069 Waste to Wealth

About this Episode

Roz Edwards has been a business owner now for 30 years, initially in African Art and now with a collection of thousands of mannequins rescued from landfill.

Roz started Mannakin from nothing, not even the mannequins, but she was determined to use her business acumen and creativity to create a meaningful sustainable business. Whilst researching mannequins she found an opportunity to create a business out of hiring them, to provide for her children while freeing herself from the restrictions of poverty.

Today, Mannakin Hall in Lincolnshire houses a vast collection of mannequins to hire, the majority of which has been diverted from landfill. The unusual scenery within the grounds has created a popular film location, and a major source of Roz’s wealth and business growth. Roz has also started Club Mannakin to help independent, creative business owners grow and scale.

We talked about:

Her growing youtube following of people inspired by her story (over 1mn views)

What it's like starting an idea (circular economy) way before it's time had come.

The challenges and successes in growing and scaling the business

Tips for sustainable business owners just getting started

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam 0:03
Roz, welcome to where Ideas Launch!

Roz Edwards 1:37
Hey, Katherine, thanks so much for having me on here. So exciting.

Katherine Ann Byam 1:40
Really great to have you. And great that your video on YouTube is absolutely blowing up, right? How many views are you up to today?

Roz Edwards 1:47
And I've not checked because I thought I'd just give it a bit of a break. Because I have been constantly checking. It's going up by about 3000 views a day, which is just a It's just incredible. So I think the last time I checked it was on 1,011,000 and something so oh

Katherine Ann Byam 2:06
my goodness, it's incredible. So what we're talking about listeners is that Roz had a film crew come up to her mannequin empire. And it's just been off the charts how people have been responding to what she's been doing. So So Roz, I'd like you to share with my listeners, the origin story of mannequin and how you got started.

Roz Edwards 2:27
And there's a deliberate misspelling of the word mannequin. And there's a little story behind that. And that is, I was going to be a retail consultant. I had no intention ever of working with mannequins, it never even entered my mind. But I was putting content on my website all about retail strategy. And I thought, well, mannequins are a big part of retail, but I've never worked with them. So let's start researching.

And I basically put a page on my website that said, I've got mannequins to hire, which I didn't have my telephone number, and then just some pictures of some mannequins that I knew well, I could buy some, you know, if it was just like, let's let's just put this out there on the internet and see what happens. within 24 hours, my phone started ringing with people wanting mannequins, like in London next week. And of course, I didn't have any, so I had to sort of lie and just say, Oh, I'm terribly sorry. They're all out on hire at the moment. So then, it basically carried on and you know, for the last was for nearly 14 years now.

The phones never stopped ringing. But in those early days, I was operating off of Roz Edwards, just my own website. But I thought, No, this is it needs its own name. So being a little bit of an expert with websites, and SEO and everything, my initial thing was, well, I should try to get mannequins, the correct spelling, you know .com.co.uk and all the rest of it. So of course, that domain name had gone. So I went for misspellings. And then when I saw that, I could do Mannakins spelt quite phonetically. And then I broke that word down into two, which was Manna Food from heaven. And kin - kindred spirit. And I just thought that this is perfect name is absolutely a perfect name for it. Because I was literally I had nothing. I was living in a council house on benefits. No job. I'd returned from Milan after living in Malawi for 10 years. And really low self esteem. But I had all this business experience. It's like, nope, we're going to, we're going to rebuild, we're going to do something. And it probably took me about two years before I believed that I could actually I can make money out of dummies. And but it's yeah, it's it's a wonderful gift from heaven. Basically,

Katherine Ann Byam 5:02
Congratulations on all your success, it's immense how you've managed to turn this into a mannequin empire, tell us a bit about the business model or models that your mannequin operation uses, and how your success has been over the years.

Roz Edwards 5:16
So I mean, obviously, in the early days, it was taking very, very little money. And the biggest turnover we've ever had in the year is just shy of half a million pounds, which is phenomenal, really, I mean, even I couldn't quite believe that. And but basically, the way that mannequin works is, it has a huge collection of mannequins, so they're all tidied up, you know, made to look beautiful. And then they're advertised on my website for hire.

And we do sell some but the, I'd say maybe 70% of the business is hiring. So they all look lovely, and they go out in boxes get delivered lead a much more exciting life than I do. And then when they come back in, of course, they've got fingerprints all over the maybe some of the joints that they've got a joint for example, that fits the the arm and the hand together, you know, maybe that's been busted, you know, whilst they're using it, they haven't quite taken good care of it. So then they come back in, and I've got what we call the, the fixing room, for want of a better name.

But in the early days, my children nicknamed it Dolby city, because I actually used to do this in my kitchen from home, fix the mannequins and get them all ready to go back out again. So in actual fact, on the doors to the fixing room, it doesn't say Dolby city because you know, my kids name that after the TV programme.

So they all get prepared. So that can involve Yep, putting bits back together again, sanding them down, cleaning them. And then I've got a spray Bay. So they go into the spray Bay, they're wheeled on, like clothing, Rails, those are, they're all hanging upside down.

And they go in front of the spray, they they have a new coat of paint, if they don't need all of it, they might just need a waft over some of the more than others. And then they get packed. And they go back into their boxes again, and they're ready to ready to go and have fun.

Katherine Ann Byam 7:17
What challenges have you faced or because it sounds like you haven't had challenges, what would you say has been responsible for your success.

Roz Edwards 7:25
So a really, really big challenge that I met. And I didn't find a huge amount of help out there for this either, was, you find that you get to a certain stage with a business. And you have got a certain amount of turnover, as well, and a certain amount of burnout. So you find yourself doing everything because you're, you know, you're a sole trader, but it was a limited company, but a sole person working within that business.

And so there was a point where I'm driving vans into London to deliver like big quantities of mannequins. But I've got my headset on with connected to my phone, because I'm also the receptionist. So then I would get to a lay by and if I couldn't answer the phone in time, I would obviously phone them back my little notepad and pen in the van, and writing all of that down, and then having to come back.

And obviously I've got to, you know, replenish the stock after it's been used. And it was quite exhausting. So my biggest challenge really was, I can't do any more myself, this can't go any bigger. But it can go bigger because the demand is there. So then it was a case of right and compartmentalising as the right word to use everything. So okay, let's have someone on the reception and doing know answering the phone, doing the sales doing all of the admin, right, that's one person's job.

Now let's get someone fixing the mannequins. Now let's get someone spraying the mannequins. And so at one point I had about 10 staff. But that is another thing, again, is bringing all of these people in because all of a sudden, you've changed from being this kind of really exciting times of running your own business and making money, too.

I've got to be like the staff police now. You know. So anyway, what I did is I went and took a course in management and that helped enormously. But I found my role had changed, you know, because I'm really I'm now properly the director, and I'm directing everything. So that that was a big challenge, but a huge amount of success and you know, massive amount of wealth came out of that just at the right time. So it all pays off. It all pays off. Nothing's easy, otherwise everyone would be doing it.

Katherine Ann Byam 9:54
Absolutely. No. And I totally get that it's a big jump once you start bringing people on because as you say it's a completely different job. It's a completely different role. And not all of us want to do that role.

Roz Edwards 10:06
Yeah. And we don't have the experience, we don't have those skills. I mean, there were times where I really felt that How the hell am I going to do this? You know, because I don't know how to manage somebody. So I learned. That's what you do. So you've just quickly get on and you learn,

Katherine Ann Byam 10:22
Really outstanding. And I want to tap into the circular economy principle that you're running your business on, I can imagine that when you started, there wasn't a lot of talk about the circular economy, how did you influence clients choices in this way.

