Jump leads.

I was out driving in the morning snow a few days back, watching countless people struggling to guide their cars on the white blanket that had fallen as we slept.??Particularly anyone with a rear-wheel-drive BMW: ‘Ultimate Driving Machine’ my arse!??On the rare occasion we get a proper dump of snow in these parts, I’m reminded how alien the conditions are to the majority of us, particularly the intake of people who’ve passed their test since the last blizzard.??Choppy conditions can be unfamiliar in everyday life, just as they were to many of us from a business perspective until 3 years ago.??Yep, we’ve reached the third anniversary of that fateful evening on 23?March 2020 when Boris instructed us to stay at home, protect our NHS and save lives.??I don’t think I’ll ever quite get my head around what happened back then.??It still doesn’t feel real.??In a working context, we’ve all learned to adapt & pivot in ways we never knew possible.??When I look back, I realise that period was in some ways the easier part to navigate – a blitz spirit where we faced a common enemy and fought side by side with a safety net of furlough to catch us.??But while the system shocks are receding – well, just a little – the level of change feels unrelenting, requiring us to constantly find ways to adapt.??And with that safety net now clipped down and tucked away in No.11, the risk of failure feels all the more perilous.

Truth is, turbulence and change are here to stay - a ‘permacrisis’ to match the permafrost of a sharp winter.??And as I drove along on that icy morning, observing the chaos?around me and reflecting on that point through a business lens, I got to thinking.??How do you learn to navigate roads you’ve never travelled down before???Re-start the car when the engine stalls???Or stop it from stalling in the first place???And even when you have the right information at your disposal, how do you ensure you follow it, particularly when it feels uncomfortable.??Take my icy road example.??Know what you’re meant to do when your car starts to slide???1) Don’t hit the brakes.??2) Turn into the skid. 3)??Don’t panic.??Try that the next time you lose control and see how long it takes to ignore all three as the brown adrenalin flows.??With that rather unsavoury image in your mind, let me see if I can clean things up for you.

The business I set up in 2020 (yep, timing is everything) is called Reel.??It specialises in helping brands clarify their purpose, their proposition and how they pull it across their experience, like a thread of cotton that runs through each part, hence our name.??I set it up realising that contrary to my teacher’s expectations, I’d actually learned quite a lot through my career.??I’ve led start up’s and turnarounds in the UK & globally across 7 sectors, presided over the rapid growth of a dot com start-up, led the re-birth of an iconic global brand and experienced another move unstoppably towards a 6 foot drop to its final resting place.??I’ve seen and experienced most things now and have a few tips to share on how your business can grow, whatever the climate.??Not the nuts & bolts of the things you’ll do – that depends what line of business you’re in.??More the common ingredients that underpin any successful transformation.??So let me string a thread through my experiences as I draft my own Haynes Manual for accelerating a business and ensuring the engine purrs effortlessly each time to dip your right toe on the pedal.??Jump leads to re-start the engine; Leads to help you jump ahead.

1.??Start with people.??Start by talking with the individuals who actually run your business.??Not the mob in HQ - the ones in the places your customers circulate.??Get out there, create the space for them to share what’s actually on their mind and then listen, properly.??I spent 2 days early in my career being coached on how to listen and they’re among some of the best hours I’ve spent – most of us are lucky enough to hear, but how many of us actually listen.??My best example of this in action from personal experience???While I was at Whitbread.??We’d just been given the keys to one of the biggest restaurant businesses in the UK, and we wanted to know what was going on out there.??So we went on tour and met every GM in the company in a series of roadshows.??No agenda, no glossy pack.??Just a flip chart and a pen we used to capture all the areas they wanted to chat about, and off we went.??The things we learned in those few days were like gold dust and they set the tone for all that followed in a successful & highly enjoyable turnaround.??It was also a fabulous bonding exercise for the three of us that did it.?

