Strategy

Strategy is bottom up | Kan & Company

February 12, 2021

2 minutes to read

We believe that winning strategies are born from killer tactics.

Napoleon Bonaparte was a Sardinian artillery sergeant in the French army. In his day, artillery was heavy and difficult to move.

He discovered that if he could have mobile artillery he could move it to concentrate its fire on a key part of the battlefield as required.

The rest of the strategy was logistics to allow the tactic to work effectively on the battlefield.

Cannon with lighter designs were procured, larger wheels were fitted to better traverse mud, artillery divisions were given horse and horse handlers.

He needed good messengers to redirect fire during the battle. Lots and lots of training so that they could all operate amidst the cacophony and chaos of battle.

With this strategy born from the simple idea of focusing artillery fire during a battle, he took Europe.

In the 1930s Nazi Germany perfected the idea of coordinating both highly mobile mechanized infantry, armor and air forces in battle. With these new tactics came new logistics.

The new Divisions required were recombined with a mix of armor and mechanized infantry. These new divisions needed new logistics systems to fuel and maintain their vehicles and equipment. Training was needed to improve communications and coordination between different forces.

We in Kan & Company Ltd have evaluated many business models and strategies over the years, we believe in winning strategies based on killer coal-face tactics that win sales which are supported by great logistics.

Despite his success, even Napolean got predictable. Is your Marketing looking stale or missing the target? Has your sales growth flattened out? Is your firm ready for its next phase of growth?

Call us, let’s talk

Discipline and systems allow businesses to scale | Kan & Company

April 5, 2018

In New Zealand, because of our flexibility and laid back attitudes, it’s easy to conclude that a lack of formality and bureaucratic procedure is part of the reason why New Zealand company’s succeed.

However, that conclusion is false.

Too many of New Zealand’s businesses are stuck in perpetual “start-up” mode, frozen at a small scale, still operating like small start ups with few standard systems and procedures even after decades of operation.

Consequently, new staff are always re-inventing the wheel, developing processes from scratch for routine operational processes.

Without documentation systems, new project teams have to develop their own processes for deployment and these processes can’t be easily handed on to the next set of new staff, leaving new staff to repeat the same grind.

Without systems, mistakes and gotchas can’t be flagged for subsequent staff to avoid.

Without timesheets how can the organisation control its costs? How can it apportion its overheads to particular projects and activities? How can the business know whether a particular activity makes money?

Too few business owners and managers are disciplined enough to put systems in place to be able to answer these questions with any rigor.

These questions seem so obvious yet why isn’t answering them prioritized? Often the lack of a systematic, disciplined approach results in poorly tested, and unreliable products and services.

Deployment under these circumstances results in much re-work and this gets in the way of product and service development, and places greater pressure on meeting contractual deadlines. In other words, fighting fires.

Not surprisingly, profitability is impaired but often managers comfort themselves with high gross margins. Such managers fool themselves into thinking they are still making money because all that re-work is still a hidden cost, buried among the overheads.

All that frenetic, frantic activity yet the company isn’t growing as it should.

Success is not just based on talent, expertise, knowledge, acumen or luck but also discipline. Systems provide discipline. Not just discipline for operational activity as we have just touched on, but also to strategy setting, business planning, goal and objective setting too.

In fact, if a lack of systems is creating bottlenecks that are constricting your company’s growth then implementing systems has become a strategic imperative.

Systems allow a winning formula to be replicated across a great many people and this is how businesses scale.

Implementing systems that encourage a systematic and disciplined approach to all your business activities (including sales and marketing) will allow your company to focus on the right things, control costs and scale to new heights.

Putting systems in place and gaining staff engagement to sustainably use them, takes leadership and hard work. In my experience, it’s an investment that is well worth the effort.

Artificial Intelligence and the future of humankind

November 16, 2017

3 minutes

Yesterday I attended an informative and fascinating talk by Kaila Colbin, a Curator at SingalarityU about how technology is impacting and likely to impact society. The talk was facilitated by law firm, Anthony Harper.

She talked about how advances in technology were growing exponentially and that, the way humans are wired, makes us prone to underestimating the pace of change.

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) meant that sentience wasn’t that far away.

Go is a board game that is much more complex than chess. Only a year ago, an AI program beat the world’s best human Go champion 4-1. A year later its successor has beaten the old program.

AI-enabled image recognition programs are better than human pathologists at recognizing cancer cells.

Law firms were already putting AI bots into play, carrying out the day to day research previously provided by Bots.

Already robots were turning out to be more economical than human labour resulting in mass lay-offs.

It’s clear, AI enabled technology can conceivably replace humans. Disturbing.

The societal questions these raise are fundamental. What will humans do instead? Can we trust AI-enabled tech to do the right thing?

At the talk, Geoff Cranko of Strategy Creative asked about what advances had their been in adapting law to meet these new technological challenges.

I found his question thought provoking, particularly in respect of Artificial Intelligence.

Law is just an expression of ethics and so it is developments in our ethical thinking in respect of AI that needs to progress. Then all we need do is bake this ethical system into the AI.

Azimov’s Three Laws of Robotics is one step in this journey of ethical development. On the other hand, as AI fast approaches sentience, perhaps we need not re-invent anything: the 10 Commandments might prove to be timeless, after all.

How are you different? 4 steps to standing out from your competitors, in a good way. | Kan & Company

August 22, 2017

9 minutes to read

“We’re all the same”

The other day I was discussing how the competitors in a particular industry differentiated themselves from one another.