Roz Edwards 10:36
So it that is actually quite an ongoing battle, because it can come down to price. But it can also come down to almost like people's greed with things, they want to possess things. So they don't necessarily see until you know, I've spoken to them, how hiring can benefit them. And of course, as I've just explained that process, you know, the mannequin comes in, it goes here, here, here, and it goes out again. So they're constantly spinning round and round and round that there isn't more of a circular business model there, I think to show. But the whole mannequin industry is linear.

Let's go and get them all made in China quite often, somewhere in the Far East, there are other places that make them but that's, you know, the main manufacturing point, let's ship them all that way, right across the world. And then we'll have them in the shops. And then usually, maybe I think the cycle is gone longer now, but it used to sort of be every four years, right? Okay, we'll get rid of those mannequins now.

And then we'll go and get some more. So you've just got them, they're all doing this journey like this all the time. And what hiring does, is what we've already got the mannequins here, let's cut out all of that transport. We don't need it, because they are here. And getting that message across is easier with the smaller independent businesses. But when it comes to the big guys, they can't quite see it.

Some can some of you know someone now working with doing it. But generally, it's, you know, like I said, they they've been transported, they'll be used for however many years, and then crushed and go to landfill. So my job very much is persuading my clients that look, they're here. They're, they're beautiful. And in actual fact, because we're renovating them all the time, every time they you know, they've been out and they come back in, they're better than these ones that you can buy, you know, from from the Far East.

And then let me see what I can do about all of this waste and this rubbish. So I got a phone call from someone who said, Oh, I see what you're doing. We read this as quite a few years ago now. But I see what you're doing. We've got about 100 mannequins that are going to go in the bin. But the owner doesn't really want that to happen. They want them to be reused. Would you take them? So I said, Well, yeah, of course, how many again, he said, 100. And then over the space of the next four months, and this is what I was buying mannequin Hall as well at the time.

So thank goodness, because 25,000 of them turned up. There was one Arctic Chuck after another. And I remember phoning him and just saying, Are you having a laugh? And he said, Well, do you not want them because they are going to be crushed if you don't want them? And I said, Well, okay, send them. Because there's an issue here. There's a problem. And I want to fix it.

Katherine Ann Byam 13:36
It's so amazing. I just love this story. And I want to talk a little bit about mannequin mountain and and that location in Lincolnshire, can you tell my listeners what they can experience when they visit?

Roz Edwards 13:48
And we've had a couple of horror films made there. So you can imagine, really, it's it's most horror films, they start with maybe you know, two girls are in a car, and the car breaks down and it's raining, and it's dark. And they live too long. They find this place, I think, Oh, well go in there and use the phone because you know, it's out in the middle of nowhere, and there's no one there, their phones aren't working and all the rest of it. And then they obviously they wander in and discover that they've made the wrong you know, they've taken the wrong term, basically, it's very much that kind of vibe to it. So there's some beautiful big gates that you drive through.

And then you're just hit by which one of my friends said it's a visual assault, basically, that's what it is. You don't notice the mountain when you come in because like you come in and it's just to the left of you. So quite often people come in and then when they're driving out, they go, Oh my goodness. All of those may say Yeah, and so there are the buildings themselves that used to be a secret airbase for the Americans during the Second World War.

So that's all quiet exciting story as well, and but there are literally like, you know, mannequins all over some sorted some waiting to be sorted. And then yeah, there's all sorts of creepy looking buildings. fantastic views out the back when you get round to the back. Absolutely gorgeous views across the Lincolnshire ridge. And so it's a really beautiful location. And then yeah, and then you would wander around or drive around because you can drive all the way around. And then there's just the biggest pile of mannequins that you've that anybody has ever seen. I mean, I'm sure not many people have even seen a small pile. But this is it's colossal. I think someone recently told me you can see it from space

Katherine Ann Byam 15:42
for. And I know that you also have a Halloween feature as well.

Roz Edwards 15:47
Yeah. So we get people in and in the daytime, and, and almost everybody says it. And that is, I bet it's really scary here at night. And so I went, I went down to Somerset, and it was at the time it was 2015. And it was the time when Banksy had launched Disneyland. So I went in and had a look around there and totally fell in love with the whole thing. And I looked at the size of that site and thought, Well, that's about the same size as mine, I could do something like this.

And then that would provide the solution, if you like for all of those people is that I bet it's scary here at night. So what I did is I followed banks his whole way that he promoted it as well with you know, there's trip hazards, there's no lighting, you know, there's no toilets, all of this kind of thing, come with a torch, you know, prepare a little survival bag, you know, in case you get abducted by mannequins, and people loved it. They absolutely loved it.

So that's, you know, gone on for several years, when it came to 2020, of course, and all the fun that we've had there. We were all in the tears at that time. And everyone had to still stay in the family bubbles. Somebody said to me, you're going to do the Halloween this year? And I said, Well, I can't. How can I do it? So we've got this road, which at the time, obviously had loads of mannequins in the way. So I said, right, let's go clear that because people can drive round.

And that's what we do. We had a really successful event that year. And so many people thanked us for it, because we'd all been shut in for such a long time. The whole feeling that they could come out and be safe as well. I mean, I made up a story that there are child mannequins on the loose with teeth, you know, and they're very dangerous. So do not get out of your vehicle. I mean, obviously, I had the environmental health people at the council phoned me obviously have concerns with an event going on during COVID.

And I had them in absolute fits of laughter. They just said, we've got nothing to worry about with you, Ross. Just go ahead with it. It sounds brilliant. And then last year, we people were able to walk around again. So good. It's good.

Katherine Ann Byam 18:02
I want to wrap up with a final question, which is there are a lot of people who want to start sustainable businesses or have started them, and they're struggling with their growth.

Do you have any advice from the journey you've been on? Bringing the circular principle to life?

Roz Edwards 18:18
Yeah, so one thing that I think we can all do, which perhaps we don't, is just constantly be on the look, if you haven't already got a product that could be circular. Just keep your eyes peeled, because there are things out there that nobody is actually doing yet. And what's been great about mannequin is, man, I remember when I started someone saying, Oh, you say you're going to do shop fittings now and counters for shops and things. And they said, No, I'm not going to get distracted by all of this.

It's just going to be mannequins. Because I mean, even within that niche, there's no other film location, Halloween events, and people being able to stay over in the mannequin graveyard at night. That's one of my next things I'm about I'm about to launch. And then just establish that really sort of simple, easy brand, right from the beginning. I mean, when I started, I thought if this isn't going to go big, I'm going to know quite shortly. And so I can change the idea and start to do something else. So yes, I'd registered the domains. I registered it as a limited company.

And I also bought the trademark as well. So I own the word mannequin, because nobody on this earth was going to get in my way, you know, so I was very, very determined. And all of those things are just so important. I've seen that they you know, a few people that are they haven't taken those steps, which you know, and it because they didn't know they weren't advised that that's what they should do. And then they've got so far with their business.

I need to find that there's someone bigger out there doing it. They're not the same but very similar. And they've trademarked the name. So what do you do that You know, how can you move forward, you've got to change and rebuild. And that, you know, having to get to that point is, is devastating, actually. But also, the other thing is to, is to think big. So interestingly, with my business, I knew that there were other manikin companies turning over in excess of a million. So the numbers game for me was, it's open, there's no, I only need this amount of money or what have you.

