Biographical

This post is an extract of my forthcoming book on business model innovation. The innovation book looks at why business model innovation is needed and how it works. You can read more about it here. These posts are early drafts of planned content and I’m putting them out to get feedback. Please do comment below, or subscribe to these pages to get each new section as it is published. In today’s post, we will be looking at finding opportunities in this new world.

My journey to entrepreneurship is unique in my sense. When I became an entrepreneur, 3 things stood out to me from the books I was reading at the time. They were a desire to be free, find my way, and achieve some mastery over the world and my environment.

Being an entrepreneur does give you that freedom for a while. That too for a price.

Setting up a business is exciting. There are so many moving parts involved. You are hustling, trying to learn things quickly so that you can somehow fabricate this new world factory, from what seems to be smoke and mirrors. And a never-ending supply of cash. From your wallet. Which gets thinner and thinner.

First Year as an Entrepreneur

In the first year, the targets we had set weren’t achieved but we were moving in the right direction as we were able to make a few million dollars of sales.

The business model had been based on a simple idea. Companies like HSBC spent millions on CRM systems that helped them know their customers. I discovered that we could pay this small software company about £100 a month to get exactly the same. Using this new technology would allow us to run things about other companies in the industry. Plus, if we jumped on the web, we would get an inexhaustible stream of leads. So we used Salesforce and SEO to great effect. At one point, we were getting about 30% of global traffic coming for our products coming to the website. That got us into the finals of HSBC Startup Stars in 2009.

Up in HSBC’s head office in Canary Wharf, I was interrogated by the Chairman of the Confederation of British Industry and Martha Lane-Fox, who had just sold Lastminute.com, an early internet travel company, for billions.

When it came to Sir Digby Jones to question me, he was blunt.

He told me; ‘You are Fucked’.

Hardships

The recession means that no one is going to be buying steel. (I knew that and was putting a brave face on it)
The Chinese have got so much overcapacity in Steel that your industry will never recover. (I didn’t know that and really didn’t want to hear it)

We didn’t win the competition – there wasn’t much we could do against the brutal truth of market forces.
Soon after that, it hit us.

We didn’t get orders.

Worse. Our customers didn’t get orders.

The oil price crashed. The steel price crashed.

We tried everything, but how can you get orders when the industry that you supply has no work? And their customers are demanding 30% price clawbacks in order to survive.

I got onto an accelerator course run by Dr. Siva for CRADLE, one of Malaysia’s economic development bodies to learn about entrepreneurship as I was self-taught up to this point.

Among the tools, he taught us, was the business model canvas which was only a few years old at the time.
We will spend a lot more time on this later. The important part now is that I was able to sketch out how the business worked in about 10 minutes.

Then looking at it, as we hurtled towards bankruptcy, I was able to ask the question, what if we changed this about the business?

Most of the normal tactical stuff – cost-cutting, creditor management – was only useful for slowing our uncontrolled tumble from the sky. It didn’t help us get out of the stall and establish any control.

Silver Lining

Every Friday, my wife and I sat down with a few beers, looked at the business model, and discussed how to change it. We looked at what had worked during the week, and what hadn’t. I’d say we had optimism, but in reality, it was a bleak pessimism, we had to make this work as there was nothing else.

We made it through 27 iterations. Somewhere around number 20, we had to choose between buying some rice to feed us or baby milk for my daughter. Eventually, we came out to the other side.

What I learned was that the business model canvas was an amazing tool that really helped us understand what we were doing, and then enabled us to dynamically change the business and respond to the way the market changed in a dynamic way. The alcohol definitely helped with being slightly relaxed, so we were able to be a little bit bolder than business orthodoxy would let us.

I’m not sure if Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigault designed it to be used this way – but for us, it works, and the business went on for a number more years until we got blindsided by a totally different problem.

If You Want to Read More

I keep everything structured on my niftily titled business model innovation book page. Head there to browse, binge, read straight through or cherry pick. Please do take a moment to comment below or upvote comments that you agree with

Subscribe to the New Book Chapters

As I write each new section you can have them sent to your email. The plan is to write something 2 – 3 times a week. It is easy to unsubscribe, but I hope you won’t as the goal is to delight and entertain as well as educate and train you through this business model innovation journey.

