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 execution and it’s impact on entrepreneurial success
Steps towards the Execution
Shimon K. had a great idea. Over two or three years he banged the idea into shape with his partner Dominic N. When I worked with them we spent a year turning it into a food delivery business. It parallelled work I’d down a few years before for Jesselyn on another food delivery business. That one had raised over $30 million and we’d grown rapidly if unevenly.
With Shimon’s business every month we had the same number of meals delivered as the month before. It really shouldn’t have been rocket science to get sustained growth coming through. There’s one argument that says – throw money at Facebook adverts and you can grow even if FB eats up most of the benefits. For whatever reasons even that didn’t work.
This is a surprisingly common problem in startups. One startup that is almost utterly dysfunctional can deliver consistently bad service and yet grow 15X in a year. Another which on many measures is better doesn’t grow at all. #
As a consultant I can sit down and be very analytical about why Shimon’s business didn’t work and why Jesselyn’s did.
The question is why was Shimon unable to change the trajectory of his business to meet that of Jesselyn’s? He had the same information, was chasing the same/similar market opportunity and had comparable resources available.
This is relevant because for most small businesses the focus has been on maintaining the same trajectory – shifting it up a bit, controlling the downward curve. Few have had the ability to shift the curve significantly, turning it into a steep upward slope.
Is it because of competence, drive, perception, belief?
If we can’t make this change then how can we hope to change the future of our companies? How can we avoid the doom that awaits us?
I started writing this book about three years ago. Sitting on the balcony of my house in the jungle I tried to type, tried to put my words to paper. The ideas didn’t come. The sentences were stilted and ugly. The ideas were, frankly, idiotic.
What changed?
I changed the way I looked at things. Marcus Aurelius said – something about changing country doesn’t really change anything – but when I moved to the UAE with a view out over a desert lagoon with waves showing the gentle change of the tide, the words came quickly.
That’s a change in the slope. There is a concrete change in both creativity and execution. Day by day it seemed that we did the same thing, but the results were different.
Thinking back to Jesselyn’s company – that was what made the difference.
Execution Works
One day I was driving into work. I was dreading the day, my delivery riders were going to be late again with cold food, hopefully not with a caterpillar in like the day before. The customer service staff were on the verge of quitting and the only people I’d interviewed were going to make things worse.
The phone rang.’There’s a fire. Drive faster!’ Jesselyn’s angry tones lashed me.
When I got to our kitchen it was all over. It was gutted. The firemen were cutting the chef free from the remains of the walk-in freezer where he’d sough safety from the flames.
Fundraising when your factory has just burned down is tough. You look… incompetent. We got the new kitchen up and running, and the flames burned away many of the old processes, objections and obstructions. Tick, tock, the seconds moved faster and we did more each second. The sales took off, customer service eased and customer no longer found insects in the food!
What had changed? Same people, same company. The change in the way we saw the world was huge. I saw it as a massive opportunity to lift productivity and performance. Jessica saw it as a disaster and our Air America plane rapidly reaching the runway, still too heavy to take off. The combo worked and the business blossomed.
Shimon’s business never had that perceptual shift and as I write his plane still bounces along the tarmac towards the boundary fence.
What is the fire that will change your perception and the way that you act?
If You Want to Read More
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