Seth Godin, One of my favorite marketeers and “the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age” according to Business Week gave a talk about the importance of getting to the finish.
It got me to think about why I’m an obsessive finisher. If I sit down to watch a movie and it’s the worst in the world, I’ll sit through it. I don’t own a TV for one simple reason – If I start watching a program I’ll stay there till its done but if I don’t start watching it, i’ll never miss it.
Being an entrepreneur is easy, you get an idea, develop it and build the business. It’s the building the business part that tends to get everyone caught up, “The Resistance” as Seth calls it in his video. So focus on what needs to be done to get you to your finish line, in time everything else will take care of itself.
Today is the launch of my latest venture TheMobilityShop.ie – which is a specialist daily living aids business selling wheelchairs, bath lifts, walkers and other products which enable the elderly, mobility challenged and those recovering from an injury. We stock a full range of products including many of the products preferred by the HSE and industry leading or award winning ranges. Over the coming months we intend to work with our client base to build upon our range to increase the solutions available online and to offer new products to the market currently not available in Ireland.
Zatori has also taken on two new staff in the first month of 2011 and I’m expecting this to be our best year yet so hopefully there will be some news and announcements coming soon.
As always I’m keen to hear your thoughts on the new site so let know on Twitter or email, or you can post below.
So for the last two months i’ve been traveling in Asia and India, as always I find traveling gives a unique opportunity to get ideas and perspective.
One of the big take-aways from this trip is that when needs become musts there is a tendency to do less with more. It’s got me thinking that maybe the role of an entrepreneur is to self discipline and limit resources with the specific intent of gaining the maximize ROI in terms of operational efficient.
Gary Chang is a great example of how limited resources mixed with smarts can be an awesome combination, transferring his 330 square feet apartment – into a 24 room luxury pad!!
Another example of this is Jugaad in India. In the rural communities you see many home made vehicles called Jugaad, these are self made vehicles which run on a pump meant for agricultural use. A family can rely on the engine for their transport, then use the same engine for lighting in their house if needed and when the waters come to pump water around their farm our out of their house if there is a flood.
So the question is do you have facilitates or assets that could be used beyond their current state? Could a night club on Dublins expensive Stephens Green be easily transform into a clothing shop during the day when its not being used, simply by applying some of Garys principles from the video?? Think of the synergy and imagine how much value could be created that at the moment we are just ignoring.
“It’s just the way things are done in our industry”, it’s an easy justification to almost any non-productive practice. Be it why banks need to close their doors before their key target market (the 9 – 5 employed) can utilize their services or why Lawyers operate a burn them out mentality with the not so occasional overnight shift, when it would be more productive to have twice the number of lawyers working half as often (and you’d probably attract all the best ones if you did).
Sometimes the stupidest reasons for businesses start-ups to do anything is the exact reason they do it. “I can’t understand why my competitors do it this way so I’d better go ahead and copy them or I’ll look like I just don’t get it”.
Its also why insurance companies let you fill in big long forms online to get a quote only to deliver you to a page saying they can’t make an online quotation. But you should try their phone support (although it’s not open right now), but hey their computer intranet might have some super secret information not available to the website or they might just waste another 10 minutes of your life…
These examples are so common place we start to not even notice them anymore but it always makes me think of the classic Henry Ford Quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Sometimes we just need to change the rules of the game altogether.
So Christmas is here and for me this means one thing. Christmas FM is back on air!! Since being a teenager I was in love with the world of Radio and although I no longer and involved full time in the industry, every Christmas for the last three years I fall back in love with it.
This year we are broadcasting in 5 regions in Ireland a huge increase as our first year was just in Dublin and the second in only Cork and Dublin. This year we broadcast on the following frequencies:
Dublin – 89.9 | Limerick -105.5 | Cork -106.7 | Galway -89.5 | South East -103.8
We also had the No1 downloaded I-phone App on itunes in Ireland within 2 days of launching it.
Christmas FM is a social enterprise. A business set up to run a temporary radio station for 1 month a year, with all the proceeds going to charity and run by volunteers. There are three simple aims:
1. Make as much money as possible for our chosen charity each year and help raise awareness for the work they do – This year our Charity Partner is Barnardos. 2. Spread a bit of Christmas joy to everyone who wants to tune in. 3. Have a lot of fun with all the volunteers who help make the station happen.
Last year Christmas FM won awards for “PR Excellence for a Non Profit” from the PRCA.
For me it’s a great way to leverage charitable donations, so we raise money for the stations operation costs via the Christmas FM online store and put money forward to cover the operation costs. Then the station itself builds a huge listenership who text message in to have requests and everytime they text €1 goes to the charity directly. Also by raising awareness for the charity (Barnardos’s) good work, our listeners give generously to their cause and we have street teams to raise cash in all the major cities.
People love the radio station, feel under no obligation to give to the charity if they don’t want to. And yet we often get people who find the station from all corners of the world, listen online and then want to give back to a cause that brought them a small piece of Christmas happiness.
I heard something very disturbing today that really got me thinking. A friend had mentioned that they found their status as a previous public sector worker was causing them problems to get a job. It wasn’t just some bitching and moaning, he was confidentially told this by a personal friend who was involved in the hiring process that it was a deciding factor. Now I know this is an awful generalization, very unpolitical correct no doubt against the law (I mean they always write the laws in their favour right?). But is it possible their is a small truth in it??
In my mind there is a big chasm between public sector workers and private sector workers who work in the SME sector. The public sector has different goals and performance reviews. The big thing I notice is in this “job for life” sector its very hard to get fired unless your stick you neck out and do something abnormal. In the private sector its very hard to get promoted unless you stick your neck out every so often so you can be noticed.
