044 Go-To Market Strategy

044 Go-To Market Strategy

About this Episode

Katherine Ann Byam (MBA, FCCA) is the wing-woman to your genius, and a business resilience / organic growth consultant. As a strategic partner to leaders,  she helps businesses design and embed effective strategies for responsible brand stewardship, to deliver outcomes that favour a wider stakeholder view.

In consulting she supports sustainable business development, resilience and business transformation projects. She is also a specialist in using Linkedin to generate organic growth and impact.

As a leadership coach, she works one to one with you as you go through any critical leadership changes; career transitions, starting businesses or scaling.

Her aim is to address solutions that consider society and environmental resiliency at their core so that her clients preserve their longevity and a fair return for innovation and ingenuity.

Her brands include Dieple Virtual Services Hub, Where Ideas Launch, Women in Sustainable Business, The Eco-Business Growth Club,  Diep Linked Agency Services, the Courageous Career Club and the WW Executive business club.

Subscribe to Where Ideas Launch

Episode Notes

What’s the biggest mistake people make when they go to market?

They skip all the steps I spoke about before. They think that they would buy their product, therefore, others would. But there’s much more involved in taking a product to market.

If you run an existing business and you are struggling with growth one or more of the things below may be playing against you.

The main mistakes:

1)     Vague idea of an ideal client in mind.

2)    Designing a product that fits everyone so therefore it suits no one. That my friend is not even a onesie, and even if it was, no one would go out in public in it. Well, few people at least.

3)    Taking on any client, who isn’t a good fit for your services or you as a person. (don’t get me wrong, when needs must, but you can end up developing in a direction you don’t want to go as a business owner, and that will just make you hate your business!

4)    Pricing strategies that are not adjusted to the market or your place in it.

5)    A business model that is not fit for your stage of growth.

6)    A product or service that does not deliver on customer expectations.

7)    No niche in the way you approach the market.

8)    Using all social media and none of them well.

9)    No planning for your launch, including logistics coordination and supply chain, or audience building and awareness.

10) No understanding of the key metrics that drive your conversions.

11)  No identification of key resources is required to support the launch.

12) Failure to test product-market fit.

13) Lack of integrity or ethics in your data points

14) Tech fails.

15) Burnout and exhaustion because of inadequate self-care (probably we have all been guilty of this at one stage or another - but even if your business is your baby, you still need to put on your mask first.) good airplane logic never fails.

16) No clear brand aesthetic

We’ve covered many of the points above in past episodes, but by the end of season 3, we would have covered everything. This section is strategy, not yet executed. Before you launch, you will have more to do, but all the points will be available to you.

Let’s talk Business Models

Business models are how you place your value proposition in front of your customer. Your value proposition is a combination of the USP of you, and the general value the consumer receives from the consumption or enjoyment of your product.

 The best business models will do the following things:

The key things that you need for a strong business model:

Passive products or services require little to no input from you, except to set it up.

Examples can be:

Some of the most popular business models

The way you execute the ideas above can vary. There are many mechanisms for business models that you can choose from. Some of the popular ones this year:

To build a decent go to market strategy, go through your numbers.

Financials

Start with the full business year in front of you. Consider the following:

Market Data

Product Suite

This is how the product suite can work.

An offer within an offer is something you give either free or for a small additional fee, that closes the deal for the customer, and deals with their objections to the course, or their other desires that are linked to the service you provide.

For example. If you offer a travel service, your customers are into travel. You may want to create neat package deals for them but sweeten this with a loyalty card that offers a discount for their next purchase with you, or for items they will want to consume when they arrive at their destination.

Summary - Go to Market Strategy

You also need to consider Supply Chain and Finance. I have covered the supply chain in episode 34 – Sustainable Supply and Sourcing and I also have a special guest coming up to talk about Financing, so stay tuned, we are full of value.

Recommended resources

041 Idea Development

041 Idea Development

Subscribe to Where Ideas Launch

Episode Transcript

Hello listeners! Apologies for this delay and halt in proceedings but sometimes life says no, you can’t have it all your way, and things come up that cause you to take a pause and a big step back.

Podcasts are eternal things, and someone listening to this episode years from now will wonder why they are hearing this, but What’s happened in Afghanistan has been a wake-up call for me, when I look at what lies ahead of us. It’s caused me to rethink a great many things, and that’s why I needed a break in producing new content and serving what you need.

I will record an interview with a friend who worked for the red cross in Kabul until it fell to the Taliban, and you will be able to find that interview on my Youtube channel, so for now, I won’t speak any more about that, but it’s still on my mind.

The events though have made this work that I’m doing take on greater importance, as I and all of us, need to do more to help others, and this podcast, my communities and my services are designed to do that.

This episode is about developing ideas, and it’s going to be split into 2 sections, to be covered in the next few weeks.

All right then. Let’s do this.

Lesson 1 for you today is this:

You develop business ideas to test them, not to launch them!

 This is one of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make and trust me I’ve experienced first-hand how costly these mistakes are.

In my view, this is going to be the most important section of this E-Book so listen up and pay attention!

What you are testing in the development phase is that your ideas and research correspond to market reality and meet not just the perceived needs but the real needs of your customers as well.

I recently read an excerpt from Dare to Lead by Brene Brown – which turned out to be a quote from another book Good to Great, and I want to mention it before we get into the details.

You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

At this point, let’s reflect on what we’ve done so far.

We know our mission, our skills, the jobs to be done by the customer. We’ve done some market research, and we’ve selected a few ideas based on our ikigai, the intersection of all the good news we got from the idea stage, as well as things that may not have been conclusive but are at least interesting enough to take forward.

Before you start testing, you need to know your “who”

Who are you selling to? Specifically? What are the characteristics of people who have this problem, or what are the conditions under which this problem is experienced?

Use your research results to understand:

  1.     Ideal Client
  2.     Niche
  3.     Prototype and Test
  4.     Go to Market Strategy.
  5.     Supply Chain, Finance and Legal

Truth bomb: It will cost you far more to develop the wrong idea than it costs to start again and find a better idea. Development takes the input from your market research and aims to convert it into a mock-up of commercial reality.

Ideal Client

An Ideal client (IC) or an ideal client avatar (ICA), is the perfect customer for your specifically imagined product or service. They are the person whose dreams you want to fulfil, or whose nightmares you want to end.

They are the people you discovered in your market research that helped you tailor your idea, that your skills and talents along with product or service design are absolutely made for. They are excited out of their minds to use your product or service because it speaks directly to their problems.

Your work thrives when you are extremely specific, especially when you are getting started, and they have a specific set of problems, and or a specific set of characteristics. If you don’t yet have a track record, you are relying on both ideal client and niche to help you build your credibility.

Your ideal client can be:

  1.      A previous version of you.
  2.      A specific person you discovered during research.
  3.     A specific friend or former colleague whose problems you always solve.
  4.     A customer who bought from you in the past
  5.     A Realistic re-creation from a series of experiences.

Consider capturing all the below information for your ideal client. Name your ideal client or avatar as you’re going to be talking to them a lot!

You can consider having up to 3 ideal clients. 

Ideal Client Example.

This is how I bring this to life, with an example of one of my ideal clients, who I call Nora.

Nora is in their own sustainably-minded business, which they run as a side gig. They have been in her start-up for less than a year and are struggling with adequate sales growth, although they are experiencing moderate sales.

They have reflected on their business, and they think they need to increase traffic to her store. They are thinking about investing in ads, but are not sure about the return on investment, and do not want to lose money/ cash flow which is in short supply. 

They have accumulated some knowledge, so are wary of sellers claiming more knowledge than they have. They would like a place to ask some questions and currently look toward large groups and communities.

She desires long-term to live off her business and backs herself to succeed, but her question is more around should they seek out help, or figure it out on her own, as they are resourceful and have gotten this far on her own. She wants to prove to herself and her family that she’s got this.

 Her independence is strong, but they also like the idea of a community. The problem of growth has been a persistent one these past months, and they are not clear whether this is seasonal, or how much covid has had an impact, and how the return to a new normal might affect her business. They believe that consistency is important but suspects a bit more is needed. 

Nora is a 28-year-old female living in Manchester UK.  they have a partner and dog. They are living together, but not yet married. They live in an apartment building, but they look forward to having a house soon. they believe in a minimalist lifestyle and has been a vegetarian since they turned 16. they like to go on backpacking trips with their partner in the Scottish or Welsh mountains on holidays. they read fiction and listens to a variety of podcasts. they and her partner use bike scooters and public transportation but they look forward to a campervan. 

They have a digital marketing role for an online shop, but on the side, they work on their own digital store. they use Etsy, Facebook, and Instagram shops. In her day job, they work mostly alone in a small team. they have a degree in Sociology. They’ve been in this job for 3 years, but they are looking forward to leaving it because it’s a lot of work in support of someone else’s dream.

She is a self-starter and taught herself much of what they know about marketing. they are headstrong passionate and cause-driven. they fear not being able to make the impact that they want or live the lifestyle they would like. they dream of financial independence and a minimalist and balanced lifestyle with the needs of the planet. 