But interestingly, what happened is, yes, the turnover hit, you know, half a million, I've got all of these staffed worry about, it turned into this other thing, and I could see it going into something that I didn't necessarily want. And so I have actually scaled it back now, you know, with lots of different processes in place, so that, like all the automation, or the website is automated for people to go and hire mannequins and everything. So it's so important that we don't just start something and, and just get carried away in the here. And now we have to have that vision, we definitely have to have that vision and those solid foundations of things like, yes, it's a limited company.

Even the VAT return, I've registered for VAT when I was turning over 100 pounds a month, you know, the VAT threshold is obviously it's 85,000 pounds or something. Most people wait until they get to there. But then you've got to either add 20% onto your prices, or you've got to absorb that, you know, because it's an extra cost. So all of these sorts of things, but there's got to be foresight in it. You know, there's got to be a vision there of actually why why are we doing this? Why are we doing this?

Katherine Ann Byam 21:40
And I guess if you're if you're selling to companies, or hiring to companies, etc, then having that fact charges negligible to them. So it all makes sense if you design it that way. So finally, tell my listeners how they can find you.

Roz Edwards 21:53
So mannakin.com, so that's MANNAKIN because everyone has a problem with spelling, even the correct word of mannequins. And I've got a really, really beautiful lead magnet that explains why the mannequins are sustainable and circular. And what kind of mannequin you would need for different situations. And then a reference to the extra bits and pieces that I've got going on including club mannequin as well.

Katherine Ann Byam 22:24
Wonderful. I'm going to leave all the links for them. Thank you so much Ross for gracing us with your presence today. I know you're a very important YouTube superstar. Thanks for joining me.

Roz Edwards 22:36
Thank you.

Katherine Ann Byam 22:40
Season Four of where radius launch was brought to you today by Katherine Ann Byam business resilience and strategy consulting services. Katherine provides business assessments and strategic support to help guide your business toward a netzero future. Get in touch with Katherine Ann Byam on LinkedIn

046 Green Commerce

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Episode Notes

Commercialisation

Preparing to go to market is separate from going to market; there are a host of other decisions that need to be made at this stage, principally around audience building and or client attraction. For product marketers, it includes critical supply chain decisions, as well as the choice of commercial strategy.

For service businesses, as well as product businesses it is about audience building, generating a buzz and excitement for your product, being visible and discoverable online, and the different paid and organic means to realise these objectives.

In this episode we will be covering:

Operations Teams
Launching
Social Media and Organic Traffic as well as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Paid Traffic – Advertising
Digital Technology you need in your business.

Launching

Launching is quite different from making your product or service available. It is about building anticipation with an audience you are actively building. Creating a sense of momentum toward a goal is the main thing here, as you don’t want people to purchase your product and not use it, this is waste, whether it be digital waste, or physical waste. You want to heighten awareness of the problems your product or service solves, or the lasting joy it will bring to the consumer, either through celebrating their ability to make responsible choices, or having something that lasts much longer.

Entire industries and a lot of wealth in the world has accrued to businesses that launch things that go from shop to landfill in mere seconds after entering the hands of the consumer. All the supply chain costs, poor wage rates, endless pollution, that create problems for city councils to take care of.

Launching a green business has to excite people about being responsible. It has to help them raise the lid on green practices that feel good, as opposed to unethical marketing, sales, and product strategies that leave us with a moment of pleasure and eternal regret.

I hope I painted that picture pretty clearly!

It’s case study time. I use some of my case studies not as examples of model businesses, but to explain the principles of what we can learn from the example. My first case study is Apple.

When Apple launches a product, people queue up physically or virtually to buy it.

There’s a big reveal, a demonstration of contemporary design concepts and all their marketing effort is directed at this single focussed product of the launch – They do not talk about any of their other products, although they still sell other products, by bringing audiences to their store or web page.

This is what launching can feel like for a green business if you study the art of making it happen for ethical businesses.

Maybe you don’t have the means to do a launch on the scale of Apple, but you can do a well staged launch using the audiences that you have. Wherever they are. This is what Season 3 of this podcast is for me, it's exciting my listeners to start amazing green businesses that excite people.

The fundamental principles of launching are to have a sustained effort at one period to launch your product or service to the world.

These are the broad steps you should consider.

Establish a launch timetable based on the size of the audience you need to build, and the strategies you will be using to build it.
Get your launch assets ready, with content plans, content pieces, behind the scenes, how I made this, gift promotions, incentives, pre-launch vouchers, info sheets and checklists, quizzes all prepared in advance.
Design the launch experience, and the tangible or intangible outcome or experience you want your customers to have.
Determine all your in-person engagements to grow interest before the launch – Which forums you will be speaking in, and how you will show up in those forums. Curate these well to ensure you meet the audiences who would be interested in what you do.
Start talking about the key points of interest for the consumer through questions, sharing of stories, market research type teaser questions in places where your ideal audiences spend time. This can be digital or physical spaces.
Invite the audience to join some form of launch event. This can be in the form of:

o Make it with me /or do it with me challenge for 3 to 5 days

o A bundled offer – potentially with collaborators

o A party of some kind that uses your product or service

o A limited time promotion

o A summit or series of speakers.

o A marketing campaign through ads or other

o A Masterclass

o A waitlist

Share real experiences and or testimonials about your product or service.
Continue to build credibility by showing them what your product or service can do.
Be consistent, share stories, but pursue fair marketing.
Check your metrics throughout, to understand if any boosts are needed to get visibility right.

This is an intense process, but this is what it takes to launch well.

You do not have to launch in a big, controlled rhythm like this, but you are likely to generate more long-term traffic and sustainable income this way, than having to promote your product or service every week.

A sustainable business must not only be sustainable for the planet. It must also be sustainable for you as the world or your community needs to benefit from the existence of your service or product.

Your values are key to helping you drive the outcomes you want for both the business and the planet. Building an audience is the most underestimated but critical element that we underestimate because we believe that people share our purpose and our passion.

The challenge with audience building is trust. If you start something new, even people who know you have reservations about trusting you.

In this internet age, it has really become self-fulfilling at times, as the bigger your brand gets, the more people trust you, but if you are not yet on the growth ladder, you need to find ways to get on it.

For all our planet friendly intentions, we still need to compete, sometimes with each other, but more significantly with brands who do things in less ethical ways.

If we plan to live and eat from our business, we need to make it viable, which includes competing with others, or finding the underserved niche, and sharing with them how your product or service will transform their outcomes.

The better you get at organic growth, the lower you can get your prices, but advertising as a strategy may be needed to build the initial audience, so consider those strategies well.

Throughout the experience of your launch, you need to have considered and prioritised customer service; this should be pre-designed but adapted as needed.

To run a sustainable purpose driven business you need strategy to achieve the objectives you have yourself in a metrics-oriented way.

And therefore, you need to document as much as possible, the whole sequence of events, with all your finances, and everything considered.

Launching summary

Launching is the most growth and revenue generating, cost concentrated way to bring a product to market.
It supports coordination of all marketing activity and messaging.
Grows supporters and fans.
Facilitates a boost in your income and recovery of development expenses.
Is it a barometer of future success?
Develops a pipeline of leads for future launches.
Concentrate your efforts.
Lobby supporters advocates and volunteers.
Leverage as many platforms as you can.

