David Murby's Blog

A simple example of continuous improvement

David Murby — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 11:21:24 +0000

Last week I learnt a better way to do something I thought I’d mastered at the age of 6. You can always learn a better process or improve your way of doing things. Being open to new ideas and the concept that someone may know a better approach to something you have always done, and thought you were good at, is the key to lifelong learning. This can reap benefits in your personal and professional life.
Whilst the activity I improved was not being done completely wrong it was clearly sub-optimal. A very small change means that I’ve now gained a benefit and something that used to irritate me no-longer affects me. So what did I learn? I learnt to tie my shoe laces properly! So now my laces don’t come undone and I don’t have to tie double-bows to secure the laces. OK, so it’s not going to change my life entirely but it was a lesson. You can always learn. Every day’s a school day as the saying goes and this is true in so many aspects of business life.
How open are you personally and as an organisation to new ideas and different ways of doing things? Make sure you’re always looking to improve your approach and never rest on your laurels.
Oh, and if you’d like to learn to tie your laces properly and you’ve got three minutes check out the TED talk video here.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Continuous improvement, Innovation

I’m at IBIS 2011 connecting and getting new ideas

David Murby — Sun, 15 May 2011 23:02:59 +0000

This week I’m attending IBIS 2011 in Barcelona. Now, full disclosure, I’m part of the conference as I’m moderating one of the sessions but, other than that, there’s another reason why I really like this type of conference: new ideas.
OK, so I don’t come away from IBIS with a whole pile of “lightbulb moments” but I do garner further information which stores away in my brain and creates the slow burn of new ideas.
Steven Johnson has put up a brilliant you-tube video on where good ideas come from. If you’ve never seen it then you should check it out here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU&feature=youtube_gdata_player). Johnson writes, in his book “Where good ideas come from” that “Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time.” I believe that IBIS (and other similar conferences) expose the delegates to the ‘existing parts’ of the new, good ideas. By taking these parts away, thinking about them in the context of your own business you can build up new good ideas which then create the ‘parts’ of the next idea. It’s a consistently evolving process and to be part of it you’ve got to get out there and network regularly, expose yourself to new people and new ideas.

Filed under: Bodyshops, Uncategorized Tagged: Innovation, Vehicle Repair

Before you start marketing your bodyshop, do your market research

David Murby — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 11:00:10 +0000

Understanding the market you serve is a critical step is knowing how to position the marketing of your bodyshop. The assumption at this stage is that you have determined what you ultimately want your bodyshop to be like; how big, what work you specialise in and which customers you’re going to target. Having made those decisions its important to critically assess the size of the market. Identifying the local competition and where you stand in relation to that competition is a vital part of your strategic positioning.
Let’s assume I have a bodyshop in the Reading area; a quick look on the web site of the Office for National Statistics and I can get the number of vehicles licensed in the Reading (60,000) and West Berkshire (105,000) unitary authority areas. So, my target market has around 165,000 cars on the road. Working from industry statistics that there are 3 million repairs each year from a total 34.3 million cars on the UK roads I can calculate that from my 165,000 cars in the area there’s likely to be ~14,500 repairs required to vehicles in my area. My (fictional) bodyshop can repair 25 vehicles a week so I want 1,300 repairs per year to keep my bodyshop full; this is approximately a 9% market share. Now I can look at the other bodyshops in the region, how big are they and what market share might they be looking for? If we add all of them together and we get to less than 100% we’re in a good area, if it’s 200% I might need to think about expanding my catchment area!
Also we should consider the makes of vehicles the competitors are looking to capture. If there’s a nice even spread of manufacturer approvals across the area that’s good, ideally I want to specialise in a manufacturer that no-one near me deals with. Then you’ve got the insurance company approvals on top of that. If you understand your market through proper analysis, ultimately you can more effectively target your marketing budget and the money will be much better spent.
This is just a small example. There’s a lot of information out there and it doesn’t take weeks to investigate the market before you end up marketing to people who you’ve no chance of converting to customers.

