Is my crystal ball any better than the next person? Who knows what the “PROBABLE” future is, but we know that many irreversible trends have accelerated in the pandemic and we see these trends among our TAB members. Take pubs for instance. In Ireland, approximately 2,000 pubs have closed permanently since 2005 or about 25% of the total number. However, 350 pubs have closed permanently in the pandemic. So what is the future of pubs? The virus and variants are not going away, but we will have to learn to live with them. One thing for certain is that the future will never be a polished-up version of the past, but will emerge from the green shoots around us. That is why I used the word “PROBABLE” because it is a summary of the big trends to be considered when planning your strategy for 2022 and beyond.
P-R-O-B-A-B-L-E
Partnerships: have always been important, but our understanding of the psychology of human beings makes the chances of a partnership work out so much better in the future. As we know two heads are better than one, but why do so many partnerships not work out? Partners combined their expertise and create opportunities much greater than the sum of their parts, however, there are thousands of reasons why the synergy never materialises. It is not possible to process these reasons on one’s own, like it is not possible for the subject of PTSD “get over it” on their own. The smart partners in the future will always look to have their expert business owner coach, so that partnerships can deliver their potential synergies in the long term. Strategic Partnerships will also be essential for the growth of your business. 70% of all software is sold through partner channels. In 2020 Salesforce announced that it is recruiting 250,000 new partners in the next four years and has effectively shut down its reseller program. Is your partnership strategy working as well as it could? What improvements could you make by shifting distribution to partnership channels in 2022?
Recommender Systems: We have witnessed the emergence of recommender systems in hospitality, travel and many consumer industries. Recommendations and referrals are the number one way of gaining new business. As Jeff Bezos put it, Brand is what people say about you, when you are not in the room. That is personal referred trust. We have witnessed the very significant growth of BNI during the pandemic, which is the world’s largest referral and recommender systems. Why? People want to come together in community, but not at the expense of hours wasted in traffic. People have a natural distrust of each other until proven otherwise, but are open to connecting and accelerate that process. Recommender systems are in their infancy, they will combined with other platforms, marketplaces, membership organisations, virtual groups etc in the future. But if you do not have a strategy for your recommendations, your competitors will. Our TAB 2021 Excellence Award was won by TAB member Eve Em and her team at “Pierced” in 2021. The award was based on the number of 5 Star ratings on google. We had 19 local TAB members with perfect 5 star scores. Another member will be launching their own recommender system in 2022 for certain communities. My question is, how well are you listening to your customers? How well managed is your brand ? What is your strategy for participating in recommender systems in 2022?
Outsourcing: The world is getting more complex every day, increased regulation, specialisation, technological, data and security challenges multiply. Consumers seek to be protected by governments against the unscrupulous and clamber for holding industries accountable for their activities. Outsourcing is the megatrend that creates opportunities for specialist and advantage for those who leverage outsourcing well. In the last recession, I outsourced almost every activity that were non core essential activities. The market place was not so transparent then. The concept of outsourcing emerged from the thinking of Harvard Phd Graduate, Professor Leonard Wrigley, who identified, firms who stuck to their core competencies out performed those who didn’t. I had Professor Wrigley for two years at my time in UCC and the lessons I learned then stay with me to this very day. Even in our Optical business, we never brought glazing of lenses in-house, but always leveraged the best manufacturing operator/supplier out there. That is the industry trend now. Today I am chairman of a business called HRDuo.com which provides a complete HR outsourcing solution from as little as €10 per person per month. The businesses who are looking to scale, and deal with their personnel issues in a professional way, get it, and are moving in their droves. Its human to keep wanting more, do more, take on more. However to take on more and do more, you must drop something? What are you going to stop doing in 2022? What can you outsource and get a lower costs better solution?
Blended: Working, learning, networking, doing things in an live virtual or onscreen world is here to stay. Mark Zuckerberg has called it by announcing Facebook will be called Meta. Today the tug of war is between: I want to work from home versus I want staff to get back into the office. Tomorrows battle are more likely to be: I was unfairly treated and overlooked for promotion, because I chose to work from home. It’s a fact that more females wish to work from home and more males from the office. My wife, Mairead O’Leary runs her own business as an optician. There has been a massive increase in demand for Occupational Lenses. These are the lenses which give you the perfect prescription when reading from a screen which is about 50 cm from your eyes. She anecdotally reports that almost everyone who is working from home, want it to stay that way and they are working harder than ever. Imagine the employer of the future that drops the perfect office in your back garden and has worked out, how to make people part of the team, how to crack creativity, and on the job learning but done remotely. Will they have an advantage? For the time being, we continue to perform eye examination in person, so its not just one way or the other. How do you present your employer brand with regard to blended working policies? What decisions and changes are you going to make in 2022? Will that be sustainable and competitive in the longer term?