She advocates for DEI (Diversity Equity and Inclusion), animal rights, reducing consumption. Her worst nightmare would be to work for someone else all her life. they have a positive outlook on the future and her generation's ability to make changes. 

She does all her spending online and tends to work on her side gig during the day and in the evenings. they collaborate with some other online traders already, but they want other sources of growth. they think while walking with the pets and listening to podcasts. they spend their free time reading, with friends and walking in the ocean. they are not as consistent as they would like but sometimes enjoys going for a run. 

She rewards herself with something fashionable and vintage. they sometimes spend time gaming online. 

My other ideal client has a burning desire, not a problem, and her name is Mia.

Mia is an educated professional woman who is ready to pivot and start a positive impact hybrid service and product-based business. they want to address a need they spotted in the market when they experienced this challenge 3 years ago with their youngest son. they want other mothers like her to have the choice, and not be so overwhelmed by the challenge they face. they struggled through this on their own, but today they have accumulated significant knowledge that they are compelled to share because existing solutions are incomplete and ineffective.

Mia has been feeling quite jaded in her corporate life for a long time, and they want a change both for her family and for her own psychological wellbeing. 

It is important to Mia that anything they do can replace or surpass her corporate income as they need to secure her family’s future. It scares her to not do something about the problem they see, but it also scares her that they will take this risk at her age and fail, and never be able to return to the rank and status they left behind when they leaped. 

She has become used to quality in education and training, coaching, and mentoring and service delivery. they are willing to invest in the right offer that suits what they are trying to do and will pay a premium for things done for her that will save her time.  

She has 2 routes to getting started, accept a redundancy package, and start fresh, or keep working and start a side gig. they go for the redundancy route.

She has many options to choose from when getting started, and they prefer to look for established and trusted brands. Yet they do not offer her sufficient clarity, as they are not close enough to the marketplace to give the best advice. they may be spending time together in the following places.

Incubator or accelerator.

The regional chamber of commerce.

Networking events for start-ups.

YouTube.

Sharing ideas with trusted friends and mentors.

Digital courses with established universities

Sampling peer to peer networks

Grants for green start-ups.

Sampling podcasts and Facebook Groups

Time and cash flow run rate will be sources of concern for her. Also, whether the business can really replace her income.

 Mia has seen the membership but is not confident due to its low price. they may be more interested in an interim service, a bridge between the knowledge they have and the knowledge they need. they also may be interested in recruiting a VA (Virtual Assistant) but does not know how to go about that decision.

 At 42 years old, living in Winchester UK and enjoying suburban life, they have doubts. they are not as confident as they once were. Her marriage though does give her some assurance as her husband continues to hold a corporate job. 

They also have the kids, a boy, and a girl, and managing family time, family needs, the dog is another full-time job. they drive the kids, now teenagers and takes care of holiday bookings and logistics and every other administrative activity of the household. they have a master's in human resources and has become disillusioned with the corporate world. They are proud and wants to succeed. they will sacrifice income if her family remains safe. they listen and reads Brene Brown and Simon Sinek and other traditional entrepreneurs.

They are level-headed and thinks before they leap.. they are interested in helping others, protecting the environment, and safeguarding a future for her children. 

Their shopping habits are a mix of offline and online. they work early in the morning, and late at night on business. they use baths and runs to clear her mind, and sometimes a glass of wine. they minimize her meat consumption and pays attention to the details of her pantry.

Summary – Ideal Client

3 Key Takeaways

Niche

A niche is a core set of characteristics about a group of your ideal clients, that you focus your marketing on. You utilise the set of features that are best suited to focussing your marketing campaigns, and where you can identify useful research, trends, and other competitors serving your niche.

It is a broader concept than the Ideal client but works hand in hand with your ideal client to give you a narrower focus.

Let us look at the example of Mia.

To create a niche for my audience of “Mias’”, I can look at the field that they currently work in, and the type of companies they work for, and what they typically read. I can build my marketing plans based on reaching more of that audience.

The niche Mia fits is:

 Corporate women over 40 working in operations in FTSE 500 or S&P 500 businesses.

Once you understand your niche, you need to revalidate your research on:

In the case of my niche for Mia, I may want to narrow it a bit further.

The new niche can be:

 over 40 women, working in FTSE 500 and or S&P 500 businesses based in the UK & Ireland.

Those 2 modifiers narrow the scope and focus of my marketing content significantly and increases the likelihood that when they receive information from me, they know it is for them.

Let us take a slight detour into branding, to show you how this works.

Let’s say that significance and trust are core values for Mia. On my branding colour wheel, I want to choose colours that match this, while preserving what they want also in her personal life. I may want to choose some core colours in my wheel such as:

So perhaps if these were values, those colours would appeal more on my feed.

If you get the niche, ideal client and messaging right, you do not need a huge audience, you can operate with direct outreach, offering a done with you or done for you service (more on business models later).

When Elon Musk started Tesla alongside his collaborators, he first introduced the Roadster, which was a luxury electric vehicle that he sold at hefty prices, to very wealthy people. They were wooed by both the design, the responsibility of the brand, and the niche marketing efforts. The company then used the revenue earned to develop more economic models he would sell to completely new audiences. With each successive release of his brand Tesla, he is able to create more affordable versions, which interestingly keeps the value high for older models in the resale market as well.

Today, Tesla’s have more than just a cult following. People are willing to pay in advance for the release of new models, all while being responsible in their business ethics. There are 17 separate ways that you can address the sustainability challenge we face in the world. His products are not affordable for the average adult, but it does cover responsible production and consumption and climate change as well as smarter homes and cities.

They thought out a strategy to serve multiple groups while scaling the business sustainably.

Key Points

Summary - Niche

3 Key Takeaways

Prototype and Test

A desktop exercise for testing is useful and helps to guide the initial design. You use this in your initial market research, composing your idea, and validating some basic assumptions. Yet if you want to develop superior user experiences and really design a product or service that your ideal client considers reliable and worth the time and effort, live testing in an environment which is as natural as possible makes an enormous difference to your long-term product development and marketing spend.

Product Prototypes

The building or designing a physical prototype of a new or improved product is vital. Getting this product in the hands of your ideal client is also crucial. Allow the consumer to take this product home and use it the way they use it. Without instructions (except safety and health instructions of course) to learn what comes of it.

Service Prototypes

Developing a beta version that is designed to break is the way to do service testing. You want to facilitate your ideal audience to tell you all that they think and rank the importance of the improvements and why to give you a steer on where to focus your efforts.

3 ways to facilitate testing.

What to look for when testing

 Summary: Development – Prototype and MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

This is all about designing the user experience.

You need a minimum viable product or wireframe.

Gives an initial assessment of the viability of the product.

3 Key takeaways

This is a key step in reducing the cost of your learning.

Used correctly it can become a rich source of data.

Expand your reach beyond friends and family.

039 Ideas that Change Things

039 Ideas that Change Things

About this Episode

How do you come up with an idea?

From the poets, science-fiction writers, anthropologist, scientists, explorers of space and time, to the futurists, and the real experiences of those on the fringe, ideas come from a variety of sources.

We explore how to calibrate your ideas following the 5 guides below:

Show Highlights

Speaker Introduction

Katherine Ann Byam is a consultant and strategic partner to leaders on sustainability, resilience and digital transformation.

Subscribe to Where Ideas Launch

Sponsored by - The Eco Business Growth Club and Women in Sustainable Business

Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam  0:00  

How do you come up with an idea?

Creativity is one of the greatest human gifts from the poets, the authors of science fiction, to the anthropologists, scientists, explorers of space and time, to the futurist, quantitative and qualitative, to the real experiences of those on the fringes. Ideas can come from anywhere.

The way the brain connects events, words, sound, smell, patterns, and senses, we don't even understand yet to spark something new is an incredible marvel that we can learn to better exploit. It starts with interest, call it a healthy level of curiosity, and it goes further, when you add to it the following key elements to grow your possibilities.

These key elements that I will talk about in the rest of this episode are the mission, skills, jobs to be done, market research, and idea selection at the end. The mission directs your actions. What is your purpose and driving goal around starting your sustainable green business?

Entrepreneurs in this space are often guided by two elements - wanting to solve a problem of social importance while bringing in some income to sustain their efforts or wanting to solve a problem of environmental significance. This purpose can be articulated into a clear mission statement or an open question.

Sparking Ideas and Missions - The Role of Questions in shaping the future.

Questions tend to spark great missions, especially questions that are difficult to solve but an important objective on this scene. When we get into sustainable business we often prioritize passion and purpose over profit. And this is great, however, you will not be able to sustain this business without some commercial element.

So you need to make your mindset work across all three things, which is purpose, profits, and the planet. Turn your questions into a tangible purpose for your business. Start broad, thinking big about what you want to accomplish, and then add constraints such as the environmental context, the skills that you have perhaps, depending on how you want to start this business and how you want to grow it, and your freedom, or ease of conducting that business within the environment that you currently work in.

You need to have a clear intention toward the profit motive as  even for purpose-led businesses, this is going to be valuable. Some examples of companies with inspiring mission statements that I've pulled together for you. Patagonia - "We are in business to save our whole planet." I thought this really powerful, and they've been leaders in this sort of big business to sustainable business space for quite some time. Microsoft - "To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more." I know that Microsoft could be in that debatable space with tech companies. However, I do like the mission statement and I think it's quite powerful.