041 Idea Development

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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:

Ideal Client
Niche
Prototype and Test
Go to Market Strategy.
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:

A previous version of you.
A specific person you discovered during research.
A specific friend or former colleague whose problems you always solve.
A customer who bought from you in the past
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

Who is he/she or they based on demographic research?
What do they desire most?
What do they fear most?
What do they value? What is important?
Where do they spend time offline and online?

3 Key Takeaways

Name and create a model for your ideal client avatar. A real person is always the easiest to visualise and test!
Identify his/her personality profile so you can learn how she/he makes decisions.
Choose a niche based on the characteristics of your Ideal Client.

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.

The specific problems you want to solve for your clients.
The types of solutions your clients are looking for.
Or some specific demographic such as location.

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:

Who else serves your niche?
Is it narrow enough? If you have many big players serving your niche, you may need to narrow It further.
Where does this niche spend their time, and at what time of day?
How best to engage them?

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:

Purple – Creative, Curative, Protective, Thoughtful, Wise
Green – Calm, Soothing, reassurance
Black – Sophistication, power, formality.

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

Understanding how your ideal client, your brand and your niche come together, is essential groundwork for your strategy setting.
Do not just assume your ideal client is you or a previous version of you; actually, document their characteristics and look at which characteristics make for a suitable niche.
Do not just assume that your ideal client is interested in the environment; as in the case of tesla, the cars are also high performing and aesthetically beautiful, even elegant. I know many Tesla users of higher end models that had no interest in the sustainable side of the brand, or it was not the factor that made up their minds.

Summary - Niche

Ask yourself which niche within your ideal client’s characteristics seems underserved? Under-loved, and in need of a specific targeted solution?
What are the attributes and jobs to be done in that niche?
How accessible are they? Who is serving them today?
How can you brand them and your ideas?

3 Key Takeaways

The riches are in the niches.
Brand with your Niche and ICA in mind
You can brand your business and your product differently yet be conscious of the alignment of values and driving mission.

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.

Focus Groups – This is a controlled and therefore unnatural environment, and although it produces results, it should be supported by other forms of testing.
Test Market – Choosing a small market to deploy your first tests, in, and providing them with incentives to provide feedback.
Ethnography studies – observing in a natural environment how people use your product or service.

What to look for when testing

Define your audience.
Attract your audience.
Control for the right ICA
Test your copy – and your understanding of your ICA.
Control for competition trying to learn more about your product.
Document what you want to learn from the test.
Create space for accidental discovery/ observation.
Get critical data on pricing and positioning.
Have clear metrics in mind.
Examine causal relationships.
Observe the indirect communication.
Decide strategically on which questions in your survey need to be open-ended or closed.

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

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

Mission
Skills
Jobs to be Done.
Market Research
Idea selection

Speaker Introduction

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

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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.

038 Hack for the Planet

About this Episode

Carbon Kapture is a social enterprise start-up with a big mission: to regenerate our oceans and fight climate change. We remove CO2 by growing seaweed, then create carbon-negative products and services.

Kelp-us-save-the-planet-a-thon is a virtual hackathon hosted by Carbon Kapture. It is free to join and takes place once a quarter.

Join Howard Gunstock and me as we discuss the journey to build a viable planet based business.

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam 0:03

Today, we have a previous guest, Howard Gunstock, who is back to talk to us about the journey he's been on with Carbon Kapture. Howard, welcome to the show. Once again, thank you, thank you very much for having me on the show. It's really good to be here. And Howard, I know that we kicked something off when we had this podcast back in October, but you were just beginning to launch some of your products like your Ocean Care Bonds, etc. You were just getting loud on social media really starting to pick up the followers. And since we've had that episode, it's actually been the second most downloaded episode. You are about six people away from being the top downloaded episode, but you are gaining on the leader. So tell us about your journey since the last podcast my friend.

Howard Gunstock 1:11

It's really interesting. When we started talking about this Carbon Kapture was an embryonic idea that it's something that we're thinking about doing. And as you said, when we launched the social media on our socials back in October, and that was a strategic move that was designed to build up our portfolio of potential customers and our base. And there was a reason why I wanted a strategic move: to become effective kelp farmers. We're going to need to form alliances with businesses that already do kelp farming. Yeah, because I am not your typical kelp farmer. And what we want to try to do is to have these alliances and I had a conversation with a Kelp farmer a few months ago, a European player.

And actually, the reason why we did our stuff in October and November was purely part of this conversation. And he said, and he was saying to me, how can you develop all these farms? How are you going to do all these things and say, well, we're going to have joint ventures and partnerships. He said, Well, why did you need to do this thing with Carbon Kapture? And I said, Okay, well, this was it. If I came to you, six, six months ago and said, Hey, I want to have a kelp farm, you would say to me, "No, I'm not going to give you any of my licence, why would I half my profit?". And effectively, that's where he would be doing. But then if I come to you and say, “Hey, I've got the Carbon Kapture, this is my brand, these are the things these are the products that I'm going to do.

These are the people that follow us.” I then got some leverage to have a conversation with you about being able to help build on your business, rather than remove some quality to your business. And that's really what I want to do. We want to take a collaborative approach. And to do that we've taken an approach that we're going to build our brand. First, we're going to gain variance to what we're doing, we're gonna get a groundswell of support, and then move it forward. And that was a really powerful piece for us to try to achieve. Just the fact that I had that conversation with that kelp farmer was kind of like a seminal moment. It's like I've achieved a little bit of what I wanted to do and being a disruptor in the aquaculture industry.

So that was fascinating. The other thing that we've been doing is testing out some of our hypotheses. So I think you briefly mentioned or alluded to Ocean Care Bonds. So that's really the first milestone and that came about from the original idea of Carbon Kapture, which was, "are people prepared to put a higher power on the regenerative power of nature? Are they prepared to invest in ocean-based and nature-based solutions?" So we were meant to have Ocean Care Bonds in the beginning of December, I massively underestimated how difficult it is to mobilise a part-time team.

The only full-time person in the team is me. And my business partner, who does an incredible (big shout out to Dave Walker Nix) job of managing two jobs, managing his actual job and then his Carbon Kapture job. So we tested out Ocean Care Bonds back at the end of December. So it was meant to be for Christmas, but we managed to get it out on the 27th. So we missed the Christmas bump. And what we were doing were in effect selling advanced sales on kelp. We haven't been involved in the water yet and to see if people are prepared to put a higher price on this thing. And also thanks to the wonderful team at Alpha Geeks who put together a brilliant, brilliant digital campaign for us and also Katie Nuttall from Studio Nimble, amazing content that she produced, but we sold out of our Ocean Care Bonds in 20 days. So it was an advanced sale, not in the water, really trying to capture the imagination for 20 days. I'm like okay, that's pretty cool. But then what I really wanted to find out was, what button had I pressed?

It was we had this great campaign and we thought we knew what we're doing. But actually, in real terms, we didn't know what button we pressed to our customers. So I set about to all the customers that said, they were okay with us contacting them for marketing purposes, we contacted them. And what was really interesting was the feedback that we got from the customers. And the first thing was that people have really bored of trees. I just didn't realise that was a thing. But people are really bored of investing in trees.

