offer you a free drink on completion.

The cost of find new customers is high and therefore making sure you have an approach to make sure you can rely of this income is important for your business. Just 10% extra from each customer at this time is the difference from your business being average and being at the top of your industry when the recession finally ends.

Take a look at what options you have today to make more from your current customers.

We hear the term ‘knowledge economy ‘ used by many people and this week I finally made a decision, its not good for us entrepreneurs. The essential facet of a knowledge economy is that focused on the production and management of knowledge. It means Universities can get paid to make new discoveries, without ever wanting anyone to use them.

So lets take a look at history, Greek scholar named Pythagoras, who lived around 500 BC was also fascinated by triangles with these special side ratios and came up with a theory which we still use today. So the Greek’s had a knowledge economy. I don’t have to say how they have factored since taking the cheap finance available since joining the Euro. However, the development of knowledge itself does not bring prosperity, it’s the exploitation of it.

The fact is, with a truly international economy and information sharing through the internet, knowledge is not an asset until you have the skills to use it. The frontiers of knowledge are only today’s and tomorrow we shall have new frontiers which make yesterdays knowledge redundant and obsolete. With more people on the planet the pace of this knowledge development increasing as the human race, races for more knowledge. How can you expect to win a race when you have over 6 billion people against you? Small countries do not have the man power or money.

The answer is to master the skill of managing, exploiting and capitalizing the knowledge. Society needs to develop people who have these skills to transfer knowledge into successful enterprises.

When I look at successful entrepreneurs, they develop industry knowledge, but never technical, they know the trends, but never the detail, they understand what works and what does not, but could not build any product themselves. The skill to adapt to whatever life throws at you is a skill we should all have and this skills needs to be learnt at every stage of education, even a university one.

In a knowledge-based economy, knowledge is a tool. So if we are going to anything we need an knowledge-based economy with a population who have access to the knowledge and the skills to master it for our enterprising future.

Pythagoras gave us a tool and we should never forget the skill of using it.