2.??Set your purpose.??The companies that thrive have a clear purpose driving them.??It’s the light on the horizon, the reason to believe and the thing to work back from when shaping how you’ll achieve your wildest aspirations for growth.??Putting yourself in the future and working back is easier than trying to look out from today where all you tend to see are obstacles.??And without purpose, where’s all the inspiration & energy going to come from on your growth journey???So often, business becomes a demand for "more more more" from people.??But you can’t make the grass grow faster by pulling it.??There’s growing evidence it’s the purpose driven organisations out there that deliver the consistently highest returns, and they’re also better at attracting and retaining the best talent.??So lift yourself out of the here & now and your desire to make money (yeah, we’re all doing that) and find something bigger you can all chase together.??It’s infinitely more fulfilling.

3.??Write your recipe.??Purpose is fabulous, but it can feel a bit lofty and ‘big’ if you’re not careful and sometimes people struggle to see how it pulls down into their daily routines.??You need the recipe that will make it all real, and I use that language deliberately as it needs to be written in simple terms, like the steps in a Mary Berry cookbook.??Some would call these their strategic pillars, but my steer would be to drop the corporate bullshit-ometer and speak simply; memorably.??Why do people feel the need to lose their everyday words when they talk about business???It becomes a competition to see who has the deepest thesaurus of meaningless language.??When I was at British Airways, I remember someone talking to me about self-loading cargo.??They were actually talking about passengers!??You know, those walking, talking human beings who pay to sit on our flights.??Describing our brand purpose in equally simple terms was one of our biggest breakthroughs while I was there.??More passengers please, or dare I say guests for the day.??And with your recipe for success written in those simple terms, people will get it and get behind it.

4.??Act now.??When I think back, I used to take too long cutting to the chase on some stuff, particularly when I was setting things like brand strategy.??I’d follow a linear process I’d been taught rather than taking obvious shortcuts that were available on the basis that was the ‘right & proper’ way to do things.??But it doesn’t really work.??Why wait for tomorrow when you have the answer today.??And if you don’t have the answer perfectly honed, go and try something and see if it works.??No number of glossy slides will tell if your business idea can fly with the people you’re asking to pay for it.??Act - Try - Learn - Adjust - And go again.??When we created Bar + Block (a high street steak restaurant) a few years ago, we’d never have known steak flavoured popcorn, free water and sand timers would become cornerstones of our success.??Surely it’s all about these fabulous steaks we’re selling???But they did - and we only got to them by trying the ideas, quickly.??And before someone else did!

5.??Dare to be different.??Bravery is essential if sustained growth is what you’re looking for.??I’m not saying be carefree or take unnecessary risks.??But if you don’t dare to step out from the baseline, play a few shots and try some things, how can you ever expect to win.??You’ve got to be willing to sky the ball into the stands a few times, learn from what happened and then hit it again!??If you read ‘Drop the Stick’ which I posted on here a few weeks ago, you’ll see me lay bare one of my sharpest experiences when it comes to learning about this stuff, and no doubt you will have your own.??But if fitting in is your thing, you’d best go and work for a business happy to enter steady decline, because all too often, that’s where it leads.??Take a visit to the brand graveyard occupied by Nokia, Kodak and any number of other tenants who only saw the future when it was presented to them by a competitor.??Doh… Too late.

6.??Ask around.??“No one of us is as good as all of us.”??I’ve always loved that phrase, and when I reflect on the companies I’ve been a part of that thrived and I’ve enjoyed working in the most, that sentiment has most certainly rung true.??Each time you share your idea with another person, you get a fresh perspective that makes it better.??The more you share, the better it gets.??You have to be ready for people to re-shape your idea.??Many a CMO comes unstuck trying to force through their idea and prove it’s right, bending all the insight to fit.??But if you’re genuinely open to the feedback, it will carry you to a better place.??Oh and again, have the courage to share your plan with the people on the front line who actually run your business.??If they don’t like it, they’ll tell you and in fairly blunt terms!??But better to hear it now than on launch day.??Seriously, go and read ‘Drop the Stick’.

