5 Aims for Business Networking

Networking is a mandatory activity for just about any professional, more so if you are an entrepreneur. Getting together once or twice in a month with people out of your immediate social and professional sphere can be both refreshing and highly educational. The insights derived from members in such platforms are valuable in resolving business challenges; service and product innovation; structuring operations and addressing growth issues.

Wrong Expectations

The mis-conception that one must walk away with handful of business leads in each networking session however, distracts networkers from the ultimate purpose to connect, establish and nurture relationships with individuals, groups and communities that are critical to their business. This is one of the reasons why many professionals abandon their networking platforms after just one or two tries.

The philosophy of networking no matter how professionally positioned, has a somewhat intrinsic social element to it. People expect to get acquainted with one another; get a good understanding of businesses present and engage in light conversations to establish contact. Surely, a sales pitch at this point will be a deal spoiler.

So, what to take away from a networking event?

Business contacts - it's not about collecting business cards but establishing initial connection and  getting to know people whom can turn into partners, colleagues, customers, associates and investor. Over time, a contact funnel will begin to shape as some relationships mature and you begin to engage with connections out of the networking events for various business reasons.

New ideas and insights - think of it as a process of collating and mapping various brilliant thoughts from several minds into a business relativity and context taxonomy. A rich set of information that can be applied to your business to address challenges or growth issues.  This includes service innovation, product innovation, business models, new technologies, methodologies and modern operational structures. If dealing with a internationally diverse group, pay closer attention as everyone is wired differently and therefore communicate ideas differently.

Position in value chain - take note of where participants' businesses sit in the value chain (Industry, product, etc). This will be an excellent opportunity to identify collaborators to address product completeness, market expansion and specialisation issues. It is also a great exercise to pin down potential merger and acquisition opportunities in the long run.

Talent scouting - networking events are usually buzzing with great talents both business and technical. Take the time to get to know them, have conversations and keep tab of rare talents that you can tap, when you need them.

Business opportunities - attending networking events on a regular basis creates familiarity and opportunities to strengthen relationship with members. This leads to after meetings cooperations in the form of leads, referrals or even joint ventures. Networking moderators can support such activities by providing collaboration platforms and tools such as WhatsApp, messenger, FB and LinkedIn where business conversations can take place.

Like most good things, it takes time to work

Frequent networkers know that they need to 'sow the seeds' first before the big harvest. Not forgetting, that the plant needs nurturing between the sowing and bearing of fruit. Networking should be tackled in the same way. It takes considerable amount of time and consistent approach to derive value from a network. The only difference is; the experience itself is so rewarding, educational and fun, if embraced with finesse.

Here are some other good articles to brush up on the art of networking:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/314294 https://medium.com/swlh/9-benefits-of-networking-in-business-66b2445e6d84

When Customers Think you are Sneaky

One Wednesday morning in Jan 2018 and I am sitting with a public sector client to discuss how he and his team could optimise IT operations and add new organisational capabilities faster in 2018/2019. The client is looking at various options such as; moving workloads to public cloud platform; consolidating communication services; reducing data centres; migrating to opensource technologies; adopting agile practices for new development and etc. 

The cloud migration menace 

The current IT operation is spread out among units and departments under the agency, creating disparate IT system operations with its own set of integration works and technology vendors. The client is planning to create a common cloud platform  (a hybrid of private and public) to gradually move all or at least most IT operation onto it, but is unsure which operation should be targeted first and how that will impact the rest of the systems in place. They also realised that moving hundreds and eventually thousands of workloads onto a central cloud platform would require them to change work procedure, policies and restructure the information technology department. 

In addition, each system migration will also have to consider impact to users and the domestic technology vendors currently supporting it. Without involvement of these two parties, the cloud migration can hit costly roadblocks, as most systems are legacy (non cloud native) and full of workarounds.

The eager salesman who killed his chance at a good deal before it even begun.....

As such some external experts were invited today to share ideas on the best methods to approach the problem. I sat quietly among the customer executives, listened and took some notes from each presentation. At the end, the team convened without the presenters and came to the consensus that none of the presenters actually understood what the client is looking for. Everyone (including reputable MNC reps) presented a solution anchored around a product/service or in worst cases a product,  failing miserably to discuss the actual problem, impact, coverage and risks associated with it. 