Tesla - " Accelerating the world's transition to sustainable energy with electric cars, solar, and integrated renewable energy solutions for homes and businesses." That's great. It's not as easy to target a company like Tesla for being a greenwasher because they're really in this space. They're really changing the game on how we use renewable energy today. So that's a powerful company who we might want to argue also spends a lot of resources on space travels.

I think we need to nuance a lot of the stuff that's happening in the world around us because I don't think anything is black and white anymore. There's a lot more complexity to our decision-making, and you will meet more complexity in your decision-making as well as you build your business. Some other mission statements that I'd like to play out here for you to think about how you interpret them. Amazon - "We strive to offer our customers the lowest possible prices, the best available selection, and the utmost convenience." Now that's an interesting mission statement given where we are in the world. You can think about how that statement resonates with you or not.

Coca-Cola - "To refresh the world in mind, body and spirit, to inspire moments of optimism and happiness to our brands and actions, and to create value and make a difference." That's another, let's say mission statement that I'm not sure who it's speaking to. I'm not sure it is speaking to me.  Marriott. "To enhance the lives of our customers by creating an enabling of unsurpassed vacation and leisure experiences."

Now my inspiration- I take inspiration from the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals - number eight, Decent work and economic growth is my sweet spot. My question is the question that keeps me awake at night, is how do I go about creating this decent work and economic growth principle for business owners, new business owners as well as people who are struggling to get work and jobs in developing countries?

How do I contextualize this idea of decent work and economic growth to earn a decent living from my efforts without breaching irrevocably any of the other goals? And the part of that goal of SDG 8 that gives the problem is economic growth of itself because we need to reimagine what growth means and I think that that's the crux of the thing. How can I reimagine what growth really means because you can't have infinite growth on a finite planet.

Part of this question or part of the answer to this question that plays around in my mind is how I embrace technology as a tool and not as a weapon of social disruption and these are two complicated things that I know will take me many years to solve. Each business stream I operate today considers my overarching mission. And your mission can be derived from any source. So think about what your question or problem is.

Think about your purpose, and then narrow your focus, as far as possible, and find the right skill to market fit. So let's move on to skills. You do not need to start the business based solely on your skills. But to survive and thrive in your business, it's valuable to have skills that can be leveraged by the business you form. So for example, you can start the data insights company if you're not a data scientist but your strongest skill is communication, because that skill will help you with the toughest part of any business which is sales.

The Skills that make you successful as an entrepreneur - hint: Lean on Your Strengths.

This brings me to the topic of universal skills. So there are some types of skills that are transferable to any type of business you want to start. And three of these I want to mention right off the bat - finance, research, and social writing or business writing. These skills can serve you in any type of challenge and are particularly useful for green businesses as the mode of outreach to clients often lacks a big budget, and far more targeted in niche and influence irrelevant for example. So take an inventory of all the skills that you have alongside the mission and problems that you want to solve.

What skills and strengths will motivate you to keep going when things get tough, and this is an important question to answer yourself. The journey of an entrepreneur can be harsh for sure and challenging at points during your journey. And at your lowest moments you will be asking yourself these questions about why, why am I doing this. So answer them in advance. The inventory of your skills can come from multiple sources. It can come from your education. It can come from passion that you have, topics that you read regularly about. It can come from jobs that you've done in the past.

It can come from any sorts of nature, natural abilities that you have, rare problem solving skills that you have, challenges that you've overcome in the past that you can help others to overcome, hobbies that you have, old traditions that perhaps have been passed down in your family that you haven't called upon in a long time. Your mission is so important, but also needs to be constrained by your skill if it is that you are a solopreneur. If you can gain access to the skills you need to achieve your mission, then you have the power to go further into building your dreams even if you're not particularly skilled in the area you want to develop as a business. Beyond the mission and skill, we get into the jobs to be done by the customer.

The role of Understanding the customer Journey in designing a powerful business Idea.

So let's think about the customer journey. This is really essential to this idea of the jobs to be done. If you are designing something to be more sustainable, chances are that the idea you have already has a market and a customer most likely, except that existing solutions may be damaging some or all the sustainable goals. Your product or service still has to do what the customer wants done so you have to be clear in your understanding of that before you make design changes. So let me give you an example. And this one, it depends on the type of service you want to provide or a product you want to provide.

As an example, a customer is researching holidays, and you are a holiday planner for eco business or eco travel. What is the customer looking for, is it rest and relaxation? Is it a chance to escape with the kids? Is it an adventure? Is it an experience? Is it luxury? Is it hot or cold? How is it sustainable? So, you can choose to address any one of these jobs or multiple ones but you need to have a clear understanding of the problem that you want to have solved.

So the average customer and the sustainable customer can potentially have a lot in common. To design the optimal product or service you need to ask these questions. How does the customer use this product or service today? How are they interacting with it? How did their families interact with it? How many times are they going to use it? What happens in the afterlife? Where are they typically purchasing this.?What are the people commenting on the reviews and what are the business models that currently work for the sale of that product today, as some examples.

How to solve your customers Problems

All of these questions will feed the design of the product or service. Another interesting approach is to ask yourself what level of quality matters to the customer. Using the jobs-to-be-done approach you potentially expand your market by addressing the needs of the consumers, while still achieving your sustainable goals. Let us take the customer who is holidaying with kids - they have a specific window to execute the holiday and things are likely to be booked up quickly, so they have an interest in planning their holiday early. Your window for wooing that customer will perhaps be months before the next vacation.

And because they're traveling with kids, they may have safety concerns, cost and budget concerns, the level of additional effort they will have in luggage, etc. so proposing a cycle holiday may not be the right solution. By contrast, someone into adventure tourism and perhaps travel during peak seasons, may make more spur-of-the-moment decisions, but will be more open to roughing it so can be more easily captivated by eco tourist spots. Understanding the customer journey to a decision or choice is key in being successful at converting that customer.

So, the jobs to be done -  think about what's happening before they use your item or service, while they use your item or service, and after they use your item or service. Next, explore the problems they face in that journey map.

Why Every Business Needs Detailed Market Research.

Now we move to the penultimate section which is market research. Each of these steps build on the others so market research is really about how you get to know exactly what jobs that customer needs to get done. You do this through research.

And you can do research in multiple different ways, so you can understand if there's a demand for what you are aiming to create. You can understand the audience and try to define and shape that audience, collect data to identify a niche, know the competition, understand the business models that are operating, understand the price and service range, understand the white space, the gaps in the service or product experiences that you may be able to turn into an opportunity.

There are many different approaches to doing research. Some free ones to use is Google Keyword search so you can sign up for the account and you can start doing some keyword search before you have to pay for the service in terms of the advertising spend at least. You can use Amazon product reviews. You can use Facebook groups. You can use hashtag searches, digital magazines, the free versions of Answer The Public, Quora, focus groups, or any other ways of asking existing customers  (if you have them) or asking people in your communities. You can run surveys and quizzes. You can look at some paid options which is looking at Listen Notes which is one of the podcasts usage platforms. There's Buzzsumo. There's Appsumo that you can use as well. What you really wanna do is capture as much useful information as you can about the customer that you're looking at.

There are many other sources - you can use your local chamber of commerce, you can use some statistics consolidation sites, etc. There are many ways to leverage research. The point of doing all of these things, and understanding your mission, understanding your skills in detail, getting sorted on the jobs to be done, and getting your market research right is that you could make a selection of what ideas you want to take forward. And it's possible that you want to take forward multiple ideas but I would recommend not to do too many at the same time.

Finding your business Ikigai - or identifying great ideas for testing.

Yes, you need to have some variety in your business goals but when you're first getting started, you want to go through that process of developing one idea into reality before you move into others. So with your idea selection process, you really have to go with that sweet spot, as they call it the icky guy, so look at the intersection of those things where it meets with your strengths, where it meets with a really strong need in the market, where it addresses a social good, and where it's able to pay you as well. So, look at all those things as much as you can to come up with that short list of great ideas that you want to take forward. Be generous at the beginning of this process to make sure that you capture as much as possible, but then be ruthless and brutal with yourself at the end of the process so that you focus on only a maximum of two or three ideas that you may eventually take forward. Thanks for listening.

037 So You Want To Build A Business

037 So You Want To Build A Business

About this Episode

"Abundance is a lie, but it doesn’t have to be. We can all thrive on this planet, but it’s going to need us to rethink how we design our lives and the planet.”

Welcome to season 3 of Where Ideas Launch, where we explore how we build a better planet, one small business at a time. This is series is a guide to small and medium-sized eco businesses or green tech businesses.

Katherine Ann Byam is a consultant and strategic partner to leaders in SMEs on sustainability, resilience and business transformation.

Subscribe to Where Ideas Launch

Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam  00:25

I got started in earnest on my sustainability journey in a classroom in Grenoble, France, the year was 2015. The topic was innovation, and frugal innovation to be precise. And the principles of frugal innovation were not actually foreign to me. My mother practiced them all her life. In fact, so much of who she was and still is, has become more precious to me as I navigate and build my services to support sustainable and impact-driven entrepreneurs like myself. Businesses continuously design new solutions for problems that come with an increase in price, but not always with an increase in value.

