Mobile phone operators stifle international business

Half of business travellers say they have lost custom through not being able to efficiently stay in touch with colleagues or clients.

According to a study of 250 UK business travellers by research organisation Vanson Bourne, 71 per cent feel under pressure to use their mobile phone less when abroad due to the high cost of roaming.

Almost two thirds (63 per cent) of respondents feel roaming charges are unaffordable, with 68 per cent having been surprised by a high mobile bill after a business trip abroad.

As a result, more than two thirds (68 per cent) make fewer or shorter phone calls, with one in five turning off their data connection and 7 per cent switching off their phones altogether while overseas.

Despite their reluctance to use their phones abroad, 74 per cent recognise that not staying connected with clients results in reduced customer service and dissatisfied customers.

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Businesses turn to credit cards for funding

Entrepreneurs look to use credit cards for business funding in difficult times for securing capital.

According to a study by Investec Specialist Private Bank, one in five (19 per cent) intend to turn to credit cards to help finance their businesses.

Respondents are glum about access to funding, with 51 per cent saying monies will be ‘quite hard’ to secure over the next 12 months, while 13 per cent say it will be ‘very hard’.

One in ten will look to sell assets in order to raise capital, 6 per cent expect to secure equity from friends, family or associates and nearly one in four (23 per cent) intend to lease assets in order to raise funds.

Mezzanine finance, a hybrid of debt and equity financing, is set to be used by 20 per cent of respondents, with a further 26 per cent planning to raise funds through invoice discounting or asset based lending.

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Green plans on hold for frugal firms

A focus on consolidation has stalled businesses’ efforts to improve their green credentials.

According to a study of 539 small businesses by bank Lloyds TSB Commercial, only 38 per cent of businesses have taken steps to analyse environmental risks to their company.

More than half of respondents (51 per cent) cite cost as the principle barrier to pursuing environmental initiatives, despite 48 per cent believing that going green would result in a positive reaction from customers.

Other reasons include a lack of understanding of the risks and opportunities (19 per cent), a perception that customers are not interested and a belief that their business doesn’t face any increased risks (16 per cent).

Some 29 per cent say they are putting environmental improvement plans on hold until they have recovered from the impact of the recession.

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To Enjoy Business More, Master the Basics

In the mid-1990s, Howard Mann owned a $150 million freight logistics company with six U.S. offices, 40 employees, and 35 agents around the world. And he was miserable—fighting bank pressure, staff problems, and slow-paying clients. The difficult turnaround and 2000 sale of that company spurred Mann to start a consulting business and write a book, Your Business Brickyard. His $750,000 consultancy, Brickyard Partners of Portland, Ore., tries to get small business owners back to basics so they can have fun running their companies again. Mann spoke recently to Smart Answers columnist Karen E. Klein; edited excerpts of their conversation follow.

Karen E. Klein: You went through a tough slog turning around your company after the recession of the early '90s. How did that motivate you?

Howard Mann: I learned so much about things I think every business owner should be thinking about. I wanted to help them break out of the bad cycles that make running a business a real grind. For the vast majority of business owners, it's a pretty good outcome if they have a business that makes plenty of profit, allows the business owners to live the life they want, and allows them to keep working with the people who strive alongside them to make the business great.

That's a tremendous outcome, but we've lost that because it's not as sexy as being the owner of the next $100 million mega-business. We've made business about an all-or-nothing sale or an IPO, even though that's a very small percentage of the outcomes and that's not what every business owner wants or really needs.

What's the biggest problem you see in your clients' companies?

Companies forget to figure out what they do better than everyone else and instead they try to match their offerings with what their competitors are offering. In my company, it always made us feel we were playing catch-up or we were somehow defending ourselves, instead of staking out compelling territory of our own that would reach a smaller niche.

It seems like many small companies are almost obsessed with their large competitors.

Almost every business that I encounter is consumed by what their competitors are doing. They're scouring the Internet to see news items from their competitors. Somehow we've all decided that our competitors have the answers and all we have to do is keep up with them.

That's a hard cycle to break. You just keep adding services because you think, "If my competitor is offering them, I have to offer them." You drive home at night feeling that there's so much to do and nothing's getting done and we're just treading water. That mentality—that there's a competitor out there that's looking to take food out of your mouth—doesn't lead to a healthy outcome. What you need to do is take all that energy and focus it on your ideal customers.

Do you recommend more focused targeting in general?

Yes. It became very clear to us that there was a group of clients who valued us, and that we enjoyed working with the most. They were more interested in service than in price. So we began to focus in on time-sensitive, high-value merchandise. That idea allowed us to have some real clarity about the market that we should be serving and move away from our culture being about doing more and more and grinding more out of our staff. Instead, it became more about doing fun things that honored the service culture we had.