Some vendors even try to assure the client, that they can undertake the migration work with their own set of trained partners who have no history with the client. Ignoring the fact, that moving a critical application without involving the current support vendors (and training them) could only lead to catastrophic failure and cause additional complication for procurement.

In their pursuit to pin down a deal, most vendor reps did not take the opportunity to ask all the right questions such as why it’s important for the customer to achieve this goal now, or what efforts were already in place. In fact, the customer felt some presenters were just gearing to make a quick sale for meeting quarterly numbers. 

Route to problem solving as opposed to shortsighted solutions

In MNCs, most reps are designed towards selling a service subscription or a product as quickly as possible. This is why almost every rep starts conversation around deal description, timeline and budget allocation, without spending too much time diagnosing the business problem. Opportunities are filtered based on a certain technical and business criteria that can be met directly by the vendor.  These questions are usually provided to sales folks by their companies in the form of cheat sheets.

In their defence,  this is crucial as their work and resources are recorded in sales automation system which tracks sales and is used to formulate management guidance moving forward to teams. As such, their performance and ability to secure resources for their deals is somewhat tagged with opportunity information that is submitted via the system. 

Having said that a complex problem such as the one described here, has many routes to resolution. Often executed concurrently to reach maximum results. E.g. Training and up-skilling selected ISVs and SIs based on their existing support footprint for cloud migration; migrating several non-critical workload for a pilot case; training user groups on how to harness cloud values for their work; restructuring internal technical functions and resources.

Show them where you fit into the big picture

What a client of this multitude is expecting here is just a fit in the big picture. A rep losses ground by unnecessarily minimising the complexities, deviating  or withholding useful information that can help build a better route to resolving the business problem. This makes the client second guess and continuously seek alternative advice, even when dealing with vendors that they are familiar with. Past experience on how they were left in the lurch discovering issues pertaining to product compatibility to their environment, or other licensing matters, haunts them.

The takeaway is, great deals are embedded in complex customer situations. You may not have an answer to everything, but it is any reps/consultant’s responsibility to look at things realistically for clients to take them seriously. Collaborate with the client to map the business problem, improve designs of the resolution routes where relevant, add useful insights, be willing to work with others in the process (including your competitors) and highlight areas where your company can design differentiated values and solutions. 

This won't get you a deal tomorrow but will certainly result in a working relationship that is mutually rewarding year after year. Plus you still meet your firms reporting and sales guidelines sufficiently, if not much effectively. As they say a good rep does not waste time calling customers (not that you shouldn't), instead customers call them on their first instinct when they need help.

Cost , When IT Advisory Breaks Down

No Enemy is Worst than ‘Bad Advice’

When the financial books are closed each year, we meticulously measure the profits; growth of assets;  intellectual property and patent portfolios; accumulated liabilities to employees, suppliers, service providers, regulatory bodies, investors and owners. Subsequently a lesser portion of entrepreneurs, submit further to observe number of unexpected business turns, mishaps or even anomalous increase in operational cost, which consumed significant part of the already tight resource allocations. In other words, the discovery of a series of cash burners that lead to the flushing of valuable resources which could have otherwise deployed

for growth engines. 

For instance, If a small business is operating on a budget of $50 million and is incurring 5% unexpected expenses on average per year, that translates into $2.5 million in financial losses alone. In addition, let’s say that 50% (25 million) of your operational budget is allocated for production which incurred an overrun of 10% of the forecast which translates into another $2.25 million. That is still a total of $5 million over the budget (assuming that no buffer allocation was made for unexpected expenses). Reflecting carefully a little deeper, every one of the drawbacks, may lead us to a point when we received ‘bad advice’ or even worst ‘no advice’ (withholding information intentionally is also a form of ‘no advice’) from a cadre of expert and specialist consultants that we retain as financial, legal, marketing, advertising or technology advisors, among others. According to a survey conducted in the U.K small businesses loss over £6 billion due to misdirections from experts with IT consultants leading the pack (44% followed by management and marketing consultants at 34% and 32% respectively) causing the most damage to businesses.