We've built a machine that's designed to make a few rich, and others, to keep them rich. In some countries, we don't really have a history of doing business any better. We move from the property of the crown to the property of the Lords and Ladies to the property of the privateers, pirates and the independent land owners that arose after the New World was discovered. Yet there are examples of designing social systems that work for business and society. So why don't we spend some time trying to study these?

This podcast is about addressing the problem of “how do we do business better?” not just taking a netzero box without substance behind it, without considering the social side of the story. So follow me down this road to build a better and greener business. When I started, they considered that there was no resource where I could find the complete big picture, the how to land firmly on my feet, as a sustainable business-minded person. There are pockets of information for sure, specializations in one domain of one area of the job, or another, but the experience of being an entrepreneur is not specialized or siloed and the challenges of being sustainable throughout your offer and your operations requires systemic and more integrated thinking.

Most entrepreneurs start solo or with a small team, and have jobs with multiple facets. To be successful, you need enough exposure across all the various aspects of the business that you're building, so that you can be prepared for the relentless stream of decisions you need to constantly make. Decision fatigue is absolutely real. In particular, when operating from a place of low trust. Low trust happens when brands, suppliers and service providers greenwash what they are doing. We don't want to be caught in a greenwash affiliation. If we are working hard to build an ethical reputation. So we need to do the checks and the disclaimers, to make sure that who we're working with stands up to the values that we ourselves have.

When I understood what this journey was going to be like, I began to prepare a manual to walk with me as I step through all the hurdles along the way. I wanted to solve the problem of where to start, and what to consider for the millions of people who want to make a positive impact but are overwhelmed by all the things that just come up. I wanted to create sign posts to great resources, templates, maps, and a navigation system to find the triple bottom line that's good for the planet, good for the people, and let's face it, what you need in your pocket. You're likely a specialist in an area, and you want to trade either a service or a product, or software as a service, perhaps in your zone of genius, while having a net positive impact on the world around you to round it off.

If you intend to start as a solopreneur, get prepared to be uncomfortable in your first six months, as you figure out the market, consumers, their behaviors and how to serve them better. More often than not, the product you start with is not the one that will make you ultimately successful. You also need to be prepared to pivot and reshape your offer as many times as needed for as long as it takes. I'm starting with the fundamentals and building forward from there.

Katherine Ann Byam  04:25

This episode and season is going to be a guide, but the workbooks that will come alongside it at the end of the season will really help you to personalize this for yourself and make the best use of what you're learning. It is widely acknowledged in the scientific community that we are in the Anthropocene epoch, where the activities of mankind have the most important impacts on the evolution of our planetary systems. The evidence for being in a new epoch has been building since the 1700s, but became clear in statistical records post the 1950s. What changed in the 1950s, is that we became a world with no wars, women contributing more equally to the economy and to growth, democracy and capitalism, and perhaps the most impactful of all mass marketing and advertising and increased use of synthetic Parliaments.

Most experts believe that given the boundaries of current tipping points to irrevocable climate change, we have between 10 and 15 years to radically change the way we operate in order to maintain the stable conditions that have led to the exponential growth that we have seen. The nine tipping points that you need to know about are the Amazon rainforest and preventing savanafication, and drought and converting that forest into a net carbon producer. We really need to look at that and make sure that it doesn't happen or it doesn't happen any more than it already has. Then we have the Arctic sea ice, and preventing the full melt that we now expect to happen during summertime. Atlantic circulation slowing down, is happening as a result of the other tipping points being shifted. So, the increased sea ice into the ocean is creating that slowdown in the current span.

The boreal forest decline, caused by fires and past changes, is also an area of concern. Coral Reef bleaching has been occurring everywhere on the planet at this point in time. And the Greenland ice sheet melting is another area of great concern. All sorts of permafrost thawing everywhere that it is can expose us to risk that we have not even understood yet. And the West Antarctica and East Antarctica ice sheets and the other final areas of tipping points that we need to be aware of. What this implies is that we need to make radical shifts, cutting your annual carbon footprint in both your personal and professional life by half every year is a start. But can we do it? I talk about these things because we need to understand when we get into business that it's not just for us.

When we get into business today, we need to think about our impact down the road, and how we're going to be influencing what happens for our kids for the next generation and for this blue earth that we all love. So I wanted to create that setting, but I also want to create another setting for you, which is a bit about the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Okay. So beyond the Climate, the climate has other tipping points that haven't even been discussed yet, which is around the other aspects of social life. The UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals captures these very well.

They are: no poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, quality education, gender equality, clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, decent work, and economic growth, industry innovation and infrastructure, reduce inequalities, sustainable cities and communities, responsible production and consumption, climate action, life below water, life on land, peace, justice, and strong institutions and partnerships for the goals. Of all of these platforms to leverage for change, which of these are impacted by your business. It is possible that your business has both positive and negative impact on more than one of these goals. The first thing to do is to know which. Can you articulate the impact, and in the long run, will you be able to measure the impact that you're having. Even if you've already started in business.

 This series aims to provide a supporting guide to position yourself to create the positive impact you want to, and to articulate it over time. There's also tremendous opportunity. We are all today creators and designers of a new economics, and a new way of interacting with the planet. The dominant solutions are, how are we able to convert to renewable sources of energy, how can we rewild and regenerate in nature and in our lives. How can we generate novel designs and creativity towards some of the solutions and problems that we face? And how do we use artificial intelligence, as well as bio engineering and technology to change the game. The growth of green tech solutions and advances in artificial intelligence can be truly transformational if well-guided in the context of complexity, and the risk we face as the dominant species on this planet. 

This episode was brought to you today by vehicle Business Growth club by Katherine. And by the space where ideas. Eco Business Growth club supports positive impact SMEs with coaching and community support to achieve the impact and reach they set out to meet. You can find out more by connecting with where it is launched on Instagram following the hashtag, where it is across all of your social Media.

036 Decency & Equity

036 Decency & Equity

About this Episode

Katherine Ann Byam MBA, FCCA, is a Business Resilience Coach and strategic partner to leaders on sustainability, leadership and digital transformation for marketing and operations.

This episode of the podcast covers Sustainable goal #8 Decent Work and Economic growth, a common thread of the podcast.

Katherine examines:

• Equality vs Equity

• Brewed Indecency

• The International Labour Organisations take on Decency

• And contracts that favour the larger of 2 entities

Subscribe to Where Ideas Launch

Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam 0:01
Equality versus equity, I'm about to head off on vacation. But a few things have happened in the last weeks that have prompted me to record one more podcast before I take off to the coast of Cornwall without any access to my phone or my apps.

I'm really looking forward to this. But before I come to the many topics I want to discuss, I feel the need to bring us all on the same page on equality versus equity. There's a super popular meme that shows a father, a teenager and a toddler, looking at a game over a fence equality is represented by each having the same size of box to stand on. Yet the toddler still can't see the match.

Equity is represented by each having the size of crate or box relevant to enabling them the same experience. Now in another meme, they show a third option of this equation, which is capitalism where the fence is raised so that neither of them can see and so that they pay to have a seat in the stands. And yet another meme, there's a fence instead of a wall, where everyone can see through it. And this is labelled justice.

Now the point I really want to make here is that everyone you knew and everyone I knew once for basic things, respect, reassurance, recognition, and a sense of responsibility. When we act out of integrity, or out of alignment with any of these things, well, we are brewing in decency.

So speaking of brews, let's talk about BrewDog. For a moment, I've been following and watching James Watt for more than a year. And I've used his presence, his branding his public relations on LinkedIn, as an example for many of my clients, and how to show up consistently with a message that everyone resonates with. The company has supported the NHS, they've pledged to be carbon neutral, and from the outside, they're punching way above their weight and the impact that they are creating or have created on LinkedIn.

There's no reason to believe from the open letter that good and positive things haven't been achieved at the company. But at what cost and are these costs justified? Before we assess the cost, I want to look at what decent work means in reference to goal number eight of the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Now there are four overarching ideas that we can bite our teeth into.

These are dignity, equality, fair income, and safe working conditions. Those four ideas are backed by three fundamental principles rights, inclusivity, and protection. Now, decent work is a key thread in this podcast and the work I do in sustainability consulting. So in both in treat, and invested in what is unfolding in this story, all of the principles, tenets and ideas here are subjective measures that leave a lot of room for GRI. The UN, for example, mentions equality and non equity.

So we can even poke holes in the concept of itself. But all of floored by our inability to measure them. So no matter what words we choose, we still have a problem of measurement. The only reasonable way to measure if dignity exists, if fair wages exist, if respect exists, or even recognition exist, or any of the other examples is to have full transparency.

 This means all the data being available, so everyone can interrogate it, we can all do the comparison, and we can all assess whether this exists. And then we need to be able to severe everyone on their perceptions of whether or not these conditions are being met. Transparency, unfortunately, remains an occlusion. Now let's get back to BrewDog. We have largely lost connection with the original founders of large companies in FMCG industries.