One of the participants nodded knowingly and said “We’re all saying the same things, we’ve got basically the same feature set. No one is different from anyone else. We’re all chasing the same thing.”

Really?

In many mature markets, whether its soft drinks like coca-cola or lemonade through to televisions, or even sophisticated products like electronic cameras, smartphones, IT systems or airport baggage conveyor belts, you could say that each of the competitors are roughly the same. But you’d be wrong.

Actually, you’re not

In fact, despite the fact that the competitors feel they are in an intense arm wrestle with little differentiation between each other, customer perceptions could be and often are, quite different.

The challenge for each competitor is to get inside the head of your clients. What are they saying about the various competitors? What characteristics of your product and service bundle do they rate everyone on?

Are you more reliable? Do you perform better? Are you more responsive? Do you instill more confidence? What comes to mind when they think about You?

When the features of all the competitors are relatively the same, the differences between the more subtle characteristics of each competitor become more amplified in customers’ minds.

Take cars…

Take sedan cars. A car, is a car, is a car, right? No. Think about it. Most cars have four wheels, a steering wheel, an engine, a body and a load carrying capability. These days most are pretty reliable, their comfort levels, sound proofing and accessories are all pretty good.

Yet most people will see cars from different manufacturers, as being radically different.

Most people will perceive different manufacturers through the lens created by their brands. Some cars will be seen as more masculine, more sophisticated, more sporty, more feminine… Others are considered geeky, boring, goofy, qwerky…

Customers will want to be identified with a particular brand, because they see it as a natural extension of themselves. And that’s how they want to project themselves to others, but without words.

So loyal Ford, Toyota, Honda, GM, and Chrysler owners will see a world of difference between each other’s cars.

The same is true of industrial products too. All the customer’s tangible interactions with your product and service, build toward the “brand” persona of your company. No matter how commoditized you may feel your product category might be, your customers will still associate different values to your “brand.”

Or Coca-cola vs Pepsi

Take Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Time and again, blind taste testers are fooled into thinking that Coca-Cola is in fact Pepsi, and the other way around. Yet, the Coca-Cola fan drinkers would never knowingly buy a Pepsi; and the Pepsi drinkers would choke if they knew they were drinking a coke. Why?

But back to B2B: I once knew a salesperson for Swagelok, a manufacturer of gas and fluid systems components, such as tube fittings, valves, tubing, and gauges. When he came to give a demonstration of his product, it was presented inside a case, with a felt lined, form fitting interior.

Before he brought it out he would lay out a felt cloth down on the meeting table before unclasping the case and bringing out the shiny industrial valve for the client to see.

Just by unboxing the valve in front of the potential client, well before he began saying anything in his presentation, he had put the potential client through quite an experience and the client had had a foretaste about what this company was about.

By now, you might have guessed that I think of “Product” in a very broad way. To me, “Product” is everything to do with the physical product and/or service your customer is likely to experience through interacting with the actual product or service itself, as well as your company, its staff, its agents, its advertisements, its publications and any after sales interactions the client might have.

3 steps to differentiation

Step 1: Don’t fall into the trap of thinking there is no way you can differentiate your product from your competitors.

Whether it’s better reliability, responsiveness, assurance, presentation, attitude, or empathy for your clients’ needs, whether it’s a set of values, a persona, identification with some idea that captures the imagination of your customers, whatever it might be, trust that your customers already think of you as being different than your competitors.

Step 2: Find out how you’re different and whether it’s in a good way or bad way.

Read reviews of your products and services. Talk to existing and potential customers. Take out consultants that advise your customers for a cup of coffee. You might be pleasantly surprised how much they are all willing to tell you.

Step 3: And if it’s in a bad way, take it by the horns, and channel your customers’ perceptions toward something they think is important. It most likely won’t change by accident. Left alone, it might even get worse.

Focus on something your clients rate highly and make sure you’re better than the rest of your competition on it. Line up everything to support this competitive strength. This is the essence of strategy and product positioning.

“Product” differentiation can happen organically and accidentally but then you don’t know whether its a strength or a weakness. Product differentiation can still be organic, but do make it an intentional process.

Intrigued? Want to talk about it? Click the button and we’ll get back to you.

Sales doesn’t work in isolation… | Kan & Company

August 15, 2017

2 minutes to read

Sometimes when the sales pipeline is looking lean, the Sales team quite rightly comes under scrutiny.

Their lead generation methods, their pitches, feedback from prospects and their activity levels, among other things, will be reviewed.

While Sales is under the magnifying glass, its easy to fall into the trap of looking at it in isolation.

Sales doesn’t operate in isolation or a vacuum. In fact, Sales works in conjunction with a number of other factors, such as brand awareness, reputation, and customer service experience.

I recently took part in a discussion about a new product launch. We were discussing the sales process of an OEM product to other technology firms. During the discussion, he quite rightly pointed out that he was reliant on the technical team to develop manuals and specification documents that allowed potential customers to see how the new product would be integrated into their own systems, what software had been written that provided APIs for them to use and what after sales support would be available.

He’s going to be pushing it uphill if these things aren’t in place beforehand.

On another occasion, a business owner suggested to me that all he had to do was to add another sales person to his sales team. After a short discussion, it became clear that the business had not developed an idea that captured the imagination of its market. An idea that made it stand out from its competitors. An idea that would form a theme for its sales pitches. An idea around which all its marketing efforts could rally.

If Sales are flat lining, sure, scrutinize your sales operations to make sure your i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed but I suggest you also look at your key messages, your advertising, your website marketing, your case studies and customer experience processes.