If you’d like some help or advice on building and implementing a strategy for your organisation get in touch
http://numinaconsulting.co.uk/inscontact.html

Filed under: Bodyshops, Business Strategy, Marketing Tagged: Marketing

Strategy implementation – making it all happen

David Murby — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 11:15:15 +0000

Action
Ultimately this is where it all comes together. Michael Porter has said B grade strategy with A grade implementation is better than A grade strategy with B grade implementation.
As we all know, doing something different is hard and it’s easy to fall back to previous ways of doing things. When the day to day workload is piling up people will take their attention off the attainment of the strategic goals and focus on shifting the workload. Ironically, if you’ve got your strategic framework in place, getting things right should make the workload easier to deal with (note that I don’t claim it’ll make the workload less!). This is because the framework will make it clearer on how to deal with things that come across your desk as they automatically get prioritised based on how well they fit into the the strategic plan.
It’s at this point that the senior management team have to keep themselves and everyone else focused on the long term strategic benefit and not let the team slip back into the firefighting model. This is hard work and requires us all to keep a check every day on what we’re doing and how it moves the organisation towards the strategic aims.
This is when leadership comes into play and leading by example is crucial. If your strategy has been communicated as making customer service key to your aims and the leadership team do not demonstrate a commitment to customer service, cut investments in this area and do not give time and resource to customer service the message is load and clear – that despite all the fine words the strategy is not top of the list of goals for the management. The rest of the company will follow the example of the senior management and the strategy will fail at the implementation, the last but the highest hurdle.

Conclusion
To plough in a straight line you have to keep your eye fixed on the horizon and not focus just in front of the plough. This is the same with strategy implementation – keep focused on the long term goal and keep measuring and adjusting your operational activities to ensure they contribute towards your long term aims for your organisation

If you’d like some help or advice on building and implementing a strategy for your organisation get in touch
http://numinaconsulting.co.uk/inscontact.html

Filed under: Bodyshops, Business Strategy Tagged: Bodyshop Strategy, Vehicle Repair

Focus, focus, focus – you have to do the strategically important

David Murby — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 11:15:59 +0000

Focus on the key operational imperatives
What are the key changes you need to make in your business operations to achieve your strategic goals? Do you have a clear view of the operational steps you need to take to achieve these goals? It is important that your business is aggressively pursuing a small number of key operational imperatives to get you to where you need to be. Realistically the number of organisation-wide imperatives should be limited to a maximum of three. This means that the people in your business will be able to keep a clear view of those programmes whilst continuing to work on their day to day job functions without getting ‘change fatigue’
The scope of the three imperatives should cover all areas of your business so that everyone in the business feels part of the strategic change. Projects in each operational area of the business (finance, product development, customer service etc.) should contribute towards the operational delivery of the changes needed to deliver your strategy. Each imperative should have a member of your senior management team as a sponsor and this person should be responsible, cross functionally, for the delivery of the change programme and the projects needed to get you to your goals.
As an example, if customer service improvement is one of your operational imperatives to achieve your strategy, all areas of the business should look to see how they can improve the customer service in their area. Small projects should be set up and regular communication across projects encouraged to ensure everyone is moving together towards the strategic goal.
As projects are completed new ones should build upon the gains of the previous ones and as you introduce new operational imperatives, these too should build upon the previous imperatives. It is critical that everyone involved in your business, including customers, can see real improvement from the projects and that subsequent activities are seen to be building on the foundations of previous actions.

Conclusion
Build a roadmap of operational imperatives to get you to where you need to go. Break these imperatives down into projects across operational areas and break the projects into smaller work streams. Get everyone involved and ensure that each piece of work is clearly adding to your strategic direction and builds on previous initiatives. Let everyone see how the strategy is starting to improve their daily work and enhancing the business as a whole.

If you’d like some help or advice on building and implementing a strategy for your organisation get in touch
http://numinaconsulting.co.uk/inscontact.html

Filed under: Bodyshops, Business Strategy Tagged: Bodyshop Strategy, Vehicle Repair

People are your best asset only if you let them be so

David Murby — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 11:15:52 +0000

People
It’s an old cliché that people are an organisation’s best asset but it is also very true that nothing gets done without the people in the business. Your business will only achieve its aims if the people are doing the right things at the right time. Therefore, to achieve your strategic aims you need to:

Hire the best people you can afford. In many cases if you’ve got really good people it doesn’t matter what you need them to do, you can work that out later! If they’re really high quality individuals they will help you work out the details of what needs doing and how to achieve your aims as long as you can give them clear direction on what it is that you need as an end result.

Make sure they’re clear on what needs doing. Very clear communication of the goals and the scope of their role is critical for people to perform to their best. Make sure everyone in the organisation knows the strategic objectives and their part in making it a reality.