The second thing that was really interesting was the people really did want to buy into something that was nature-based, the regenerative power of nature, and people really care for the ocean, like super, super care for the ocean and its health. I think there is a growing consensus of understanding that actually, as a species we are derived from the ocean that we came from, we came from apes and gyms. But before that, the evolutionary processes we came from the water, and being able to sort of know that all life came from from the oceans means we really should be taking more care of the ocean. And the final marker was, people wanted practical ways to engage in the topic “climate change,” as a topic is really abstract.

But if you take away the trees, it's a really abstract topic, you can ask people what it is. And there really is a massive swing and understanding. And in part, that's our job at Carbon Kapture to help people understand and interpret the problem in practical real terms, but actually having tangible products and services, practical ways that you can engage makes people feel like they're contributing to solving the problem. And we all know why I say we all know, I think it's i think i think it's a known fact, that groundswell people power is the reason why change happens. And I can hold those markers to sit on more, and Marcus Rashford. Clearly directive leadership, a clear call to action was is all that it takes. And actually, when you do that, effectively, and you've got your marketing on point, you can have some real meaningful impact.

Katherine Ann Byam 7:42

That's amazing. I just let you talk, I didn't want to interrupt you. Because I think it's been such a fascinating journey that you've been on. I want to get into some of the challenges now because I know that you have built this groundswell of support that you talk about. There is a movement behind you. There's definitely energy behind the brand of Carbon Kapture. And it's exciting, like people are excited to hear about you. Tell me about some of the challenges that you're currently facing in the scaling journey of what you're trying to build.

Howard Gunstock 8:11

Yeah. So there are numerous challenges. One, I think this is the one that everyone has, getting, getting the investment. And so we've taken a really long time to get our stuff together. Aside from the ocean care of bonds, which was relatively clear, the challenge is, when you're talking about creating carbon negative products and services, and ecosystem services, that's even more abstract for some people than climate change. I mean, at least it's a word that's banded around.

And when you're right at the edge of all the cutting edge of climate change activities, what you tend to find is that your thinking is a little bit more nuanced to the vast majority of the population. So you've got to dial it back. So being able to describe our products and services clearly in an unambiguous way has been singly the biggest challenge that I've had to have ever had today. Because not only are you describing it, you're also then having to quantify it financially. And that is something that goes into your P&L, and that's what your investors want to know about. And you got to be able to talk to it, in a sense of what does this actually mean in practical terms. So that's been a massive challenge for the company.

One that I'm delighted to say, we are now over Touch Wood. We have our pitch deck together, we have our P&L together, we know what we're talking about with our products and services. And in the last two weeks, we've started to actually announce some of our partnerships and alliances. There's two or three more to come. I'm extremely grateful, by the way, for your support as well with our hackathon which I'm sure we'll come to in a bit. But it's been a really great opportunity for us to test out our thinking. I mean, it's not been easy. And certainly, there's a lot of money in the swear jar. There's a massive amount that's gonna go to charity. We've got that.. And it's been a pleasure to work with my team to be fair, because they've challenged me appropriately to be able to get to where we are.

So now we have, we have our sponsorship packages, which is really a great little thing. We have our consumer products that we're going to be producing when we get to the end of when we get to having biomass, we're going to have our corporate offerings as well for that. And we're mainly operating in animal feed fertiliser, so stimulants, and biochar, which are fantastic, but the idea of being able to sponsor our activities is the thing that really will be to help organisations aligned to the strategy of ocean health and the regenerative power of nature.

Katherine Ann Byam 11:09

It's interesting because I currently participate and volunteer for a steering group with the Hampshire Chamber around Netzero. And typically, the conversation doesn't come to this regenerative side. There's a lot of talk about cleaner energy, and there's a lot of talk about what we are doing to build back better to reduce the use of toxic things and plastics, etc. But there's not a lot of talk about cleaning up what we've already put into the atmosphere, which is essentially where Carbon Kapture has positioned itself.

Howard Gunstock 11:42

Yeah, we are all the Wombles of aquaculture. We'll begin to throw me clean cleaning up the everyday things that people leave behind. There's a lot of words, buzz words, and that seems to come along. So first of regenerative, all it means is it's the next stage from sustaining what we've got. So everyone has a sustainability project. And what's really become apparent when you're at this when I'm at my side of it, I'm not talking about any other perspective. But I'm just saying from my side, sustaining what we've got is only good if everyone participates in sustaining what we've got. In effect, sustainability, in its current form, is like communism. It works in theory. But unless everyone's on board and does exactly the same thing, then what you're going to get is some sustainability having more power than others sustainability and this piece that says that the bigger players will only sustain what is essential, rather than what they're trying to do.

And then there'll be other people who will try to be more sustainable and become more righteous and pious and all that sort of stuff. That's not where we're at. We're on about being able to, in effect, we climate positive, good for the environment and regenerative. The regenerative power of nature is in nature. We have perennials, everything. It will turn around, there'll be a new new season, a new summer, a new harvest, a new crop, and we can play with it. I mean, we can genuinely geoengineer that, to our advantage, it seems so mind numbingly obvious, like soul crushing the obvious that we've had this power all along, and no one's gone, "Oh, that's something we could do." or if they have, it's only been a passing thought, "Why is no one else taking this and running with it so fast?" And I do understand what we're doing, how effective we are as a company.

As we start off, we're going to be like trying to move water in a wheelbarrow. We know that some of the CO2 is going to go over the side, here, there, and everywhere. Got that 100%. But as we refine our skills and capabilities, we'll become more and more effective at removing bad elements from one location and moving it for the betterment of another and that's what it's about balance. You know, as a species, we don't value nature because we've not been trained or programmed or the story isn't about that. The story is about the value of money, wealth, and capitalism, and consumerism, yeah, consumerism.

So then what you’ve got to be able to do is then train the mind into two parts. One is how I become more of a thoughtful person and two how do I then show that thoughtfulness in terms of our planet that's led (not exclusively), and that's a sweeping statement, by those who have the most influence and those who had the most influence or those with money. So those with money need to get on board with this idea. Because otherwise , this is not my thinking, but in 10 years time, if we don't fix this really clearly, in 10 years time, the “in” gift is going to be a personal breathing apparatus.

That's the gift at Christmas. We don't get our stuff together right now, you know, Darth Vader. You won't know that you're walking into it into a carbon dioxide pocket, you won't know you're walking into a hydrogen pocket or, or a nitrogen pocket, or a methane pocket, it will just be there. There's no Batman, funny coloured smoke stuff going on, it will be the same colours you're looking at now, it's completely trashed completely invisible. And we will know that's really what we've been facing for the past 10 years, you're going to be talking about complete breakdown of all those chains and when those ecosystems break down, they don't come back. So we have to do this now. What sustainably should be is about doing the right thing.

And what it shows is we're not about doing more than the right thing. Businesses need to do more than the right thing, because they haven't. Any industry hasn't done the right thing for a really long time in a few. Half a few have put the Planet in their heart and they've been the outliers. And thanks to them, change is possible. But the vast majority need to do more than the bare minimum. The bare minimum isn't one there. It's got to be a lot.

Katherine Ann Byam 16:57

So I want to move us now to fixing some of the challenges that you have. So I know that you have just built this energy behind the hackathon that's coming up. I want you to share with my audience about the hackathon, and how they can get involved.

Howard Gunstock 17:15

Absolutely, thank you. Yes. So it's really one of the one of the really beautiful things about Carbon Kapture and the way that we've positioned ourselves and the way that we've had so many graduates, postgraduates, PhD students, just literally give us the academic research in my inbox. I have got something like 100- 150 years worth of academic insight. It's amazing. And I'm massively grateful to those people for giving me their abstracts. Please don't give me any more info in the abstract. I don't have the brain capacity to handle it. But yeah, anyway, it's been brilliant, it's really helped shape some of our thinking of our products and services.