This not sticking your neck out is why departments like Enterprise Boards have committees to approve every small grant. Enterprise Ireland spent two third of their budget on Administration and only one third on grants! Making every decision by committee is a massively expensive way to make sure no-one is accountable.
Things that have happened in the last month made me even more aware of the gaps between the two sectors of workers. Its not that the people are bad but the systems change their approach to work. There’s huge talk about offering redundancy to public sector workers who no longer have any role in the departments they work in, but cannot be let go due to agreements previously made without big redundancy. This simply wouldn’t happen in the private sector. If they couldn’t afford you, like it or not they would find a way to get rid of you. I don’t mean unjustly, but its a simple fact that some people have been abusing the system in the public sector, FAS was never decidedly a “bad” organization, no one every stuck their head out they just slowly raised the bar on the levels of corruption over time. If you need to down size your department in the private sector and people have been committing fire-able offenses, em no brainer.
An example of how one could down size without redundancy: Check the last 10 years of stationary expenses. I bet Septembers bills we’re usually high, a stationary rep told me they we’re instructed to get in quantities of childrens copy books etc, which they didn’t normally stock to facilitate demand from government departments with no ties to education. Cross reference and hold the purchasing department also accountable for not preforming their duties. Cut the sloth, don’t reward it.
But this post isn’t politically motivated, the question is – Are public sector workers attitudes toward work somewhat spoiled by their previous experience in a organization where their wage and future weren’t as closely tied into the ability of their job to provide positive return on investment?
Has the public sector made a section of the work force less valuable?? And if so is there anyway of addressing it?
Its been one hell of a crazy month. Halloween means Halloween Costumes and that means TheCostumeShop.ie goes into full swing. This year I was really chuffed to have crossed into the Top 200 websites in Ireland on Alexa and place 194th at our peak in the Irish listings. And more surprisingly high in the UK listings – and we’re really not optimized to be featured there at all.
The Costume Shop Alexa Rank on 30/10/10
During this month we created 64 new jobs in the Portlaoise Area, something that i’m really proud of in the current climate and I have to say the Irish work force has some incredible people being under utilized. We also had a lot of fun along the way – Did anyone see Deric reading the weather on TV3 dressed as a mad hatter?? Classic.
One of the great forums of marketing that I finally got around to learning was Facebook pages, I have to be honest and say i really hadn’t been keen on the idea of formalizing a role for someone to look after social media as part of their duties, but I was completely proved wrong. Michelle and Stephen did such an incredible job of The Costume Shop facebook page and by the months end, we had gone from 100 likes (fans) to 6250 likes in just a month with decent conversion rates. At least for Ireland that has to be some sort of social media record.
Quick word on facebook marketing, we didn’t spend any money on facebook ads to get fans. Buying ads to get likes on facebook is simply retarded, you wouldn’t buy friends for your personal profile so don’t do it for your business. When running FB ads, always land on your own domain and at an optimized page. Also there is a huge difference between an active facebook page and a stupid facebook campaign. While the I like tatyo crisps on bread campaign was considered by a few a success (currently with 17,700 likes) – I’m not sure how many (if any) conversions / packets of crisps sold, they made as a result of the campaign. And having acquired all those likes, which is really more of a statement about the person than an interest in the business, what else can they say other than “I still like…”. I digress. Facebook marketing only works when you engage and share things of interest with people who already are interested in your products. There’s no point in shoving your product down peoples throats. Find your tribe and stick with them as Seth Godin would say.
So I’d love to say the next few weeks should be a chance to calm down and catch up on the non existent sleep we’ve been getting, but the plan is to get two new businesses concepts investigated and hopefully get off the ground before 2010 is out. As they say create a tight timeline and a mammoth task to focus on to let peoples true potential out.
One of the most enlightening talks and ideas I’ve come across in a while comes from Steven Johnson. I’d just had to share talk courtesy of TED. For me this speech is freakishly relevant to whats been going on my business for the last few months.
I was delighted with the news that we got nominated for FOUR Irish web awards on projects I’m currently involved with.
It’s great timing for us with our Halloween Costumes business, TheCostumeShop.ie, gearing up for another busy season. The Costume Shop is nominated for Best E-commerce / Service Website in Ireland AND Best SME Website. A huge compliment given the caliber of other companies in this category.
The Bikini Shop which saw huge growth this year in Swimwear sales due to the warm summer is nominated for Most Beautiful Web Site, hopefully not just because of the beautiful models that we have on the site 🙂
And the icing on the cake Christmas FM, a social enterprise that raises money for charity but playing non-stop Christmas music during the festive season was nominated for Best Music Site. A true achievement for a project coming into its third year running.
The Full nominations list can be seen at the Web Awards website.
Below is a speech from Peter Jones, Dragons Den Investor and inventor of one of my favourite terms Ultrapreneur. This speech echo’s something i’ve been saying through out this recession, it’s the best possible time in our lifetime to start a business. It also got me thinking what Ireland is doing to match this type of innovation.
This type of entrepreneur lead method of teaching teenagers and aspiring entrepreneurs of any age that there is an option of there to have a go yourself is sorely missed in Ireland. And while I don’t want to take away the great work of programs like the Young Entrepreneur competition and Mini Company program, I do feel schools and CEBs could do a lot more. I mean is there anything more silly than a teacher who has never worked in the real business world being responsible for the slight exposure a teenage encounters to the business start up lifestyle.
Wouldn’t it be great if every school had talks and speeches from people out there today making a change in the economy and doing it for themselves? I’m sure other business owners feel the same. Anyone know of how we can make this happen here in Ireland?