And it's perhaps easier to treat the company as the external presence that works to its own culture and rhythm that we don't assess, you know, largely I have lived and experienced my career as believing in this idea of a company in a culture that I could believe in. And I know many of us do.

But this idea of a company isn't real, it is all created, it is all perceived, and it is created by the people who found it and who run it. When a business is found to run. There's much more tied up in the public perception and the perception of the founder personally. This is usually inextricably linked from the company. What the open letter refers to as the cult of personality is therefore unsurprising.

All the way didn't speak to its veracity I've never worked there. But what the employees have described is not an experience uncommon to employees in many companies, if you read Glassdoor reviews, but when you build your brand on a foundation, you have to make sure that that foundation is well embedded. Public Relations starts with who, why, what? And the stories behind the founders and the founding story of the brand. A good publicist understands what the business owner wants to create and where it comes from. From this perspective, I consider the BrewDog public relations team to be exemplary. What appears to be missing is an alignment between the vision and the actual reality.

But as James rightly said, my fault he takes responsibility for the culture of the company. I also have tremendous respect for this paragraph where he says in his response, it's hard to hear those comments, but it must have been harder to see them. We appreciate that. And we will endeavour to honour that effort and courage with a real change of deserves. We aren't going to make excuses. We're going to take action. From our commitment to sustainability to a passion for bear BrewDog has always been defined by taking responsibility and continually improving, this is no exception.

Now it took a bit of a public bollocking and rolling over the coals as they say, to acknowledge a need to listen and to change. But we do have to celebrate this outcome for people who are working toward decent work in the world. I really want to congratulate the punks with Cooper's organisation for what they've done not just for BrewDog employees, but for employees everywhere, who need the courage to say enough is enough. And I'm going to take a stand.

So many employees around the world and indeed the UK are not free to speak their minds and have become slaves to their golden handcuffs and their lack of belief that they can start a new career or give up some of the comforts they have come to enjoy, because of indignities that they have suffered. To James what I see that we are all watching.

We are also rooting for you to set an even greater example than you've done with your public relations to what you will now do to transform your organization's internal culture so that the values of decency tribe shine right true. Beyond James and the BrewDog. travesty, the International Labour Organisation explains the challenges we face globally on the decent work front employment growth since 2008, has averaged only 0.1% annually compared with 0.9%.

Between 2002 1007 Over 60% of all workers like any kind of employment contract, fewer than 45% of wage and salaried workers are employed on a full time permanent basis. And even that share is declining. By 2019, more than 212 million people will be out of work up from the current 201 million and 600 million new jobs need to be created by 2030. Chess to keep pace with the growth of the working age population. Now, these stats are a bit dated, but they're still relevant.

So what do we do? Well, many of us start businesses and season three of this podcast is going to be all about building a business from the ground up going from idea to see you. But starting businesses is also not the full answer because the exam question is much bigger than this. How do we balance what we need for the well being of people, plants, pets and other organisms on the planet in such a way that we achieve a sense of belonging, of contribution of personal and vocational growth, and of economic growth, because we all perceive this as a necessary thing.

We can debate this. Now this is the challenge that we face in levelling up those who are not having a decent quality of life, and those who have more than what they need. Now, before I close, I want to speak about something closer to home for me. A few weeks back, a small but still significant consultancy, started discussions with me to join them as an associate on their team. You know, initial conversations, the CEO of the company joked, let's sign the contract and put it in a dark place never to be looked at again.

 Contracts are complicated little beasts, and they are generally not needed in good times. It's when times get bad that they become the first thing anyone reaches for. To suggest, therefore, that a contract is something that could sit in a dark place never to be looked at again, is a mark of professional disrespect. And as such, I was pretty sure I knew how this relationship would turn out.

As I could already tell we had different values. I received a 35 page contractual document assigned from this company stipulating our rights. Yet none of these terms favoured me or acknowledged the unique skills I honed on my own before encountering this company skills that they do not currently have. Still unlikely The previous time I received the contract of this nature, I decided not to simply throw the contract in the Delete bin along with the relationship. But instead I chose transparency.

And there's that word again, I chose to disclose what I would be doing with this document, before I considered signing it. I advised this guy, that there were a few clauses that were not satisfactory to me, and that I'd have my lawyer check it because I didn't want to misspeak. I received no response from that meal. My lawyers no spring chicken, it took her 30 minutes to hone in and respond to the red flags in the contract.

She told me the following. I have reviewed the agreement and do find that more one sided than normal, and answer to your question, there is no guarantee of any work or even if the rate of PII, they reserve the right to reduce the fee from the scheduled periods if they have a business need or a given a client volume discount or a bulk discount, and you have to wait over a month for payment. You're giving up the intellectual property in what you work on, and provide for them, and you be restrictions, you have to give them longer notice when they gave you and you were bearing the risk and liability if something goes wrong.

 I asked the owner about his willingness to negotiate and that my lawyer would like to mock up some revisions on a Word version of the contract. And his response was this, I have reflected on our exchanges and your request to edit our contract and negotiate in quotations on its tunes. I think it best if we pause our relationship for now, my sense is that you expect a far more formal relationship than we are used to. We have never operated like this in over 20 years. And it does not feel right to start a relationship on such a formal footing. Now,

I wish you the very best of luck in your endeavours and perhaps we can pick up a discussion at another time. Dude, I will tell you this, without an apology for your disrespect, there will be no other time. Many people signed contracts like these because they are scared of not being able to take care of their family of not getting another opportunity elsewhere, of not being able to show up the way they need to. And to get the great opportunities that are perhaps just a stretch away. I am not that person. The first thing in any relationship for me is whether or not my fundamental core values can be upheld in that relationship.

My fundamental core values are rooted in freedom, equity and decency. When these are not present, no feasible working relationship as possible. It's that simple. If you want to make changes, you need to be prepared to speak up and say what's not right with the world around you. Even if it excludes you from that will by default. We don't get to inclusion, by not expressing an opinion that is not inclusion, that is a false sense of let's all go go along with the stream. Alright, so I think I have covered the full spectrum of things related to decent work. If you have any queries on this topic, do feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.

I'm always open to connections and conversations. If you've enjoyed this podcast over the past nine months and the last two seasons, do let us know by giving us a rating, reviewing and commenting on the stories that have meant something to you and share with us anyone you believe would be a good fit for the show, and whose views you would like to be represented on the show. One challenge I faced in finding guests is the diversity of the lineup. But I am proud that there is a broad international representation on the show. I urge you to participate connect with me, as I mentioned on LinkedIn, start a conversation because who knows where that conversation may lead. Thank you for listening to these past two seasons.

And we're coming in just two weeks with a full season three of the show. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for listening. This podcast was brought to you today by career sketching with Katherine Ann Byam and the space where ideas launch. Career sketching is a leadership development and coaching brand offering personalised career transition and transformation services. This space where ideas launch offers high performance, leadership coaching and strategy facilitation to businesses in the food and health sectors. To find out more contact Katherine Ann Byam on LinkedIn

034 Sustainable Supply and Sourcing

034 Sustainable Supply and Sourcing

About this Episode

Using the TECK method to improve your supply chain sustainability and resilience, from our host Katherine Ann Byam, Business Resilience Strategist & leadership Coach.

TECK Stands for Transparency, Energy, Circularity and Knowledge. Tune in to learn more, and share your thoughts with us! We are on instagram @whereideaslaunch

Subscribe to Where Ideas Launch

Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam  0:01  

Today's session is about sustainable supply and sourcing. And before I get into what we could be doing to solve this problem of sustainable supply and sourcing, I need to tell you why this matters.

Now, we are using resources at 1.7 times their rate of natural regeneration. We have become less efficient at converting those resources that we extract from the ground than we were, let's say in the 1980s compared to today. And part of this is because we have changed the source of supply. Most of the world aspires to be at the level of wealth of let's see, for example, the US.

Now as people aspire to have more and to grow more in terms of wealth on an average scale, we're going to demand more of those resources than we have in the past. Climate change will also render many places uninhabitable, starting, let's say in the 2040s, to 50s. And this will invoke mass migrations and a number of other economic and social challenges that we expect will emerge. Technology can give us solutions if we use it in the right way. And there are also projects underway all around the world to rewild nature in some form or fashion in order to get us to a point where we can move the needle on what we've been putting into the atmosphere in terms of carbon with a very, very urgent timescale for change that we need to commit to.

A lot of customers are becoming more savvy. So as we get into the marketplace, we're starting to see a greater demand for a greater need for knowledge around things that are sustainable. I think customers since the global pandemic, have really started to reflect on what it means to them to live on this planet. The recognition that there's only one blue planet that we have that we can currently inhabit makes this need to do something that much more urgent.

We have also seen things like vaccine capitalism come under real attack because still, we are developing the world and we're developing this planet on the notion of nation-states, where the situation that we're in today, it's so globally interconnected that some of these decisions can no longer be taken on a national level. realistically. Yes, we can still take it on a national level. But will we have the impact? Will we have the same efficacy if we take decisions on a nationalist level?