• SaaS – Pricing Tactics That Can Turbocharge Your Business
• Revenue in the Business Model Canvas – What Value Will Our Customers Pay For?
• Why Do Some Entrepreneurs Succeed? Part 1 – The Idea
• Business Model Failure: According to Hemingway
• A Step-Change is a Big Change

This post is an extract of my forthcoming book on business model innovation. The innovation book looks at why business model innovation is needed and how it works. You can read more about it here. These posts are early drafts of planned content and I’m putting them out to get feedback. Please do comment below, or subscribe to these pages to get each new section as it is published. In today’s post, we will be looking at finding opportunities in this new world

How did I come to write about business models?

Indeed what do I know about them?

Usually, a book like this is written by an experienced professor at a great business school. It’s usually a sharply dressed, or a consultant from a firm you might have heard of, or a businessman whose company’s rise you will have followed through the years via wired, the FT, or Techcrunch.

I’m none of those people.

If they are important to you, I’d close the book now, send it back to amazon and get a refund.

Justinian

Justinian was a Roman emperor back in 600. If you are a history buff, you’ll know that Rome was conquered by the goths, huns, and vandals well before this point, and was the capital of nothing. So how come there was a Roman emperor?

Justinian instead ruled the roman empire from Byzantium, later Constantinople, later still Istanbul. Like every Roman emperor before him, he wanted to restore the empire to the glory days that it had had under Augustus Caesar. Like the last 40-50 emperors he didn’t have enough men, money, or generals to do the job. Italy and the western roman empire seemed irretrievably lost to him.

Belisarius, who tended to see things differently, what did have was a general. Belisarius had a ‘crooked mind’ according to the historian Procopius. He didn’t do things nearly as elegantly as Sun Tzu described in the Art of War, but, somehow within a few years, Italy was Roman again.

I tell this story not because I think I could do a better job than Belisarius – I’ve tried playing strategy games online, and it was embarrassing. No, I tell it because like him, I’ve tended to see things differently, and it’s worth exploring why.

I could take a slick commercial approach to tell this story. I did this, this, then this happened, which meant this, and so I had a huge awakening. That all put together means that I am superbly qualified to talk about business models.

The last 9 words above are true, but I’m going to tell it in a different way, in a way that it fits the change I want to create.

There is no path. There never is. And there never will be.

My University Journey

I headed off to university to do chemical engineering. I have no idea why. After I wrote that I rang my mum and asked her. She had no idea either.

I took a gap year and ended up in Jerusalem, where I found an awesome second-hand book shop Sefer ve Sefel (Books and Books?). I read and read and read.

Then when I go to university, I announced to the horror of my parents that I was studying philosophy.

There were a lot of things that I could have done, or should have done to have got a decent degree – I got an ordinary one in the end. A summer trying to translate Thomas Aquinas was one of the less pointless expeditions I undertook in the university library.

What was fascinating, and where I did stay the course was when it came to the philosophy of science and the history of ideas. Why do we think the way that we do? Why do the ideas we have about the world change? And why do they get better? Do they get better? What are the rules that govern the way that ideas and theories change? This was both highly technical and highly abstract.

Dissertation

I did my dissertation on medieval theories of motion. Everything I knew about Newtonian, I had to forget, which was very hard. I had to try to get my head around a theory that had the air filling the vacuum left by a spear and then pushing it forward. After thirty years, I’m still not sure if I’ve got that right.

How could I see the world like some of the brightest men in the world had seen it a millennia ago? Also, see it in all the glorious wrongness of their inept, inadequate, and impossible theories. I learned to see the world differently.

Some people see things as they are, but I see things with a different perspective, things that are not there.

If You Want to Read More

I keep everything structured on my niftily titled business model innovation book page. Head there to browse, binge, read straight through or cherry pick. Please do take a moment to comment below or upvote comments that you agree with

Subscribe to the New Book Chapters

As I write each new section you can have them sent to your email. The plan is to write something 2 – 3 times a week. It is easy to unsubscribe, but I hope you won’t as the goal is to delight and entertain as well as educate and train you through this business model innovation journey.

• Thomas Kuhn’s Theory
• How A Business Model Is A Social Construct?
• Thomas Kuhn’s Science and Business Models
• How to Write Great Answers on Quora
• Start Your Entrepreneurial Journey

Every year I get thousands of messages from people on LinkedIn wishing me Happy Birthday.

This is awesome:

people care

It’s also bad:

How do I reply to so many direct messages

I tried that a few years ago – it took me a few weeks to send a personalised message to everyone. last year I used the LinkedIn autogenerated suggestions. That felt horrible and ungracious.