The common theme here is to take every advice with discretion. As such, investigating IT projects that are currently squandering resources and yet hindering the business from its goals, is a necessary step to identify sources of specialist misrepresentations. 

The Alluring Appeal of the Third Platform Infrastructure and Services

Asian SMBs are pouring billions of dollars (3rd in spending after North America and Europe) into technology with the hope to increase their competitiveness and success rate against larger businesses by adopting more and more of third platform infrastructure solutions (e.g. mobile, cloud, big data, analytics, Blockchain, social tech and collaboration tools) and services (e.g.  AI/cognitive, virtual /Augmented Reality, IOT, 3D, Security, Robotics). Choosing the obvious ‘cloud’ path (both private and public) may have reduced the conventional risks associated with IT projects but even then, there are questions to be asked and answers to be probed to avoid mistakes. Matching the software or services that links best with business operation; choosing the right cloud technology (often to be align with the existing tech eco system); picking the right development platform for mobile or IOT applications and even understanding the various direct and indirect licensing estates, is crucial in realising the returns of investments channeled into automation, optimisation, waste and redundancy elimination. In short, pretty much any decisions on solutions to business challenges depend on sound IT advice.

When Reputed Automation Projects turns into Drawbacks

When strategic IT initiatives get derailed they turn into impediments that weigh on the business forming waste, sluggish business processes, redundant workloads and prone to manual interventions to produce – the very same elements that we are trying to abolish for a much error free and productive business environment. For instance, in 2004 HP stated that is suffered a shortfall of $400 million in quarterly revenue due to a failed ERP migration of its ordering and supply chain systems. The breakdown caused a 12 weeks business interruption with order process and resulted in manual intervention to conduct day to day business, not the least three key executives fired by the CEO Carly Fiorina, at the time for the costly affair. Closer to home, AirAsia was sued by the Australian regulators in 2010 for breaching consumer law by not displaying the total ticket prices on their 
reservation systems. AirAsia later admitted that this was due to a poor localisation of their system for
the Australian market. However, this incident caused them $200,000 in fines. In 2006, CPF took action on a leading global IT Services provider for a failed IT project it contracted in 2001. It was cited that communication breakdown within the parties along with complacency has caused the project to collapse.

Such is the price to pay when IT projects goes awry. While they may not impact the business severely as isolated incidents, a plague can form collectively if not addressed in timely fashion resulting in overrun of budget, miss delivery dates, suboptimal applications that leak revenue, threat from various non-compliance (industry, consumer, data privacy, security, tax, accounting, software licensing), wasted computing resources (comatose VMs, equipment), damage to brand reputation and overall workforce productivity.

But Should Technology Advisors Condemned?

Pointing the fingers never helps anyone. In majority of cases, relationship breakdown between business and IT advisors over accountability and delivery of outcomes, or dissensions arising of it, are the true causes of project failures. The agency theory problem perhaps is best to explain why either party might get derailed from accomplishing project goals in the process of aligning and creating values for their employers (sometimes may involve several business units), partners, customers and their ownself. What’s important to know though, is that most IT advisors (technical and business) are earnest and perform credibly to stay in repute. Nevertheless, provisions should be allocated by both parties to take action in the event of negligence, complacency or breach of contractual agreements, that likely to emanate losses.

In addition, it’s crucial to tap into this rich pool of experience, knowledge and technology mastery in scoping and deliberating on what makes an IT project successful. What a cognitive waste it would be, to just ask this group of plans and recommendations but to never dive in the ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘when’ such recommendations takes full effect to benefit business. Here are some notable areas to heed in navigating conversation with your IT advisors.

Firstly, understand who your IT Advisors are, what they represent, aims and areas of conflicting interests. In any one project, it is common to have several IT advisors with slightly different agendas and strength. On the vendor’s part, sales and consulting has a responsibility to promote, position and sell their solution as the best fit for your requirements. An independent or in-house IT champion may maintain a neutral position to assess what's the best for the organisation but tend to build assumptions and loyalty with certain providers from past experiences, creating a blind side to their judgement. Sizing these advisors and their leverage in key initiative, is the first code to crack. It is also advisable to adjust compensation model if necessary to suit the dynamics of the relationships, their interests and priorities (E.g instead of hourly rate to delivered functions).