So these are questions that consumers are starting to ask. Now, in some countries, there are no furlough protections like we have in some of the Western countries. So there's no social protection around the issues that have emerged from the pandemic, including the loss of jobs, the loss of tourism, etc. Now, wealth inequality is rampant and growing.

There are something like 2700 billionaires who own enough to be the biggest country by GDP. And it's only getting worse. The number of people that represents 2,700 billionaires is less than .0005% of the planet. Netflix has been doing a great job of educating people around the topics of sustainability, with independent films such as “Seaspiracy” and “Cowspiracy.” And there've also been a number of interesting films on Amazon, for example, “Living the Change.” And what these are doing is creating a movement in people's minds that they need to do something different, that they need to be more responsible, and that they need to make different choices about their food, and about their repurchase of things and how many things they want to accumulate, how they dispose of their things.

But we're going to talk a little bit about how we can make our supply chains more sustainable for this purpose so that we can address the needs of our customers. Another anecdote that I'd like to share with you, I was talking to a friend of mine who runs a group on Facebook, and he told me that he started his group, it's called Sustainable Living in 2014, and by 2020, much he had 3000 people in his group by September 2020. He had 65,000 people in his group. Today, he has 75,000 people in his group and this shows that there's been a huge shift of people looking for sustainable solutions groups that have sustainability in their name on Facebook have been growing exponentially.

My own group of women who are running sustainable businesses has grown by 100 a week for the last month. And it's starting to accelerate. So this is really becoming a thing. There are ways for us to go about checking our carbon footprints, etc, as people as individuals, freeways, which is also helping to expand the knowledge and make people more aware.

So now I want to get into exactly what we can start doing in our supply chains to think through this sustainability equation. I think about it as tech. And I will explain what tech means it has four elements to this sustainability puzzle. It is transparency, energy, circularity, and knowledge. And I'm going to go into each of these topics so that you understand what you could be doing differently in your supply chains to make a difference.

The first point you need to know about transparency. It's about making a statement; making a statement to see what you definitively stand by when it comes to elements of the whole sustainability puzzle. Sustainability, as you know, it has many different angles, we can start with the human side of the thing. Are we against modern slavery in all of its forms? Are we paying our workers a living wage? Are people able to survive based on the contracts that we're giving them? Is all contracting fair?

That's a key part of the transparency debate, and we should be having that publicly available on our websites. How is the ratio of CEO pay to the lowest-paid worker in organisatio? What's that ratio like? And how we preserve certain reasonableness with that ratio also dictates how transparent and how respectful we are of the human side of the story. Then we have revealed things about our suppliers themselves. So as we supply, we also have suppliers and our suppliers should also be following some of the rules that we have determined are necessary to be an ethical company. So we need to think also about our suppliers.

We also need to think about the way our products are disposed of. Transparency is about communicating what solutions are there to recycle the products that we sell. Getting into this further, you can go the certification route.  And the certification route gives other people, your customers and suppliers etc, an idea of who you are if you have a certification that states basically the rules that you have agreed to comply with. This already goes part of the distance, I say part of the distance because certifications have been challenged through their ability to truly verify what's happening.

There are two certifications that are very popular at the moment in this space, which are the fair trade certification and the B Corp certification. Both of these are useful in terms of progress because they do assess quite a wide variety of topics. You can become certified without having all of the boxes ticked. And this is where these certifications can come in the challenge at times. But the idea is that you set a roadmap for yourself as to the things that you want to accomplish. And as you accomplish them, your ranking will increase. So it's a good idea to get involved with finding good ways to be transparent about the good things that you're doing and also to be transparent about the things that you're still progressing. Both sides are important. It's not just a topic of greenwashing. Now we get to energy. Energy is the second in the tech framework and energy for us. - it's really about where you're sourcing the energy to convert your products, how aware you are about the usage of energy in your organisation, and how efficient you are on the usage of energy and the things like your website. So it's not just about the physical product itself, but it is about what's happening in your offices and your website, how heavy is it to load for customers. All of these things need to be validated and checked before we can see that we are truly energy efficient.

So it's not just about the choice of our energy provider. It is also about how we're returning energy to the system. It's also about how efficient our entire systems are to carry out the work that we asked of it.  To see in tech is about circularity and the key question here is how are you sourcing your materials, and can your sources be recycled? And this is essential because we need to be able to communicate to our customers what they need to do to dispose of that product. We also need to think about how we can create a second-hand market for that product. And a number of companies have done this. So they do buy-backs, they do sell secondhand versions of their products. And this needs to be something that we go deeper and deeper and further into, especially if we can make that product more efficient to use in terms of energy. So as much as we can recycle and reuse and change and shift even if it is, you know, scrapping the thing for parts and Using that into the process. Minimising waste is a key part of what we need to do.

Also, using different types of plastics will allow the things to be able to return to the earth, for example, and break down more efficiently as well as being able to reuse them in other products. The other bit of circularity is about your supply chain responsiveness to being able to collect things.

So I have a great business model. Someone I've interviewed on this podcast, the model that she uses is that she gives her product in bottles, and then she's able to collect the used bottles when you make a reorder. All of this is important to your customer, they need to know how to end the life of that product that they've purchased. If you have a circular model designed or some links to other companies who will provide that recycling for you, you need to communicate that. The last letter in the tech framework for supply chain resiliency is knowledge.

Knowledge is about how you're communicating with your employees, your customers, and all your stakeholders about what's key to be measured in your space around sustainability and its goals. So if we think about the UN Sustainable Development Goals and that framework of 17 goals, there's a lot there that we could be sharing and tailoring to our organisation. And this is about real education and real change as opposed to greenwashing. So it's not about CSR and PR featuring what you're doing. Because that comes under real attack. It's about making real changes, communicating but making real changes, and also communicating where you have not yet made changes and what you're planning to do.

This is where we start winning the respect of people who are interested in purchasing our products. So this brings us to the end of the tech framework. I hope that was useful in setting up how you can think about your supply chain for the future. Please follow my future episodes where I will be talking about the supply chain in more detail. Thanks so much for listening.

Thanks for listening. This podcast was brought to you today by career sketching with Katherine Ann Byam and The Space Where  Ideas Launch. Career Sketching is a leadership development and coaching brand offering personalised career transition and transformation services. The Space Where  Ideas Launch offers high-performance group leadership coaching and strategy facilitation to businesses in the food and health sectors.

To find out more contact Katherine Ann Byam on LinkedIn.

032 Transcending Work

032 Transcending Work

About this Episode

These are the notes from the TED Styled talk I gave at the Bee Inspired Event in April 2021. Enjoy this session.

Subscribe to Where Ideas Launch

Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam  0:01  

From what I can tell, we have always believed in stories and narratives woven into the fabric of well-being, and the identity of the society we are a part of. Many societies once thought that the world was flat. This was until philosophers and mathematicians and scientists proved otherwise. Well, for some of us at least. But the process of facilitating this transition of beliefs involved colonisation, slavery, murder, and eventually the reeducation with new stories. There are still tribes in the Amazon forest in Brazil and Venezuela, and other places around the world too to be fair, who believe that children have been fathered by all the lovers a woman takes during her pregnancy. Scientists have proven that this isn't true. But the social impact of that belief meant that all men who had relations with that woman would take a role in that child's upbringing. That child belonged to a community. 

For many of us today, we believe that a large house, a powerful car, and the ability to travel in style and in luxury are a sign of success that will attract not only more wealth, but more community and more well-being for us and our families. We believe that we can have infinite growth. We only need to put our minds to it. Growth Mindset they say. But can we really have infinite growth on a finite planet? My name is Katherine Ann Byam and I'm a business resilience strategist and leadership coach, helping leaders design a path to sustainable transformation for their businesses, careers, and lives. I am inspired in particular by one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals,  Goal No. 8 Decent Work and Economic 

Growth. And to explain what that means to me, I'm going to have to take you on a trip to 1982 in the suburbs of a tiny island, called Trinidad and Tobago. My parents were typical middle-class boomers who lived a comfortable life in a house with land and space for multiple cars and a garden. My parents did decent work. My dad was a lawyer working for the government. His promotions at the time were primarily based on his time in service. My mom was a High School teacher of Biology and food and nutrition.

My grandparents lived a life more closely linked to nature. My grandmother was not allowed to go to High School, so she lived her life as a homemaker. I never once heard her complain, though. When I was born, my grandfather was already retired. And he was the proud owner of a permaculture regenerative farm. He did not call it that, I assure you, he called it “the garden.” I remember it distinctly. His garden has beautiful fruit trees for as far as my tiny eyes can see. And as an adult, it looks smaller than I remember. But at the time, that place meant the world of adventure to me. He had an area for growing beans and pulses, an area for flowers, an area for chickens to rummage around and to feed off the land. The first time I witnessed a chicken being killed was in that garden.

 My granddad would take the chicken and carry it to an area out of the eye range of the other hens and the coop. He would slide the entire chicken into a paint can with a hole at the bottom, and then hold the chicken’s wings and legs in place with that can so he could swiftly separate its head from its body. The chickens don't die immediately with this method. But they also do not suffer for very long. This would probably disturb most five-year-olds who live in cities today. But at the time, although it was difficult to watch, it fit the context in which he lived and in which that chicken lived. My grandfather was a sustainable farmer and sources 40% of his food from his garden. Bread, rice, and fish was still sourced from the grocery. What happened to the chicken felt like a natural part of being on a farm. We eat fresh eggs laid by the chickens who eat a bit of corn and a lot of bugs. My grandfather did decent work. His reward was seeing his garden grow and sharing the fruits of that labour with his family and his neighbours, who in turn also shared the fruits of their labour. Much of the local community with sustainable farmers.