So we're massively grateful. And we understand that part of the reason that someone was giving us that was in the hope that maybe we could give them a job. And we're a small business, we don't have a lot of money. So at the moment, we're not in that position. But that feeling of someone paying it forward to us is something that I feel is really important to our business. It feels like the right thing. If you're studying Ecology, or Biology or Sustainability or related disciplines, you're doing it because you have a passion for it. It would be like a crime that you study a STEM degree, and then you go into a completely unrelated discipline in business or something else. And all that knowledge that you've got isn't wasted, but it's not channelled into a way that will benefit us as a society. And that's something that's got me in this whole lockdown and COVID-19 thing where opportunities for graduates has become more and more sparse, has played on my mind massively, and played on the team's mind.

So the idea of the hackathon is that it actually solves a myriad of things. So we have some great ways of solving our business, our business problems. And these are ideas that have been thought of by a bunch of middle-aged people, men, women, you know exactly that have sold some things. And okay, we've got a handful. But what we don't have is we don't have all the ideas that come out from the people who are right at the cutting edge. So with our hackathon, we'll solve a couple of business-related problems that will either build on what we've already got, or give us a completely new idea, or potentially give us some stuff for the parking lot later on. Some great ideas are going to come out. But what we really want to do is use that as a platform for good.

So we're going to film it, we're going to stream it, and we're going to sandwich some adverts in it. And we've got some, we've got some amazing sponsors. So big shout out to you for offering to be a sponsor, thank you very much. Also to }getabstract, Jabra, The Applied Negative Energy Centre, and also avery + brown, who have done an amazing job on sort of helping our, our marketing. Thank you very, very, very much to all of our wonderful sponsors of our hackathon. So the idea is that we will film this and then we're gonna put people into groups of five, and we'll advertise it to potential employers.

So if you're looking to hire a graduate in a Sustainability, Ecology, Biology, Marine Engineering, field, or any other related discipline, we're going to have 25 of the best graduates that we can find. And we're gonna let them have an informal assessment centre, where we give them the problem, they showcase their soft skills, their communication skills, their presentation skills, and problem solving skills. And you can look at it for free, we're not charging anything for it. And we do an introductory service to the rights of some of those graduates, on behalf of the employer that's also non cost as in, we're not going to charge anything for that, because we want those companies that are looking at them to look at us as a company. We are also offering, you know, those people that probably can be looking at possibly looking potential sponsorship for some of our activities.

But we're also using the hackathon, to advertise to investors as well, people who may want to co-own a farm or invest in Carbon Kapture. And we're going to try and put on this show, this show of ideas and good stuff from people right at the cutting edge. You know, we're not talking about the policy and procedure business. We're talking about practical applications to help people engage with climate change because what would be more powerful than helping a load of students who have a vested interest or ex-students have a vested interest in sustainability getting themselves meaningful jobs in industries that value their skill set. That is such a powerful thing to be able to offer. And I think we'll get some stuff out of that as well. But more importantly, we get jobs to pay it forward. And that really, that fits in our ethical compass really well.

Katherine Ann Byam 22:28

Now. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Howard. So just remind everyone again, when your hackathon starts, and how they can sign up.

Howard Gunstock 22:35

The application window is still open. I found a lot of really great graduates. But I'd like some more, please. Employers, you can all register, by the way. So you can find this at carbonkapture.org/hackathon. If you're not an employer, graduate investor or sponsor, you can still watch it. There's an

Eventbrite ticket link for that. It's free. If you are, then you just register an interest at the relevant Google Doc that we've got. We've got Google Doc for graduates, we've got Google docs for employers, we've got Google docs for investors to sort of help people and we'll send you an invite and a link to the event and a hold the date and all that sort of stuff. And then we're just going to stream it on LinkedIn live. We're going to stream it on Facebook and YouTube. And we're just gonna have a lot of fun with it. So yeah. Perfect.

Katherine Ann Byam 23:35

Thank you so much for joining the show.

Howard Gunstock 23:37

Thank you so much for having me. Have a wonderful day. Cheers.

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.

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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.

024 A Perspective on Strategy

About this Episode

We talked to Kaihan about the current strategy and innovation landscape, and what companies are doing to meet the trend and wider social expectations of them. Kaihan Krippendorff has made a commitment to helping organizations and individuals thrive in today’s era of fast-paced disruptive technological change. He began his career with McKinsey & Company before founding the growth strategy and innovation consulting firm Outthinker. His growth strategies and innovations have generated over $2.5B in revenue for many of the world’s most recognizable companies including BNY Mellon, Citibank, L’Oréal, Microsoft, and Viacom. A best-selling author of five books, most recently the Edison Award nominated, Driving Innovation From Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs.

He is a member of the prestigious Thinkers50 radar group – A global selection of the top 30 management thinkers in the world to look out for. Thinkers50 also recognized Kaihan as one of the 8 most influential innovation thought leaders in the world considering him for a Distinguished Achievement Award in Innovation – given to the person in the world that has contributed the most to the world’s understanding of innovation in the past two years. Kaihan is currently ranked the Thinkers360 #1 Global Innovation Thought Leader and the Thinkers360 #1 Global Business Strategy Thought Leader in 2019.

Kaihan also founded The Outthinker Strategy Network, a community comprised of strategy executives from the world’s top Fortune 500 and private companies that keeps him ahead of the pace of disruption and up to date on trends, threats, and opportunities across industries.

Amidst his dizzying schedule of keynote speeches, consulting projects, ongoing research and writing, Kaihan still finds time to teach at business schools throughout the US and internationally (including NYU, FIU, and Universidad Americana). Regularly featured in major business media outlets Kaihan is an advisory board member for a blockchain-powered transportation platform, an international food processing/exporting company, and a B-corporation focused on sustainable products and lifestyle.

He holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering, Wharton, Columbia, and London Business Schools and a doctorate in strategy. With a mother from Bangladesh and a father from Germany, Kaihan brings a holistic, diverse, and global perspective to everything he does. His work has brought him to 58 countries all over the world. He speaks three languages and has lived or spent significant periods of time in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the Pacific. He lives in Greenwich, Conn., with his wife and three children.

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam 0:02

Welcome, Kaihan, to Where Ideas Launch.

Kaihan Krippendorff 0:52

Katherine, thank you so much for having me here.

Katherine Ann Byam 0:54

Wonderful to have you here. I discovered your work at the Outthinkers Summit 2020. I was just emerging from the shock and paralysis of facing the pandemic in March. And I found this summit really enlightening. I was wondering if you can share with my listeners more about the summit and whether or not you're carrying it on this year as well?

Kaihan Krippendorff 1:14

Yes. We definitely want to carry it on again. We probably won't do it (one year would be in April,) we're probably going to wait a little bit longer, maybe into the summer. But we had never run a summit before. We suddenly discovered that all of my speaking opportunities suddenly disappeared. Right? My calendar was completely empty. I was sitting in my office with my colleagues. And we looked around and said, "Well, okay, so what are we going to do?" And we thought, you know what, there are probably other thought leaders who suddenly have availability, and here's a chance for us to do something right.