7.??Obsess over the operational detail.??As I expanded beyond my comfort blanket of marketing into running the operational line in businesses, I remember seeking the advice of a friend who’d been a COO for several years.??His advice???Just remember that however more creative & ambitious your ideas for the business are, you’re pushing them through the same people.??He wasn’t making a comment on their intelligence, simply that in everyday life there’s only so much people can absorb, and if they can’t land what you have in mind, it never becomes real.??Your brand is in their hands.??So obsessing over the operational detail of how your plans will land in every place, every day is essential to sustained success & growth.??Keep it simple, actionable & memorable.??When I think back to all the clever things we did to improve the lounge experience at BA, I’m reminded one of our simplest, most effective routines was to spot the gold card on an approaching passenger’s bag (regular flyer alert) and simply make eye contact, smile and say “welcome back.”??No technology or scanning required.??Just common sense.??And people loved it.??

8.??Become a greenhouse for talent.??Whether you’re creating something new or turning something broken around, the appetite for new ideas grows, and with that many of the perceived barriers to change fall away.??That makes them perfect environments to hot-house talent.??Want to play with some freedom and make your mark???Come and work with us.??Here you can move faster, go for it, break things, learn from the experience and go even better the next time.??That kind of environment gets all sorts of people involved, and the qualities for success aren’t drawn from the grades you got at school or Uni.??Some of the most effective people I’ve seen driving change couldn’t have shown you a shiny set of A’s from a highly coveted school, but my did they have the courage & tenacity to think in a different way and drive genuinely breakthrough ideas.??A clear purpose amplifies that diversity, drawing people in from every part of the forest.??On my career journey, Egg was a prime example – such a broad & inspiring group of people united by a mission to simplify money, rather than simply make more of it.??And because that’s what our customers wanted, the money flowed anyway.

9.??Keep it intimate.??This links back to the first point I shared, but as more people join the cause and your enterprise grows, the intimacy you once enjoyed because there weren’t many of you around can soon dissipate.??Working hard to keep your bigger business feeling small and connected to the people delivering your experience pays off by the shovel load.??Roadshows, events, smart use of social media, team huddles that include people from the sites you operate and so on - they all work.??But I think the technique that’s paid off beyond any other in my experience is storytelling.??Framing stories around the brilliant things that drive growth in your business can be a remarkably powerful engagement tool.??The great thing about stories is that people remember them – that’s why we tell them that way.??And what gets remembered gets replicated.??The collection of stories we gathered at Whitbread to showcase ways people served up a memory (our purpose) are the single best example I can think of – 10/10 scores in our NPS surveys rose month on month for the thick end of a year after we first shared that work.??The more intimate you can keep things, the more the love spreads.

10.??Keep it together.???I don’t mean keep your shit together, although that does help!??But when you’re breaking new ground, it can feel uncomfortable?and at times exposing.??Staying tight as a team, having each other’s?backs, sharing in the successes, jointly shouldering the failures and smiling through the darkest moments of adversity are all essential to your ultimate success.??I can recall one period in particular where a monthly ExCo meeting I joined with two colleagues became a source of deep pain, such was the state of the business we were turning around.??As three football fans, we found ourselves adopting the chant of one of the game’s lesser loved teams as a rally cry just before we stepped into the room. “No-one likes us, we don’t care” said with a shared smile each time we were about to step into the bear pit proved to be a brilliant energiser.??You’ve got my back, I’ve got yours and whatever happens in there today, we know we’re moving in the right direction - so let’s do this and with a smile.??A year down the line and with the tide turned, they became some of our most enjoyable meetings.??But it was that sense of togetherness that got us there.

There – that's my top 10 to get the party started.??Parties… Lockdown… Boris… Hmmmm.??They don’t guarantee success, but hook these jump leads onto your business battery and you can charge forward with greater traction, whatever the weather.??I opened with talk of wintery conditions and an anniversary we’d likely all prefer to forget, and while Covid has thankfully retreated, life has nevertheless felt pretty cold & bleak at times this last year.??But as one of life’s optimists I’m looking ahead to the weekend clock change and an opportunity to spring forward, rain or shine.??The windscreen is significantly larger than the rear-view mirror for a reason.??So handbrakes off and away we go.