No one would walk past my grandparents while they’re relaxing on their porch in the evenings, for example, without stopping to say hello, having a chat, or coming to collect or to receive or to give food. I'll be honest with you, I didn't know how much I valued that part of my upbringing until very much later. 

I wanted to take on the world. When I got my first job at a multinational company, I was earning more money than my mom did. Within a few years, I was earning more than everyone in my family. I was travelling the world and acquiring knowledge of how to make decisions that favour the shareholder of a major corporation.

 At one point, I would fly through Miami twice every month, each time asking the travel agent to schedule the connecting flight late enough, so I could take a trip to Dolphin Mall for shopping. My footprint is huge. And even though I donated much of my clothing to charity, I still have four suitcases and Ziploc things that I could hope to wear again. Sure, I have a Finance and Audit background, I prepared financial statements. I sat on the board’s Audit Committee. I travelled to more than 50 International offices to review our business practices. I had decent work and a massive consumeristic appetite. When I joined the company, there were more than 120,000 people globally. By 2010, the number halved.

 My grandmother died in 2010. Seven years after my granddad, she was 92. I learned that while I sat quietly on my own in a church in Santiago de Compostela. intervene. I received a voicemail message and I knew instinctively what that message was going to say. At the time, I was actually there because I was beginning to wonder if I made the right decision leaving my family behind for the glamour of life and work in Europe. My view of decent work had begun to fracture.

By 2014. I was on a list, one of those lists that no one likes to be on. There was a list for information and consultancy. There was a chance I would be made redundant. I kept my job. Yet I started to wonder what else I could be doing? That's not this that would bring me more joy, and be better for the planet. Work is decent if you as the individual believe that it is. My grandfather was a police officer before he retired, but his dream was to form a garden. He changed his life immediately and completely upon retirement. And he continued to work in that garden for 20 years until his death.

 That garden never paid him a cent. But it gave him a great community and food on the table. My grandmother was never paid for her entire life for her work. But she was fulfilled by raising and caring for her family. She showered us with completely unconditional love. I was paid very well for my work. But I felt a growing misalignment between what I valued and what my employer valued. And when I went off to do an MBA, and during one of my classes, it was the first time I realised that my income was in the top 1% globally, and the top 5% in the UK. Before that, I felt like I wasn't making much money relative to my international peers, for example. I started to understand the systemic inequalities that are creating further and further distance from the richest, let's say 2000 plus billionaires of the world and the poorest 20%. Income inequality is an important subject we need to address. 

And sooner rather than later, we tend at times to conflate climate change with sustainability. Yet sustainability could be understood as an entire system of economics and activities that maintains or improves the quality of life of people on our planet. The very foundation of our lives has been disrupted by reality. Yes, reality. Many of us esteem to be wealthy, financially, in real assets, and in our relationships perhaps. Yet we ignore the signs that things are not going as planned. And that while we build toward Maslow's idea of self-actualization, the base of our pyramid is fracturing under the weight of our desires. Food is impacted by toxic chemicals, significant water use, and antibiotics.

Water is impacted by industrial pollution, climate change farming methods, and simply where you live in the world. Air is impacted by toxic chemicals being released by industries and by farms, and shelter is being disrupted by the atmospheric conditions that are causing us to emit vast amounts of CO2 and CH4, and other toxicants into the air. So what can we do? The really great news is that everything, absolutely everything is open to being redesigned. So I want to call you to action today saying, “Start with you!” Recognise that sustainability is self-care. It is the care for your health and well-being. It is the care for your family's health and well-being, and others care for your community. Understand the data.

Do a baseline assessment. You can do this for your personal life by checking the World Wildlife organisation site, for example. And for your business, you can take the free assessment available on the B Corp site. This can tell you where you are across a variety of measures and help you to decide where to celebrate, and where to start taking purposeful action. Collaborate. Look for collaboration opportunities among business units or across your community that design solutions for a problem you see at work or where you live. Diversity created the rich planet we live in today and inclusion will help us save it. Innovate. Remember that innovation doesn't have to be new to the world.

Most of man's best inventions have come from observing nature. Observe solutions and other spheres that can be repurposed, adapted, and used to address new solutions in your area. Do you remember the book, “So You Got Innovation?” It was one of the greatest books I read during my MBA. And in that book, there was an example of an Indian potter, who designed a fridge made simply from clay and water. Simple, elegant. If you have the capital to invest, think big. We live in an age where we have the most advanced tools and data are available. Much of the technology for many of the solutions that we need already exists.

Volunteer to support the transformation of urban spaces into areas for community farming and other forms of integrative activities. This concept of “interbeing” is something that I think is so powerful. We are connected to the flora, the fauna, and the people who live around us. And we need to find ways to preserve that connection. Where should you work? I say work for companies who have taken a stand. But you don't have to. You can do things where you are and change and influence a better tomorrow. The companies who have taken a stand - I can bring some examples for you, Patagonia. They were one of the forerunners in B Corp assessments, and they say that we are in business to save the entire planet. Then we have our favourite bamboo roll company Who gives a crap. This one currently gives considerably to charities to support toilets for places that do not have sanitation, appropriate sanitation in Africa, for example, and also to help them repurpose that waste matter into soil manure for farming. Oatly, the oat milk brand that's disrupting the milk industry.

Then we have the Impossible burger. And that's a company that has found a way to make plant-based burgers smell and taste like the real deal. I want to leave you with this. What we believe as humans have changed and evolved any number of times throughout our history. The more we learn, the better decisions we can make. But this only works if we are willing to be curious enough to suspend our beliefs and stay in the question. We have precedent for being able to make a significant change for the better of our planet. We slowed the destruction of the ozone layer with the Montreal Protocol, for example, in 1987.

The Paris Climate Accord in 2015, has had a rocky fight for six years, with us pulling in and out of it. But we see that nations are recommitting, the global pandemic showed us that we can all slow down and even live with far less than we thought we could. This tells me we also have the ability to redesign the engines of growth. And think of it as much more than wealth in the form of physical capital, we can start to appreciate our natural capital and our social capital as well. The only limit we have in making this change a reality is our imagination. Whatever you believe you can do, believe we can all change and save the world. And we will. 

020 When Labour No Longer Matters

020 When Labour No Longer Matters

About this Episode

Ten years ago, I realised that something was broken with the way I understood the economy. It wasn’t because I didn’t know the theory. It was that the theory stopped making sense to me.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals came into being in January 2016, and act as the foundational lens under which to review the sustainability of our businesses, countries and entire planet.

The goal that threads my business together is 8 - Decent work and Economic growth

Subscribe to Where Ideas Launch

Episode Notes

About 10 years ago, I realised that something was fundamentally broken with the way I understood business, governance and the economy. It wasn’t because I didn’t know the theory. It was that the theory stopped making sense to me.

I left my employers on a sabbatical year, not to travel the world (as perhaps I should have done) but to do an MBA. It was in that MBA year, that the idea behind the sustainable strategy business that I run was born.

My MBA was mostly traditional, and mostly taught the same old methods and processes, but for 3 glimmers of hope. I specialised in innovation, as this was clearly going to be the source for the radical changes the planet needs, and then I deeply sought to understand geo-politics, competitive advantage and inequality and I understood that my instincts were not wrong.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals came into being in January 2016, and act as the foundation lenses under which to review the sustainability of our businesses, countries and entire planet.

One goal became passion in particular, although all are in some way key to my business, but this was goal Number 8, Decent work and Economic growth.

My business connects with this goal in various ways. My work with entrepreneurs is intended to support small and micro businesses to lift off with support throughout the journey.

My work with larger businesses and business executives, is to raise this heightened awareness of the deepening role that they will play in a future of sustainability and full transparency.

This podcast aims to bring these worlds together.

Let’s flip back to this topic of Decent work and Economic Growth.

Growth is something we all want and expect, it seems almost hard coded in our DNA to seek it. Yet growth is unsustainable without reviewing the way we look at the factors of production.

Some of the targets in this goal cover topics such as a focus on sectors that encourage employment opportunities such as sustainable tourism, opportunities for entrepreneurship and developing small and micro businesses through access to finance.

The pandemic has not only decimated the tourism sector and events industries, but it has also accelerated the exit from traditional jobs, retail and others, right along side a faster pace of digital transformation.

If you are over 30, you probably learned about the 4 factors of production, Land, Labour, Capital, and Enterprising spirit.

Yet here’s the thing. Labour is diminishing as a factor, while capital is accelerating, especially when it comes to technology.

Our system is set to destroy itself by destroying the middle class that fuels the global engine of growth, in addition to the fundamental real resources on which growth still depends.

Since the education of the 80s and 90s, we now understand capital in 6 more granular ways, and this may begin to shed some light on where we can go from here.