There are going to be people hurting, There are going to be nonprofits that are looking to help those people that are hurting. And we have all of these great speakers. And then we have people sitting at home thinking, "look, what am I going to do?" Why don't we combine those three things? And we reached out to the top thought leaders that we knew and said, "Hey, would you be willing to participate in this charity summit, and just give your time for free, volunteer it, and we're gonna raise all the money that will go to charities to help people deal with COVID?" And so it was really kind of a last-minute pivot idea that we've never done it before. And somehow, just through a kind of passion and not sleeping, we pulled it together in the course of a few weeks. That you were part of that?

Katherine Ann Byam 2:30

Yeah, it was a great resource. And I think it actually changed my whole thinking. I found that at the right time. I had gone through my own journey of "Oh, my God, I just started a business. And now this." So it was quite a savior for me. And I wanted to take us to another topic and another burning platform beyond the pandemic, which is this topic of sustainability. And we've read that there is an idea that we are burning through resources 1.75 times their rate of natural regeneration. And I wanted to know, from your perspective, what are the implications of this on traditional strategy?

Kaihan Krippendorff 3:07

You know, I think that there has been a sea of change that has suddenly accelerated in the area of strategy where, since the 1930s, and 40s strategy has been optimized to maximize shareholder value. And companies are realizing. They didn't realize and we've been tracking this trend for about a decade or more that if you only focus on shareholder value, then even if you're after shareholder value creation over the long term, you create resistance for your growth.

You know Walmart has great difficulty less so now, but for a period had really great difficulty just putting down another store because they weren't good for the community - maybe purely out of self interest, so be it. And I don't know what their interest was. But even if it were out of self-interest, they say - if we're going to take a long term perspective, what we need to do is to create a more sustainable strategy -one that doesn't only benefit us, but benefits other stakeholders, a strategy that benefits the community, employees, society, the environment, the world.

That is the ultimate strategy because then you don't have competition if you will. And so, we're starting to see this suddenly accelerate the awareness among consumers and investors are growing investor bases that are of professional investors who are investing in companies who have sustainable strategies. We have big companies turning into public benefit corporations. We have multiple public better portfolio benefit corporations going public. I think in just last year in the US, there were five such companies. I'm on the advisory board. We've invested a little bit into one of the first B corps and that is the only sustainable future. And corporations are a stakeholder that play a role and they need to participate with other stakeholders in society.

Katherine Ann Byam 4:55

What are your thoughts on ESG and whether or not it changes anything further?

Kaihan Krippendorff 5:02

I think it is critical. I think that the UN Sustainable Development Goals have shone light on the needs of global imports. What I think ESG needs to elevate to is “to look beyond the purpose, right?” It is one thing for Unilever, Procter and Gamble to say, "one of our goals is to cure hunger to rid the world of hunger." That is great. But you need to inline incentives.

You need to reach further. You need to say, "if that's really my goal, I'm going to no longer pander to investors who are after short term cash flow. I'm going to attract investors who also care about that because they're going to support those initiatives and your business model."I am not going to make money from things that would motivate my company, my people, while I'm here or three generations later from doing something that's inconsistent with that. Like Facebook, they make money from selling advertisements. And they do that by just creating engagement. The easiest way to create engagement is to get people into arguments. So even if they are after something that is more of a conversation, they are financially motivated so we need to look at business models to really live what ESG potential is I would say.

Katherine Ann Byam 6:27

It's a fascinating topic. And I think it's such a great platform now for a lot of businesses, not just the big ones, but for startups as well to really think about sustainability and the way to design their business models upfront to address these needs even in terms of circular business models.

Kaihan Krippendorff 6:47

Yeah. And if I could just add on to that, I think the real opportunity is for the startups and maybe startups within companies as well. But I think that successful businesses came to be - it started off with good, let's go back to 30 years. You created a business because there was an existing need and that someone was fulfilling. And you went in with a better product, you stole market share away from them. That was the Michael Porter market share competitive focus strategic approach.

Then you move to create new needs, right. That's kind of the blue ocean approach, right. But I think what we're moving to is creating profitable solutions to society's needs. And if we look at successful startups, they increasingly are. That's their mindset. There is a problem with water availability, with equality, with hunger and food availability. What is a profitable solution to that?

Katherine Ann Byam 7:50

Yeah, I want to pivot a little bit into innovation. And for me, it goes very hand in hand. I feel as a strategist, sustainability and innovation are now almost one thing in the world that we live in today, but you argue that employees, more so than entrepreneurs, are society's primary innovators, and I wanted to discuss that. Why is this in you?

Kaihan Krippendorff 8:11

I did research. I looked at the 30 most transformative innovations for the last 30 years. This is from my most recent book and this is about a vetted list - thousands of submissions, a panel of professors, and they kind of said the big things that are important that have really impacted this side in the last 30 years are the internet, email, MRIs, DNA sequencing, right? These big ones, not the “like” button on Facebook, not even “search” from Google, right? - the big ones.

And then I just backtracked, and I said, "Who conceived of the idea?" and who then developed the bill and who launched it, what I found is that 70% of those innovations were conceived by employees, not entrepreneurs. And if so, what that means is with without employees innovating, you would not have a phone, a mobile phone and internet, you'd not have email, you're not be able to get an MRI, you couldn't get a stent, we'd live in a very, very radically inferior world if it weren't for employees.

Not only possible, but the truth that employees are involved, that doesn't take anything away from entrepreneurism. I want to say entrepreneurs play an important role. But we tell stories about entrepreneurs. You look at lists of most famous business people, most innovative people, it's all a lot of them are entrepreneurs. They happen to be mostly white men which is a whole other issue. But we don't tell the stories about like, you know, Heather at TIA, who came up with a program to get people with autism jobs and get them into society. We don't tell those kinds of stories of the intern entrepreneur. And so one of my missions is to really start shifting our narrative around what innovation is and who the entrepreneur is and celebrating employee entrepreneurs. Sorry, I could talk about this for a long time.

Katherine Ann Byam 10:05

That's fantastic. Now, I think there's a side of social entrepreneurship as well that these people are kind of unsung heroes. They're doing sort of handcrafting, or they are trying to make a difference in their local communities. I recently watched a show on Amazon called “Living the Change” where they were talking about regenerative agriculture and about these communities that were doing time banking and having their own currency in their small local area and stuff like this. And I was wondering, what are your thoughts on this type of sort of social entrepreneurship and what it means for the wider picture?

Kaihan Krippendorff 10:41

I think it's critical and huge. And I think it's increasing not only because of the need and the awareness, but also because of the goals of the workforce today. The goal of the workforce for my parents was to get a stable job that gives you a salary that gives you retirement. And now, the goal is to make a difference, even if we make less money. And that doesn't mean you should have to make less money, but I also think that there have been certain strategic concepts that have been introduced.

And one of the things we do is we organize a peer group of Chief Strategy Officers. So I get to spend time with heads of strategy for companies, and we talk about the emerging concepts. And this whole idea from Clayton Christensen of "Jobs to Be Done," I think it opens things up like you can say that the idea of creating a local currency becomes strategically a possibility when you focus on the job to be done by currency as opposed to thinking of working within the existing system. So we're seeing innovators starting to think outside of the bounds of existing categories and framework systems.

Katherine Ann Byam 11:55

Yeah. It's really fascinating. And I know we can go on about this for a long time. But my next question for you is "what are the barriers to innovation in firms, let's say outside of Big Tech and Big Pharma? What are the sort of barriers that are holding firms back at the moment?