Secondly, align expert recommendations and proposals with business, strantegy, users and its automation needs. Don’t underestimate the power of isolated units, their fiefdoms and current workarounds to complete order processing, procuring supplies, making payments or even connecting with other third party providers such as logistics to ensure business runs as usual. Bring together owners of processes to communicate the automation plans and why it is important to the business. Early involvement of all stakeholderst of the respective processes, aids in uncovering challenges that would be otherwise missed.

Thirdly, request your IT advisor to help you visualise a best case and worst case scenarios of success, with current resources, work culture, best practices, governance mechanisms, process methodologies and existing technology environment. This should help match risk areas during implementation, triage of business interruption, impact to productivity and regulatory compliance among others. This information will enable further adjustment to budget, timeline and drive the necessary changes (e.g. skills upgrade for workforce, upgrade of relevant tools and applications, inducing suitable best practices, familiarisation of the futuristic workplace notion) which in creases the success rate and contain risk exposures.

Technology Advisors turns into Priceless Assets

Recognising a reliable and credible technology advisor is somewhat facile. They are ‘rebels’ and ‘masters’ of their field, constantly contending the constraints of modern technology in a value creating business, even though they are not entirely immune to defeat. A good advisor will ensure you invest in the right business areas; choose the right technology solution; lead technology benefit analysis; help define a suitable integration strategy for best inter operability of tools, systems and applications; promotes acculturation of the right skills and best practises; outlines risk exposure; and is never without a mitigation and disaster recovery plan. 

Much importantly, they stick around wielding their prescience and immaculate social intelligence, when a project is hit with unanticipated calamities or additional requirements to include ongoing changes from regulatory, compliance, technology landscape, integration, operation, customer and market behaviour perspective. 


But these traits can only be an asset if the idea to manage failure, change and challenges is premeditated in the governance of IT initiatives. Expecting everything to go exactly as planned is a ‘mortal sin’ in this practise, as much as surrendering to stultifying statements claiming all application projects are headed for Armageddon (as stated by Gartner) which is both highly disturbing and questions the very constituent of IT advisory.

Third party platform may have intensified complications notably in areas of integration, security, data privacy, intellectual property, access to services, and multiple clouds; but instantaneously this also made way for much efficient delivery, flexibility and agility to the business. Exercising sufficient control on bodies of work according to timeline and extracting values as you go, is the new norm of the tech world. If this is understood correctly, than we know which part of our conventional wisdom should be relinquished for the future of a democratised technology environment

Relationship Formula for Small Businesses

If you want to go Fast, Go Alone. If you want to go Far, Go with Others.

I must admit that while I was writing my last blog on social media advertising as a crucial customer touch point, my mind was already filled with hundreds of questions on the premise of how various dimension of business relationships impacts upward improvement in revenue, profitability, stock prices, intellectual properties, brand, product utilisation, partner networks, markets, productivity, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, reputation and many other outcomes too granular to be mentioned.

What a grave mistake it would be to simply engage into action, accompanied with just a ‘gut feel’, before analysing these relationships, its layers and tiers; correlatives; strength; values or risks to your business? Instead, should we be calling our actions and channeling our investments based on the conditions of key relationships to the business? How does one relationship affect the other? For example, negative energy accumulating in the workforce can certainly impact customers and partners which are critical to growth; ruthless investor activism that pushes leadership into buy back programs and dividends during sales slump to quickly raise return of stocks will not only result in exhaustion of enterprise coffers, but will contribute greatly to income inequality in the workforce and the society in general.

There are countless number of ways to bring structure and automation to track most of these relationships, but a bubble diagram is perhaps sufficient to initiate study and map m utual values, which paves the way to mark priorities according to business goals. In fact, any investment on marketing, advertising and automation should take into consideration of such priorities and value creation activities. Making this a critical exercise especially for small businesses in rapid growth mode with small caps and trust me that this blog will not lead you to a CRM dialogue of any ‘X’ factor as a necessary point of resolution but may influence such conversations in the future.