Give them what they need to get the job done. Once you’ve got good people you need to give them the training and the tools to complete their role. Skimping in this area can be counter productive – like buying a really expensive can and then never servicing it and putting no petrol in the tank.

Make them feel part of the team. The collective effort works much better than individuals operating alone. They need to feel that their role is important in the overall aims of the organisation and gain positive recognition for their contribution.

All of this needs to be done within the framework of your organisation’s strategic aims and the operational targets that are moving you towards those goals. In the absence of clearly defined goals people will become strangely attracted to trivial acts which give you no real strategic benefit.

Conclusion
People management needs to be a core element of your strategic planning. Ensuring that the recruitment, retention and development of everyone in your business is linked directly to the strategic goals of the organisation will give clear return on investment in moving your business towards its aims.

If you’d like some help or advice on building and implementing a strategy for your organisation get in touch
http://numinaconsulting.co.uk/inscontact.html

Filed under: Bodyshops, Business Strategy Tagged: Bodyshop Strategy, Vehicle Repair

Build your organisation to deliver your strategy

David Murby — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 11:15:45 +0000

Organise for delivery of the strategy
By this stage, if you’ve been following through on my earlier posts on strategy development, you know what you’re trying to achieve – your vision – and you’re aware of where you are placed in the market, what makes you unique and you’ve got a key focus on what you’re good at. Now you need to set your organisation up for delivery of the vision.
Given that we’re proposing strategy for smaller independent businesses, it could be argued that there’s a disconnect here between the idea of organisational structure around a strategy and the reality of the number of people that are in the business. However, I would claim that any business with more than one person involved can be organised around strategic aims. It’s not just about departments and operational divisions.
What are the key goals that you need to achieve? Do you need to reshape the job roles and responsibilities of your team to make sure that these goals are central to their day to day activities. Are the interactions between your team members changed by the strategy and do you need to introduce new job functions or eliminate job functions that are now irrelevant? Does this mean that you need to hire people or lose people from your organisation so that the structure fits the strategic vision?
Think about the management team of your organisation. What major functions do finance, HR, operations, IT and customer service (for example) need to fulfil in order to move the business forward to the achievement of the strategic goals? If you’ve got the roles and responsibilities of the management clearly and simply outlined for the team then cascading this down the levels should be an easier activity in a smaller company.
Once you’ve thought about the roles and activities you can start thinking about the people who will hold these jobs – the subject of my next post. Sign up to subscribe to the blog to make sure you don’t miss it.

Conclusion
The organisation structure of any company needs to be aligned to the strategy in order to deliver the vision. In smaller companies the structure often seems intuitive and simply comes about organically. It is important to review the structure in light of the strategy to make sure that job roles and responsibilities fit the needs of the activities required to deliver the vision.

If you’d like some help or advice on building and implementing a strategy for your organisation get in touch
http://numinaconsulting.co.uk/inscontact.html

Filed under: Bodyshops, Business Strategy Tagged: Bodyshop Strategy, Vehicle Repair

Marketing research lessons from Twitter

David Murby — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 09:28:01 +0000

I recently wrote an article for one of the motor repair industry trade magazines on doing market research before you throw money at marketing following up on my post of 18th January. I’m starting to wonder if this is now relevant to Twitter. I use Twitter sparingly but I love it. I have three main areas of interest:

Things that are directly relevant to the motor repair industry
Local information and contacts around the Reading area where I live
Geeky stuff about Apple Macs

The Twitter etiquette of generally following back people who decide to follow you is starting to mean that the people who just collect followers by numbers are using more means to increase their follow count. Followathon is the latest one I’m seeing. Cleverly this un-follows people who don’t follow you back after a while and I’m sure there’s a lot of intelligence built into who it decides to follow in the first place. However, there’s a limit to the number of SEO experts I’m interested in following and I really don’t see what relevance my tweets are to a Guatemalan tea grower (unless they really need their car repaired).

Using tools to select followers concerns me that we’re moving to the electronic equivalent of junk mail; follow enough people and eventually some will follow back and your count goes up. However, the key market research principle still works here; unless you are really relevant to people in twitter – industry, personal contact, locale or expertise for example – your tweets will become annoying and they can just un-follow you.

In any endeavour such as this you have to decide who your customers / audience are and target appropriately. Certainly, if you’re just a rampant self publicist, having huge numbers of followers may be nice but is it the equivalent of marketing your bodyshop to cats and dogs? Before you market your bodyshop you should be working out who your audience is, how big it is, what messages you want to get out there and which channels to use. Surely using Twitter is similar?

