11 minute read
Are you seeing the bigger picture?
Are You Seeing
Bigger Picture? THE
Irish Print Awards judge and business consultant John Charnock offers some thoughts to get you thinking about the direction your company might be headed in
PRICE OR SERVICE – CHOOSE YOUR POISON Whether you like it or not, the customers you serve either value the services that you provide or they don’t. Many businesses pretend that they are a value service provider but in truth, they are not. If your customers have a champagne lifestyle but a beer budget, then you better start serving beer. Too many businesses try to be all things to all men/or women. Price – In order to run a focused, price sensitive business you need to get tough, really tough. Ditch the overheads, nice lounges, receptions and marketing and focus everything on the reduction of price. Commodity printers allocate all resources to the most e cient equipment, the minimum work mix and minimum resources. General printers, the ones that do a bit of everything, should not confuse themselves with commodity; they will never be as e cient as a truly focused commodity organisation. Alternatively, don’t focus on price. Service – If you genuinely do o er exceptional value then your customers should pay a premium, but every sinew of the business should be focused on the customer, their needs and personal service. The business should be unique, special and di erent and have few competitors. It’s like comparing a Savile Row tailor with a sweatshop. As I said above, choose your poison. The ones in the middle will have a tough time.
GET REALLY FECKING GOOD AT A FEW THINGS – SIMPLIFY Many businesses are overly complex. They make 80% of the profit on 20% of the products. 2020 is the year to get tough. As above, if getting really e cient and selling on price is your thing, then get really good at it. Be the best at whatever you choose to do.
This could be process e ciency, market sector specialty, product specialty like special e ects, customer understanding, new markets, technology and software development. Whatever you choose and this year you must choose, get bloody good at a few things.
Note: This doesn’t mean that you can’t do lots of things, perhaps ine ciently, but you must be focused on the 80%.
IRISH PRINTER I have sometimes advised businesses to split into two, one focused on something specific and the other more generalised.
PORTFOLIO ANALYSIS Simplification is the key here. Consider portfolio analysis. Take a look at this simple Boston Box to understand where your products sit in the matrix. Cash Cow, Star, Problem Child or Dog. Which ones need investment and which ones need culling or outsourcing?
By analysing and simplifying your product mix, you are beginning to prioritise the organisation.
Star High market growth High market share Cash neutral Hold
Cash cow Low market growth High market share Cash generating Harvest or milk Problem Child High market growth Low market share Cash absorbing Build
Dog Low market growth Low market share Cash neutral Divest
GET UNDER THE SKIN OF YOUR CUSTOMER All printers need to understand their customers’ plans. All too often we are kept at arm’s length and treated as a service provider rather than a partner. It is your job, as their supplier, to try and understand their business needs as well or better than they do themselves. It astounds me that many businesses still do not have a CRM system for tracking and managing their customer behaviour and interactions. CRM is not just a database of names and contacts, it is the place where all interactions, good and bad are recorded, used and analysed so that the business is better at making customer centric business decisions.
Most printers can tell me the makeready, utilisation and e ciency in seconds, but not what the customer ordered this time last year.
UNDERSTAND THE NEW BATTLEGROUND - INSIGHT AND KNOWLEDGE Many print managers, printers and service providers o er their customers insight services and yet many do not use
them for their own business. Understanding your market place, your competitors and your customers’ plans is critical these days. There are many business analysis tools that you can use to understand the environment you are competing or acting in. Porter’s 5 forces us to look at the competitive landscape, especially at the threat of substitute products and services – screens in store, mobile, video and social media are all fighting for our attention and perhaps some time and effort to better understand things that you don’t currently know about may be a worthy investment, even a new product or service. Once you have built your own insight, use it for commercial advantage.
MARKETING IS SIMPLY AN OPPORTUNITY TO SHOW YOUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES Many businesses believe that their route to growth and success is by employing professional marketeers to promote the business. In some cases this is absolutely correct. But before you go out and employ a marketing director, understand what marketing really does. Marketing gives you an opportunity to show prospects how good your product or service is and this is the important bit - if your product or service is RUBBISH you will just show more prospects how terrible your customer experience or your products are. Get focused on the appropriate products and services for your customers before you invest in marketing.
CULTURE EATS STRATEGY FOR BREAKFAST I am a big fan of strategy, strategic analysis and business analysis but establishing the right business culture within your organisation is way more important than strategic planning. You can plan all you want but if the culture and attitude of the organisation is wrong, no amount of strategy will help. Culture starts at the top.