Automation: In helping business owners to be more productive, we ask them what are their plans to change their relationship with their workload? The more pointed question is, what specifically will they delegate, automate or eliminate? We recently outsourced our local marketing automation to one of our members: Big Picture Marketing. It was in our plan for 2021 as we could see that our prospects and members were becoming overwhelmed with communications, and we needed to embrace more personalisation, relevance and authority. This could not be done, by working harder or throwing more money at the solution. Automation was part of that solution. The principles of Lean have been around along time. If it doesn’t add value to the customer eliminate it. Yet we are all faced with having myriads of systems purchased on a monthly basis that do not talk to each other and bring about actionable value creating activities. RPA is something you are going to hear a lot more about in the next few years. Robotic Process Automation is a series of technologies and services which can automate much of your processes that need human intervention today. So who is in charge of your automation projects and how will it impact you in the future? How could RPA be deployed in your business?
BELIEF: What you believe is what guides the actions that you take. Your actions and the actions of your employees determine your brand identity, not what you say. In a world of instant communications, a lifetime of effort can be destroyed in moments, where there is a conflict between what you say and what you do. We now understand through Neuroscience that we are feeling beings who think. As recommender systems, automation and other trends interact with our belief systems, it will become critical to understand our belief systems and if they serve us well or not. If my belief system is that I wish to be all powerful in my domain, what does that mean for my leadership style when I am unable to command those in my domain. The big R (Resignation) is well underway and people are questioning their beliefs they thought were unshakeable. They have started to make different choices about their lifestyle, what is important and what they have leave behind. Its a big mind-shift after thousands of years of accumulating more, to understand that the pursuit of happiness could be about the pursuit of less. What does this trend mean for your business and how will you act? What will your drop and do less of, to focus on what you want to do next? What beliefs that are stopping you achieving your personal vision?
Local/G-local : One of the impacts of the pandemic is that we have spent more time in our local communities, rather than commuting. The two of our local stores have doubled in size. Our optical business based in the suburbs have benefited from strong local markets. Yet at the same time, we see members picking up business from further afield and seeing far more competitors in their local markets from businesses in other countries. Successful international brands have registered local presence, local telephone numbers and local distribution. In many ways, local business can now be global in their reach. The complexity of financing, logistics, translations can all be outsourced. One architect member has enquiries from countries around the world in his specialist field. Another member has become a global specialist chemicals distributor and member stories abound. The reflection for the new year, do you have a strategy for going outside your current geography, because non local competitors will be coming in to it? What segments in the value chain do you have real competitive advantage that you can leverage?
ESG Agenda: Environmental Social, and Governance : As the world heats up, it is currently on track for a 3 degree increase by the end of the century. This is a potential disaster for the next generation. The ESG agenda will be central to government policies and all our lives in the future. While reporting on ESG has become compulsory for Big Business, it will become unescapable for small business. Investors, funders, younger customers, potential employees, potential purchasers will all seek transparency and accountability in respect of ESG. Since SME’s make up 50% of many economies, ESG initiatives will be part of the agenda for most businesses over the next number of years. In addition ESG is good for business, diversity and inclusion among boards and leadership teams, efficient sustainable use of resources make economic sense and its good for developing brand with the next generation of customers. Some large investor companies, such as State Street Global Advisors State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) put this ethos into action in 2017 by voting against the re-election of directors at 400 companies that SSGA said failed to make any significant effort to appoint women to their all-male boards. What aspects of ESG are on your agenda? How will it impact on the culture of business? How can you take advantage of being an early mover?
Thank you for reading this end of year thoughts on what is PROBABLE as we plan for 2022. One of our initiative for 2022 is to enable prospects to attend virtual sample board with other business owners around the world. Another is our initiative for micro businesses in the format of Accelerator Boards. So watch out for invitations.