A Case to Reflect

Long standing enterprises that has been around for over hundreds of years such as Colgate-Palmolive ( or Colgate rather), Coca-Cola, Citi, IBM and GE were some examples of businesses which survived the test of time mainly due to their founding executives ability to visualise, create, manage and control internal and external business relationships to generate an overall positive vibe that fuelled growth.

Coca-Cola for instance, was once sold for 5 cents a glass and started business in the late 19th century with just total of 7 or 8 serving a day through soda fountains. Today, this business has grown close to 1.9 billion serving per day and I need not explain the prices nor its brand prowess. The creator of this drink John Pemberton, a pharmacist and a war veteran was hoping to find an alternative or cure for morphine addiction, as many people suffered such an addiction back then due to the war, just like Pemberton. In fact, the first version of this drink was a coca-wine (alcohol and cocaine infused drink) like many other carbonated fountain drinks of the time (e.g from Spain and France). The non-alcoholic version was created only after the banning of such ingredients in fountain drinks (even though I strongly believe that the coca leaves are still a key ingredient ). At the time, Mr Pemberton also claimed that Coca-Cola cured many diseases, including morphine addiction, indigestion, nerve disorders, and headaches, though these aren't the reasons why we drink coca-cola today. How this business grew to what it is today? I would think finding the the secret recipe to an elixir that appealed to a global taste bud was the easiest part.

Pemberton, sold his business, prior to his death, to several businessmen including a young druggist, Asa Candler. Pemberton, also brought his sons to hold different property rights of the business. Candler, saw the potential of the drink and started building his downstream relationships following the soda fountain trails of restaurants, bars and other recreational outlets despite infighting among  the different stakeholders including a thorny relationship with one of Pemberton’s son. Candler also observed the increasing demand as a further opportunity to bring Coca-Cola directly to customers by bottling it with partners. Candler watched competition and imposters closely in order to understand how they try to clutter the market and introduced the unique design of the the bottle that is still in use today, to help customers choose the original product. Candler’s focus on relationships that created an advantage to his business soon overwhelmed and helped to severe toxicity from the equation and made more room for expansion.

A ‘Scribble’ is as good a Start as a ‘Doodle’

Sometimes finding the starting point is the hardest – and this is when a general mind map of all relationships that affect your business can come in handy. Scribble it or take it a notch further, just for the fun of it and doodle it (no one said business have to be boring or characterless).

Startups might find this exercise pretty straight forward if you are dealing with a single or range of interrelated products aimed at the same market category. A simple bubble diagram, indicating upstream, lateral and downstream relationships (see illustration 1 – Sample Key Relationship Analyses), along with markers to identify layers of connections is useful visual analyses which helps to get detail idea of your current relationship trends, returns, advantages, risks, value creation and investment activities. In small companies, this can be a revealing exercise that points you where much of your resources is being consumed and if the returns are worthwhile. Save the diagram, and you will see that the story it tells, will change as you revisit them every quarter. In fact, you may also observe changes in business relationships for the better or worst depending on incidents and actions that your business may have undertaken. This will also help the business from refraining or changing tactics where relationships are cold and value creation there would just be like running ghost trains.

Prioritise Relationships - Finding the Perfect Balance

But the idea to get into this exercise is not just to identify types of relationships and where bulk of your investments are being absorbed or even what improvement is being attempted in the past. It is, sort of a barometer to the validity of your current business models and identify which relationships deserves your utmost attention at this moment in line with growth agendas (which changes from time to time). Evidently, there are hundreds of relationship commitment hypothesis, studies and best practises contributed by researchers on how to form long standing buyer-seller relationship stratagems in a variety of businesses and non profit backdrops (e.g. Equality, Trust, Openness, Rationalism - Smith 1998; Overall Satisfaction - Garbarino & Johnson 1999; Cost of Relationship Discontinuation – Morgan and Hunt 1994; Flexibility - TA Scandura & MJ Lankau 1997), and much of these practices have been assimilated according to industry settings into best breed of technology solutions for easier and faster consumption by businesses. However, what’s missing though is the simplification process of these various commitment variables which is equally critical in growing startups and small businesses.