Filed under: Bodyshops, Marketing, Technology

What are you really outstanding at doing?

David Murby — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 11:15:12 +0000

Focus on what you’re really good at.
This may sound self evident but many companies get distracted by areas of business that look interesting, come up by happenstance or are requested by a customer but fall way outside the business’s area of normal operations. Two things are then likely to occur that are creating risk for the organisation.

The new area of business requires an excessive amount of management time to achieve success. This distracts from the areas of the business that you are good at and means performance suffers. The profitability is diluted and people become disillusioned because the ones working on the new area of business are getting all the attention. And all this is when you actually make a success of it!

You fail to deliver. Customers are disappointed and your reputation suffers. You have lost an opportunity to put effort into your core business because you’ve been distracted by the sideline activity. If you’re unfortunate, you’ll throw even more money and resources at the project before it finally gets killed off because you’re trying to rescue both your business and personal reputation. Don’t get distracted by ego!

Now, I’m not suggesting at all that you shouldn’t innovate. It is crucial to introduce new product and service offerings but make sure that they fall into the area of what you’re good at and where it is core to your strategy. Your strategy is just as much a framework to indicate what not to do as it is to tell you what to do.
So, one of the key things to link to what makes you unique, as discussed in our last email, is what are you really good at. In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about the Hedgehog Principle. Following this principle, organisations should focus on activities at the confluence of three things: 1 – what can you be the best at; 2 – what are you really passionate about; 3 – what drives your economic ‘engine’. He argues that your focus should be where all these three things cross. By inference therefore we can also say that your strategy should incorporate these three areas and drive you to excel where the three overlap.
At Numina Consulting we feel you should have a good ideas of what you are really good at and this is likely to link to what makes you unique in your market. Focus your efforts on this and make your organisation outstanding at this area. As a smaller organisation you are unlikely to have the resources to allocate to a myriad of projects so become the very best tomorrow at what you’re already good at today.

Conclusion
If you chase two rabbits you’ll won’t catch either of them – focus on what you’re good at and don’t dilute you efforts by getting distracted into projects that look interesting or that customers dream up but are outside what you can excel at. Become outstanding at something in your marketplace and your customers and market will remember you for it.

If you’d like some help or advice on building and implementing a strategy for your organisation get in touch
http://numinaconsulting.co.uk/inscontact.html

Filed under: Bodyshops, Business Strategy Tagged: Bodyshop Strategy, Vehicle Repair

So you think your business is special…

David Murby — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 11:15:20 +0000

What makes you unique?
When you are positioning yourself in the market you need to have some way for the customers to differentiate you from your competition, otherwise they’re highly likely to just buy on price. Now that’s great if you’re following a low cost provider strategy and are the market leader on price but it’s a really hard position to be in all the time. This is especially true for smaller businesses since lowest cost operator usually relies on significant economies of scale. So, what makes you so special for your customers.
There are a relatively limited number of areas in which you can differentiate yourself from the rest of the market in which you operate. These areas are:

The products or services which you offer

The market segments, geography and customers that you serve

The mechanism of delivery to the customer

The technology you use or provide

The production capability of your organisation

Another way that these are often defined is in the following three areas:

Operational Excellence: your strategy is driven by being extremely efficient in the way that you produce and deliver products and services. The objective here is to be the leader in price and convenience. This is often harder, but not impossible, for a smaller organisation.

Customer Intimacy: by developing an ever more segmented view of the market, tailoring products and services to a finer and finer set of customers your organisation gains an unrivalled relationship with those customers. The aim of this strategy is to build a very long term loyal customer base that is highly profitable.

Product Leadership: this strategy is based around a continuous stream of state of the art product and services. This requires continual innovation and rapid commercialisation of new ideas.
Whichever list you consider and whichever item you pick it is widely accepted that only one point can be the true differentiator for your strategy.

Conclusion
For your customers to have a reason to buy from you and remain loyal you need to find something that differentiates you from the rest of the marketplace. You have to focus on that differentiator and frame your strategy around your uniqueness in a competitive marketplace.

If you’d like some help or advice on building and implementing a strategy for your organisation get in touch
http://numinaconsulting.co.uk/inscontact.html

Filed under: Bodyshops, Business Strategy Tagged: Bodyshop Strategy, Vehicle Repair