So this year – I’m saying thanks and giving people a link to this post to share a few thoughts…

What’s Important as I Close in on 50

• Business Model Innovation – there’s a lot to be said about it, and most of the other strategists in the market are missing a trick or two. So I’m writing a book – you can sign up for the weekly excerpts here and tell me if I am onto something or not
• Doing Good – The world is getting f***d. I’m not working any longer for companies or startups who don’t create either human or environmental good. The search for cash is important, but can only be part of why we do what we do going forward
• Impending SME Doom – everything suggests that a huge number of SMEs are going to get wiped out in the next few years – they aren’t changing, don’t have the cash to change, and don’t have the talent to make the changes.
• Balance – I don’t know how many people I’ve seen burnout – marriages, bodies, businesses and souls have got charred as they make the wrong choices. me too. Several times. Finding better ways of living the good life (eudaimonia) and achieving lotds
• Running – I say running, but I really mean mindfulness. I still my mind as I run through the jungle, across the desert, or my beloved Shropshire hills. It’s great to stop the chatter of the monkey mind

What Does This All Mean?

I want to have more conversations with interesting people who see the world the same way I do, and want to change it.

I want to spend less time doing pointless or harmless work (or busy work)

I want to spend the next 30 years of my career focused on creating, growing and nurturing, people, ideas and businesses.

If I was LinkedIn guru I’d pepper this with calls to action and salesy stuff. Not me. If I’ve struck a chord and you want to talk set up a call

And thanks for the birthday wishes.

Denis

• The MindValley Business Model Canvas
• Joy Killerz Kill Change So Execute Them
• The World is Changing
• The World is Changing
• Why Technology Will Change the World, but Hasn’t Yet

This post is an extract of my forthcoming book on business model innovation. The innovation book looks at why business model innovation is needed and how it works. You can read more about it here. These posts are early drafts of planned content and I’m putting them out to get feedback. Please do comment below, or subscribe to these pages to get each new section as it is published. In today’s post, we will be looking at what was special about Birmingham and why it’s commecial exceptionalism was brief

What was special about Birmingham anyway?

Today when I ask colleagues, clients and students where the best places for business are in the world they usually give me one of three answers depending on their interests. The three cities are: London if they are into finance; San Francisco if they are into tech, Shenzen if they are into any sort of manufactured products.

Years ago I went to another great business city. Brugge. Have you ever heard of it? It’s in Belgium. For hundreds of years it dominated the wool and cloth trade. I left my hotel and walked into the town’s square. I was amazed. The architecture and history were every bit as powerful as the North Italian cities that I had visited. Beautiful golden stone. Carved windows, little statues preaching theological or commercial messages from the rooftops.

As you can imagine, we don’t put gargoyles on modern buildings, Brugge’s glory days lay over 700 years in the past. It had made it’s money from importing wool from poor sheep farmers in England, turning it into cloth and then selling it across Europe. A powerful business model. The Belgian merchants were excellent at this and they made vast amounts of money from their trade and manufacturing.

In their success lay the seeds of disaster. As everyone made money from the trade the English were able to invest in their fields and farms. The sheep were better fed and perversely the quality of the wool changed. It became far less suitable. The wool trade slowly died and Brugge was left behind. Its glorious townhouses a testament to a rich, but rapidly fading past.

Birmingham tells a similar tale.

The industrial revolution started 30 miles to the north west in Coalbrookdale, in Shropshire. In 1707 we figured out how to make cast iron at scale, a few years later Boulton and Watt and Murdoch were creating steam engines. Adam smith started talking about how efficiently machines could make pins and nails through the allocation of labour. Birmingham just seemed to be in tthe right place.

It was close to coal and Iron. There were plenty of people to fill the factories – coming in from the rich farmlands of the midlands and there were rivers, then canals, and railways which could quickly and cheaply take the finished products to London and the ports.

Birmingham became the workshop of the world. At the turn of the 20th century a significant proportion of ALL the world’s manufactured good were made there. It was a city of factories, of workers and of smoke. It bustled with energy and many of Britain’s social contributions came from there in the form of the Cadbury’s and Rowntrees. Capitalists with a human heart who sought to ameliorate some of the horrors of the industrial lifestyle.

It’s hard now to think of any significant manufacturing in the city. There is a Jewelry quarter. There are some specialist manufacturing companies left. The great factories – Dunlop , Rover, BSA have long been closed. Their sites have been turned into retail parks or housing developments.