Changing the culture of a business does not happen overnight. The leadership team needs to plan and execute communication, training, empowerment, mentoring and support infrastructure to support the right cultural environment. Once this is achieved, anything is possible.
TRAINING AND MENTORING Building a knowledge base and encouraging training and mentoring will help individuals within a business thrive. Recently, I have built Learning Management Systems for all sorts of training needs, from health and safety and induction to customer training. Basically anything that can be put into a PowerPoint can be converted into a LMS with quizzes, certificates and user progress reporting. Encouraging your super skilled staff to train and mentor others starts with confidence in the business. No operator will teach someone else to do their job if they are not secure in the belief that they have their own security in the first instance. Building security and then sharing skills will help the entire business develop.
STOP GETTING BOGGED DOWN WITH TRIVIA Too many business owners get bogged down with trivia. I call it “working in the business rather than on the business”. As a business owner or manager, how many hours a day do you spend dealing with trivia? How could your time be better spent? Investment in executive support or simple delegation will make your hours much more productive.
Sometimes delegation can be so difficult. Mistakes will happen but you have to let them happen in order to empower others and give yourself time to plan the business forward.
USE EXPERTS I am bound to say this as a consultant but having just invested in training for Prince 2 Project Management and Business Analysis qualifications, I’ve realised how much other experts out there could have helped me in the past. Academics are probably awful at running a business but hell do they know some really useful stuff. By using experts, you will fast track your business, make less mistakes and learn something in the process.
There are all sorts of experts – colour and quality, health and safety, standards and certification, project management, business analysis or general leadership. Using people with a unique perspective helps you as a business owner to see a bigger picture.
Anyone who thinks they know it all is a fool. Life is about learning and the learning never stops. Bring in an expert when appropriate to advise and question your thoughts and plans. It may save you a fortune.
John Charnock is owner and director of Print Research International (PR-INT), john.charnock@pr-int.net or www.pr-int.net
Talking to… ANDREW HORAN
Andrew Horan at TU Dublin talks to Irish Printer about being proud of his heritage and why the industry needs to wake up to the very real problem of skills shortages
What’s the biggest issue facing the industry today? A lack of training is having a massive impact on the industry. I know of a number of firms looking for staff at the moment who just can’t get them. I think we’re headed into a skills shortage and that’s throughout all the trades in printing. That will have a knock-on effect for the next five to 10 years.
Can it be resolved? I hope so. I think training has to be at the forefront for everyone. There’s no way the industry can grow if we don’t have the staff to facilitate that growth. It’s a real shame that the print media apprenticeship hasn’t run for the past few years but even before that, the industry didn’t support the scheme. We were only getting two, three or four apprentices a year. TU Dublin is still in the dark over what’s actually happening. Putting it back on the Solas curriculum seems to be an issue. The full ins and outs aren’t clear but I think the biggest problem at the moment is that the parties involved aren’t sitting around the table. Everyone needs to sit down and try and negotiate this. I know there are a lot of people in TU Dublin that would like to see the scheme back up and running. A new curriculum is also needed, the old one was outdated. If we can get the scheme back up and running, there will be a budget there to update machinery.
What does the scheme mean to you? Apprenticeship is where I started and trained. I’ve always believed that running an apprenticeship scheme is the way forward for the industry. We also have a print management degree running in TU Dublin at the moment, but that hasn’t been supported by the industry either.
Why is that, do you think? I believe that for the past 10 years, the industry has probably had its eyes shut. During the recession, I think they all closed ranks and protected what they had. Unfortunately, people retire and we’re losing those skills. For the last three years of the apprenticeship scheme, we only had 14 apprentices. In contrast, when we started the apprenticeship scheme in 2007, we had 28 students so we had huge support back then. I think the recession had a massive impact. I also think that printers believe they can train new entrants just as well as the colleges. The problem there is that if a student has only ever been trained in-house, they’ve never been given that facility to evolve. They have no qualification behind them to move on. These days, owners and managers of print companies don’t want people to move on. It was always a fact of the print industry that after people were trained, they moved onto different companies. That has been lost.
Are you positive about the future of the scheme? Yes, if the parties involved can sit down and sort something out. I honestly believe that I’m honoured to have come where I come from and to have started my career through a print apprenticeship. I’m very proud of my heritage; my grandad was a bookbinder, as was my dad who was also a lecturer in Bolton Street for 30 years. I believe that if people who are interested in this industry can come in and get trained, they can have the same kind of rewarding career.
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