Where do companies go wrong on that point?

They take on a bunch of clients because they think they have to, and they jump into large bids without realizing the impact it's going to have on their business and their culture. Those things make your business stray away from what's really true about it, and little by little it becomes a carbon copy of your competitors. After that, you're only competing on price.

Why did you decide to emphasize the basics in your book?

I wanted to get across to other CEOs that it's not about the latest fad, or trying to be so cutting-edge. Instead, it turns out, success is about getting the basics right. If you invest time and money in business basics, they will never fail you.

The other thing I want to emphasize is that business owners cannot lose their sense of purpose. People care about why you do what you do, before they care about what you do. Yet I rarely find a business owner who can tell me why they're doing what they do. They know what they do and they've spent time figuring out their elevator pitch, but very few figure out why they do it. So business owners need to have some sense of passion and purpose behind what they do and they have to get the basics right.

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To Unlock Creativity, Learn from Steve Jobs

This column is adapted from The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs: Insanely Different Principles for Breakthrough Success (McGraw-Hill, October 2010).

The company name "Apple" fell from a tree, literally dropping right into Steve Jobs's vision of what a computer should be: simple and approachable. Although Jobs had dropped out of Reed College in Portland, he returned to Oregon periodically to share ideas with like-minded people in a Zen-influenced commune called the All-One Farm where they grew—you guessed it—apples.

On one trip, Jobs made a seemingly inconsequential observation, an innovation with a "small i." However, his idea provides an A-level course in brand identity. Jobs and [Steve] Wozniak had decided to start their own company with $1,000. They just needed a name to make the partnership complete. As Wozniak tells the story, "I remember I was driving Steve back from the airport along Highway 85. Steve was coming back from a visit to Oregon to a place he called an 'apple orchard.' Steve suggested a name—Apple Computer…. We both tried to come up with technical-sounding names that were better, but we couldn't think of any good ones. Apple was so much better, better than any other name we could think of. So Apple it was. Apple it had to be." The story of Steve Jobs and the apple orchard gives us an early glimpse into how Jobs's mind works.

Psychologists have spent years trying to discover the answer to the question: "What makes innovators different?" In one of the most thorough examinations of the subject, Harvard researchers spent six years and interviewed 3,000 executives to find out. According to the Harvard research, the No.1 skill that separates innovators from noncreative professionals is "associating"—the ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from different fields. The three-year Harvard research project confirms what Jobs told a reporter 15 years earlier: "Creativity is just connecting things."

This notion of making creative associations through seeking out new experiences is worth exploring more closely, as it plays a significant role in the way Steve Jobs has generated one innovative product after another, and another, and another. Jobs is a classic iconoclast, one who aggressively seeks out, attacks, and overthrows conventional ideas. And iconoclasts, especially the successful ones, have an "affinity for new experiences," according to esteemed Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns.

Jobs doesn't see things differently from the rest of us. Jobs perceives things differently. Vision is not the same as perception; perception separates the innovator from the imitator. Vision is the process by which photons of light hit the photoreceptive cells of the eye's retina and get transmitted as neural impulses to different parts of the brain. Perception, as Berns points out, "is the much more complex process by which the brain interprets these signals." Dozens of individuals saw the graphical user interface at the Xerox PARC facility in Palo Alto, but it was Jobs who [in 1979] perceived it differently. He had an epiphany, a massive jolt of creativity.

The key to "thinking differently" is to perceive things differently through the lenses of a trailblazer. And to see things through these lenses, you must force your brain to make connections it otherwise would have missed. When Steve Jobs studied calligraphy, it was such a novel experience that it ignited his creativity. When Jobs spent time meditating in an apple orchard, he experienced something new and it led to some creative insights. When Jobs visited India in the 1970s, he experienced something radically different from his life in a California suburb. And when Jobs hired musicians, artists, poets, and historians [to build the Macintosh], he was exposing himself to new experiences and novel ways of looking at a problem. Some of Jobs's most creative insights are the direct result of novel experiences either in physical locations or among the people with whom he chose to associate.

Does Steve Jobs see things differently? Yes. Is this skill unique to Jobs? No. You can learn to be more creative as long as you keep in mind that your brain will fight you every step of the way. By pursuing new experiences and thinking differently about common problems, you are asking your brain to expend energy when its natural role is to conserve as much as energy as possible. It's not easy, but by forcing yourself out of your comfort zone—physically and mentally—you will kick-start the firing of synapses, improving the odds of generating new ideas that have the potential of transforming your business and your life.

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