E.g An IT service provider whom developed a tool that could help enterprise customers migrate swiftly from one cloud to another can choose to sell the tool and relevant services directly to customers facing such business pain. But upon proving the successful adoption of the tool, they may also see the potential to sell through  partners and vendor marketplaces who may be in an ideal position to offer clients a transaction economics that the tool creator themselves are not able to deliver due to specialisation or other resource constriction. Hence, this becomes a question and point of decision between growing the partner network and the direct sales, or both. If so, what would be the ratio to be applied for ideal outcome.

Arms Length Transactions are not necessarily Evil

Many small businesses today are present online with complete automated systems. Clear content on products and terms of sale are self explanatory with online support for customers who may have additional requirements or questions. Apparel, groceries, movie tickets and other cyclical or standardised products (e.g cloud services) get sold without the need for a sales person to interact with each and every one of the customers. These customers don’t expect personal treatment, but just personalised services and products up to their expected quality of standards along with data protection and security assurance. Here, there is a necessity to capture and analyse customer data, purchase history and trends to make appropriate future updates or offers to woo the customers to return and form loyalty to the brand. Often the customers who fall in this category has a tendency to switch from one shop to another easily and as such understanding what is transaction economics to them is critical in deciding and architecting the right loyalty program, advertising media or partners to worky with. E.g. a wine shopper might also appreciate relevant wine accessories, gifting services or the right cold cuts and cheese to go with the wine, all in one place instead of having to visit 3 or 4 shops.

In other words, unlike popular believe, businesses can establish loyalty with arms length relationship by anchoring on the right value creation activities and fulfilling expectation voids left by competitors. As such, instead of running intensive loyalty campaigns for adhoc transactional clients, you might be better off, turning to methods of acquiring and maintaining them cost effectively apart from making continuous differentiation in your offerings. In addition, the freed sales resources can now be repositioned to work on other market segments that needs personal and advisory services to grow(e.g. B2B solutions).

Expect Toxicity and Difficult Relationships

In my years of observations (and personal experience), I am yet to find an enterprise or startup that is not faced with difficult or toxic relationships (futile search, but why not?). Mark Zukerberg and Eduardo Saverin of Facebook, the Ambani brothers of Reliance India, and the fallout between media mogul, Rupert Murdoch and Richard Li of the HK Satellite TV,  are just some high profile known examples to back this.

Partner disputes over shares, intellectual properties and other business rights; a toxic employee or manager de-energising your workforce; a channel partner or sales person taking your business hostage by claiming exclusivity to relationships; technical staff making unreasonable demands in return for critical business assets; or clients threatening to switch provider if you don't lower prices or insist to work with only certain individuals; fraud; and other acts of sabotage are all common difficult relationship situations that can sow dissension and clutter in the business. The absence of or loose governing policies, contracting, legal and other enterprise services in startups and small businesses tends to make this worst. Some organisations become critically effete and drained due to the distractions. Others, take a stance to stay on course with goals and thrive in success by addressing conflicts firmly while putting in place mechanisms to protect critical intellectual, material and relationship assets.

Rewarding Relationships are Manufactured by Minds

“Hear much, leave all that is doubtful alone, speak warily of everything else, and few will be offended. See much, leave all that is dangerous alone, deal warily with everything else, and thou wilt have little to rue. If thy words seldom give offence, and thy deeds leave little to rue, pay will follow.”, Confucius.

Point is, you could be in possession of a ground breaking idea, a disruptive technology patent, abundant materials, and a ready market to adopt your offerings. Though, without identifying and cultivating the right relationships, mutual interests, trust, needs and co-dependence, mobilising these resources could end in long time to return or worst, fails to return.

The effects of advances in multiple enterprise technology disciplines that is transpiring through cloud services for superior infrastructure and applications services; advance analytics; automation of business processes; along with the rise of mobile and sensor based devices today, are driving digital transformations of every imaginable industry. Enabling us with valuable data, that can complement the humble bubble diagram that we talked about earlier in the blog.  This present us opportunity to compare real figures of performance against relationships; recognise what we do and don’t know; where advantages exist; and where an upper hand’s support is critical to succeed.  This is where we bring our multi-dimensional intelligence into work – the best of social, emotional, intellectual, qualitative, empiric and quantitative capabilities to unearth best call of strategies and actions to hold strong the founding virtues of the business.