Why did Birmingham die as the beating manufacturing heart of England? There are a number of reasons – the wanton destruction of capital in two world wars. The incompetence of generations of manufacturing leadership, the crisis of confidence with the loss of empire, the lack of investment.

Does it matter?

When my Dad retired he sold the company to a customer. After a few years it was quickly absorbed into their manufacturing facilities. The building was sold. The staff made redundant or allowed early retirement. The machines replaced. Birmingham took another step away from its industrial past. The business model of the city – making things for the world – was well and truly dead.

This book isn’t a history of Birmingham, or indeed of any city.

It’s a story of why London, San Francisco and Shenzen are doomed to face the same fate as Birmingham and Brugge.

It’s a story of why the tens of thousands of finance companies in London will lead that city into obscurity.

It’s a story of how technology will leave San Francisco and why one day Sands Road and Mountain View will be museums of a kind. Interetsing but no longer really relevant.

It’s a story of how the millions of factories in Shenzen and the Pearl River Delta will be boarded up, ripped down. Why Foxconn and the nameless factories that satisfy our every need on Amazon Prime are ultimately doomed.

Let me tell you how I got the first inkling of what was going to happen

If You Want to Read More

I keep everything structured on my niftily titled business model innovation book page. Head there to browse, binge, read straight through or cherry pick. Please do take a moment to comment below or upvote comments that you agree with

Subscribe to the New Book Chapters

As I write each new section you can have them sent to your email. The plan is to write something 2 – 3 times a week. It is easy to unsubscribe, but I hope you won’t as the goal is to delight and entertain as well as educate and train you through this business model innovation journey.

• Growing Up in Birmingham
• Network Effect and Business Models
• The Threat of Substitutes to your Business Model
• How to Maximise Trade Show ROI from Business Cards
• The Uber Business Model Canvas

This post is an extract of my forthcoming book on business model innovation. The innovation book looks at why business model innovation is needed and how it works. You can read more about it here. These posts are early drafts of planned content and I’m putting them out to get feedback. Please do comment below, or subscribe to these pages to get each new section as it is published. In today’s post, we will be looking at my early years growing up in Birmingham.

Why I Didn’t Become a Metal basher

I grew up in Birmingham. At the time it was a city in decline. There was a malaise, a resignation about it. The buildings were dirty. The factories in old-style redbrick. The new government buildings in brutalist concrete. In the words of an advert from a few decades later, there was no “Va-va-voom.”

My Dad owned a factory making precious metal electrical contacts – pins for plus in gold or silver. The factory had been his father’s before him, and his fathers-in-law before that. The family were classic Birmingham industrialists. Similar to the Mittlestand in Germany.

The factory was always an amazing place to visit. It was what seemed to be a huge brick house with floors made of polished wooden planks. There were little staircases everywhere. There were rooms full of little polished machines, brass gleaming in the low lights with men (I don’t remember women) working over them as they spat out hundreds and hundreds of little golden gadgets. The rooms were warm and always smelled of oil and crushed metal. Decades later I can still catch whiffs of the smell.

I loved going into the vault. It wasn’t quite the vault of an ancient medieval king. There were no chests of gold and silver coins, no boxes of gems. There was gold though. Silver. Platinum. Lots of it. It was all in wire. Bales and bales of it – hard to pick up. Every bale had a slightly different shade. Different gadgets required different purities of metal.

This book, in part is the story of why I didn’t take over the works like my dad had like his dad had before him. It’s in part the story of why that factory no longer exists.

Deeper than that it is the story of why so many businesses around the world are failing, and are doomed to fail with no hope of survival. It is a story of how businesses, really their leaders, can look into the future and find a golden path that helps them avoid that doom

If You Want to Read More

I keep everything structured on my niftily titled business model innovation book page. Head there to browse, binge, read straight through or cherry-pick. Please do take a moment to comment below or upvote comments that you agree with

Subscribe to the New Book Chapters

As I write each new section you can have them sent to your email. The plan is to write something 2 – 3 times a week. It is easy to unsubscribe, but I hope you won’t as the goal is to delight and entertain as well as educate and train you through this business model innovation journey.

• Birmingham Workshop of the World
• Network Effect and Business Models
• How A Business Model Is A Social Construct?
• Finding the Golden Path
• What Business Model Can and Can’t do?