The traditional definition of capital included Finance, manufactured capital, and Intellectual capital. The modern more nuanced forms of capital include Human capital, social and relationship capital and Natural capital.

We have never asked governments or businesses to take account of the way they deplete the latter 3 forms of capital in their activities, but Environmental Social and Governance Reporting is beginning to change the playing field for businesses everywhere.

What’s inside ESG?

45% of boards reported in 2020 that ESG is a regular part of their update. This is good news, even if there’s still some way to go.

Under the environment pillar, we include topics such as climate change (Carbon emissions, Product carbon footprint, financial environmental impact, Climate change vulnerability) Natural resources  (Water stress, Bio diversity and land use, Raw Material Sourcing), Pollution and Waste (Toxic emissions and waste, Packaging waste, electronic waste) Environment opportunity (Opportunities in Clean Tech, Opportunities in Green Building, Opportunities in Renewable Energy)

Under the social pillar we have human capital (Labor management, Health & Safety, Human Capital development, Supply Chain Labour standards) Product Liability (Product safety and Quality, Chemical safety,             Financial product safety, Privacy and data security, Responsible investment, health & demo risk,) Stakeholder opposition (controversial sourcing), Social Opportunity (Access to communication, Access to Finance, Access to health care, Opportunities in Nutrition and Health.

Finally the Governance Pillar (Corporate Governance – Board Diversity, Executive Pay, Ownership & Accounting) and Corporate Behavior (Business Ethics, Anti Competitive Practices, Corruption and Instability Financial System Instability Tax Transparency)

Some might argue that Tax Transparency isn’t taking it far enough as an example, but these are meaty topics to get into for boards that so far have been used to having things all their own way.

ESG has been introduced to help stakeholder groups understand how ESG risks are being considered in the business strategy of the world’s largest corporations. Not providing an ESG report can harm a companys valuation, its access to capital and its reputation in the market.

ESG is a move toward having a more long-term view of a firm based on its decisions today. Its supporting the cultural shift from the quarterly short term decision making to long term impact. Paul Polman former CEO of Unilever famously didn’t hold quarterly reporting in high regard, as had his sight set on a more long term view of the company, as a long time advocate for more sustainable practices.

The rating agencies supporting these valuations include MSCI, Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), Sustainalytics, and S&P Global are among the most prominent.

From a reporting perspective, what is material in a company that has truly adopted ESG in its way of doing businesses is Financial Materiality and Social Materiality, and they need to consider this impact across the full range of their stakeholders.

The guidance on ESG has been created by some reputable bodies, including The Sustainable Accounting Standards Board, The Carbon Disclosure Project CDP,  the GRI or the Global reporting initiative and the TCFD – Task force on climate related Financial Disclosures.

90% of S&P 500 companies are publishing CSR and or ESG reporting, although the level to which this is embedded can certainly be questioned.

What these considerations reveal is that we can no longer think in silos, and a decision maker’s role cannot be discipline specific. To embed change, a new decision making framework is needed across the board, including the nature of the information and data flows within that organisation, quantitative and qualitative.

The other hot topic is around the knowledge and capability gaps that need to be addressed throughout the organisation structure; data science isn’t the only important skill.

The implications for you dear listener.

If you are a sustainable business owner and not publicly listed you are under no obligation to comply, but I would recommend knowing your numbers anyway, as this is a good exercise for us all. Learning what and how to measure our carbon footprint and social impact would be powerful.

If you are a senior executive at a FTSE or S&P 500 firm, you should familiarise yourself with the guides around ESG and circular economy, and learn ways in which you can make a difference.

How is your board and business adapting to implement and embed ESG in its way of working? I would love to know.

Connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me what you think!

016 The Journey Ahead

016 The Journey Ahead

About this Episode

The Journey ahead – The lessons and the Opportunities.

The biggest lesson to take from 2020 is we have the ability of foresight, yet we ignore the signals. We allow our drive for instant gratification to blind our vision ahead. And we don’t adequately prepare because we believe our money protect us. Yet many are beginning to realise that money for retirement is not necessarily the thing that will feed us, shelter us and keep us safe.

Futurists like Amy Webb and Bernard Marr combine their understanding of history, science and trends, as well as risk management parameters to come up with reasonable scenarios that we can put in place to provide greater assurance of resilience.

In 2021, things will most certainly be tougher before they get better. The economic and social fabric repair still has a long journey ahead, with more viral strains of covid, and the slow pace to deploy vaccines, we know there’ll be more disruption, and someone will have to pay the cost of the stimulus packages that many well-off countries have been living on.

Katherine Ann Byam (MBA, FCCA) is a business resilience strategist, consultant and career coach. She’s the founder of Dieple, Digitally Enabling People, A digital transformation consultancy firm based in the UK helping start-ups to scale up.  She supports leaders in tackling design challenges that create and sustain business an professional growth in an evolving global marketplace.  She hosts Where Ideas Launch - the podcast for the sustainable innovator an a career show on Youtube called Harnessing the Courage to Lead. 

Kate spends her time between the coasts of south England and west France, enjoying writing as a creative outlet.

Subscribe to Where Ideas Launch

Episode Transcript

The biggest lesson to take from 2020 is we have the ability of foresight, yet we ignore the signals. We allow our drive for instant gratification to blind our vision ahead. And we don’t adequately prepare because we believe our money protect us.

Yet many are beginning to realise that money for retirement is not necessarily the thing that will feed us, shelter us and keep us safe.

Futurists like Amy Webb and Bernard Marr combine their understanding of history, science and trends, as well as risk management parameters to come up with reasonable scenarios that we can put in place to provide greater assurance of resilience.

In 2021, things will most certainly be tougher before they get better. The economic and social fabric repair still has a long journey ahead, with more viral strains of covid, and the slow pace to deploy vaccines, we know there’ll be more disruption, and someone will have to pay the cost of the stimulus packages that many well-off countries have been living on.

Expect health and politics to continue centre stage. The big things to watch are:

The transition of power in the United States

The UK’s transition to a fully sovereign land with its own trade deals.

The growing humanitarian crisis in lesser developed countries all around the world, especially impacting the poor, women, and children.

Everyone will need to manage their resources in this lean period and we can hope for more home spun frugal and sustainable solutions to emerge.

The Opportunities for you

Support local economies — the regions and districts where you live.

Seek out post pandemic strategic partnerships. Look forward to diversifying even further your business / employment portfolios.

Embed further redundancies in your supply chains.

Repositioning your brands, products, services across multiple social strata, as the middle class will take an initial beating. Make strategic decisions about how you compete — choosing your allies and foes in business wisely.

Big Initiatives for 2021

Everyone is waiting for that collective shift of mindset a new year brings. In theory we are already riding on the shirt tales of hope post-Christmas. January is a month of purpose and hope, so we should ready ourselves to ride that wave.

We’ve been dabbling in Virtual reality for years, but the age of the gamer is upon us. Improved digital user experience is really heating up as a trend.

I for one am really excited about haptic suits, even though I’m no gamer. I recently watched ready player one — a 2018 movie and got excited by this feedback loop, although the idea of haptic suits has existed in some form or other since 1994.

We’re likely to experience greater interest in Agroponics as sustainability claims its seat at all households and tables.

The battle for the truth and its conflict with knowledge will rage on without question.

Look forward to anti-trust action and fractionally fairer tax regimes to deal with digital juggernauts.

Health will continue to be centre stage, as covid has woken up the possibility for greater surveillance in this area.

Expect new economic fiscal measures to address growing global debt; we are not yet ready to change our systems of governing and assessing value. This will mean more corporate restructuring, higher taxes, and pressure on employment and naturally questions about the future of work and employment.

Protecting the rights of the individual employee will be more complicated in an age of increasing remote first work. For both employees and entrepreneurs, the competition in the marketplace will become even tougher, relationships even more important, and relevant skills the defining factor.

Travel will return with more invasive conditions and surveillance structures.

People will be craving better digital experiences, or off-grid alternatives.

Expect more cybercrime, and offline.

The Olympics. Will bring us some hope.

By the end of 2021, the new directions should be clear as we look to the horizon again. We will be in a constant state of learning, as the shelf life of “knowledge” as we know it becomes shorter and shorter.

Be ready.

 

000 Exploring the Question - What Problems Do You Want to Solve?

000 Exploring the Question - What Problems Do You Want to Solve?

Where Ideas Launch – The Podcast for the Sustainable Innovator

Every one of us can be the change. In fact, everyone of us must. The most important thing we can do is stay in the question.

Where Ideas Launch aims to answer the tough questions of how do we sustain our world, by asking deeper and better questions. It aims to prompt change not by staying in the analysis, but by originating a new genesis.

This podcast:

  1. Challenges the status quo: show you how to speak truth to power, in a way that sparks momentum for change.
  2. Explore creativity from the eyes of educators, business people, entrepreneurs, and artists.
  3. Examines sustainable business models, impact models and other ways to support the UN sustainable development goals.

Join us every week to look at our shared future from a new perspective, so that we understand the questions, that give rise to better ones.

Interested in reviewing your Sustainability Strategy?

Get in touch with me on LinkedIn?