Kaihan Krippendorff 12:12

In my book, I laid out seven key barriers. I interviewed 150 people. And you know, I won't go through all seven here. I'm happy to but I would say like the big ones are - first, that companies ask people to innovate, but they don't tell them what the strategy is. So they activate this excitement of innovation. And then these people come up with products that aren't consistent with our products or pricing schemes that aren't consistent, or brands that aren't consistent, and they get rejected, and then people grow disheartened. And then they give up, right? The second big barrier is really around the business model.

And the unique challenge for an internal innovator is that they work within an existing business model. The way that you want to distribute your innovations may not be consistent with the way that your company is currently distributing their products. The culture you want to build around your innovation might be different from the culture that you operate in. And that often appears as evidence or reasons why we have these innovation antibodies that prevent new ideas from growing inside the established companies. But the innovators I interviewed, they view that as part of the problem solving process. How do you redesign the entire business model so that it works inside the company. A heart transplant surgeon won't just take someone's heart and just stick it in your body and get mad at you because it was rejected. Right?

They think carefully about how to remove their rejection. So that's the next skill. And the final thing I would add is just the hierarchical, centrally planned system that dominates most companies. So most companies are organized like centrally planned economies, right? We have one central authority that decides where resources go, where talents go, what you can work on. And we know that that doesn't work in the broader economy. So what we're starting to see is explorations of new organizational models that look more like ecosystems, look more like democracies, look more like communities, look more like platforms, look more like marketplaces. And we're seeing these other forms of human organization coming into the mix. And so but still, most companies are dominated by just one hierarchical top-down organizational framework that restricts creativity and experimentation and therefore, innovation.

Katherine Ann Byam 14:34

One more question, but how can we take this sort of innovation and advanced learning into the public sector and into how governments operate as well? Because I feel as if there's a big burning platform there also.

Kaihan Krippendorff 14:49

Yeah. So my mother's from Bangladesh and the economy there is (I don't want to say dominated by) but the NGO sector runs a lot of the services and the activities that shape society there. So I think that that is sort of the exemplar of what's possible when you really have the “for profit-government” cooperation. It has been shown for the long term trend, that the most impactful innovations are coming increasingly through public-private partnerships. And that's been a trend for 20 years.

And so the kind of problems that we need to solve are too big to be solved by just the government or just entrepreneurs or just established companies. What we need to do is we need to bring our solutions together and collaborate together to also have diversity of thoughts, diversity of ideas. It also increases innovation. But just mathematically, there is not enough money to solve the problems that we need to solve if we just look at solutions from just the government, or just nonprofits or just corporations.

Katherine Ann Byam 16:04

Really interesting and exciting. Why don't you tell our listeners about your latest book so that they can have a check?

Kaihan Krippendorff 16:10

Yes. So it's called Driving Innovation from Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs. It basically lays out a process and a set of tools for you to be a more effective internal innovator.

Katherine Ann Byam 16:11

Perfect.Thank you very much for joining us in the showcase. And it's been wonderful to have you, thank you, and thanks for the work that you do.

022 StartUp Ecosystems

About this Episode

Marija Dimovska is a project management professional with 10+ years experience in NGO and business sectors. She has coordinated projects across cultures, implemented projects in innovation ecosystems working with a focus on technology and youth capacity building.

When she was 14, Marija wanted to know what happened behind the scenes of a Disney theme park, that led to thousands of customers turning up every year to have a good time. She’s always been interested in the behind-the-curtain process and how to streamline operations creatively. She worked in organisations such as the U.S. Peace Corps and has built managerial expertise, while experiencing the power of a diverse team building an intradisciplinary know-how.

“When we bring together the human factor with the with digital tools/ technology we are creating and introducing a formidable instrument in the creative process of driving solutions to local and present-day global challenges!”

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam 0:01

Good morning, Maria, and welcome to the show.

Marija Dimovska 0:50

Good morning, Katherine. Thank you for having me. And thank you for reaching out and my pleasure to be here with you and share some information in detail about the startup and innovation ecosystem from North Macedonia.

Katherine Ann Byam 1:02

Tell us a little bit about the key drivers of the Northern Macedonian economy. I mean, I don't think a lot of people know enough about it. So why don't you start with that?

Marija Dimovska 1:11

Small and medium enterprises play a pivotal role in the economic growth of the Republic of North Macedonia. Actually, they comprise 99.8% of all businesses. And unlike its use in the Western Balkans, the Republic of North Macedonia has a more advantageous climate. And it comes in an advantage point in terms of providing support and developing policies for SMEs, startups included. We have one particular state institution, which is called the Fund of Innovation and Technological Development. They have made this far €76M in investments for startups, particularly for the autumn of 2020. They invested €2.35 M in startups and scale-ups that pertained to different sectors and find themselves in different stages of their growth and development.

Katherine Ann Byam 2:09

Fascinating startup success stories! Tell us what are the big stories that you have about Northern Macedonia’s work?

Marija Dimovska 2:18

Actually, you know, they say that crises such as the bubble crunch from several years ago and the COVID crisis in 2020 are the most fertile ground for innovative ideas and businesses to launch and that stands true for the Macedonian startup ecosystem. We have had a lot of progress noted in a number of startups. Such a startup is AirCare. It's actually an application that signals and attracts air pollution. Air pollution is a concern to communities and to certain cities in Macedonia, particularly the capital of the western region of Macedonia Southern Western part Bitola and Tetovo as well in the north western part of the country.

So the founder has decided to devise an application that will show areas of polluted air. And throughout 2020, before the time that COVID had emerged, he had already launched his application in every single Balkan country. But throughout COVID, he launched it in the United States on the western coast. And in early 2021, he launched it on the Asian continent in the United Arab Emirates and two other Asian countries, India and Turkey. And for 2020, Gorjan, the founder of AirCare was awarded the Young Innovators Award in Europe, which is quite a prestigious award for young entrepreneurs that are developing SDG-focused innovative business ideas and solutions. We have other successful startups. Brainster is in education and technology. Throughout COVID, they actually managed to scale up and set up an office in the EU market. So they opened an office in Vienna back in May 2020. And they're just about to open offices in Slovenia in Ljubljana .

Katherine Ann Byam 4:23

Well, it sounds like a great success. And how critical will it be to get this ecosystem and startups to support running and positioning North Macedonia around its neighbours as well? How critical is it that your startup community grows?

Marija Dimovska 4:42

Well, I can tell you that thus far we have actually formed a regional startup Innovation Group where we constantly are in collaboration and we make sure that the communication is unremitting, that there is a flow of data and news among ecosystem representatives from the western Balkan countries.

Back in 2019, I actually have been attending the regional hub where there were representatives from Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. We have very good collaborations with the startup ecosystem in Bulgaria. We also signed a Memorandum of collaboration with the Business Innovation Centre, an incubator at Tina, Rana Metropolitan University, which is situated in Albania. And we have good collaboration with a Greek startup ecosystem with OK!Thess. They're a very similar organisation to Startup Macedonia where I work as a project manager, and they focus on the development of startups within the northern part of Greece.

Katherine Ann Byam 5:50

Fantastic. How can foreign interest get involved in supporting the growth in your country and in the area and the region?

Marija Dimovska 5:59

For those particular purposes and start-up Macedonia as an umbrella organisation or that connective tissue within the national ecosystem is working on not just the development of the digital ecosystem platform, but also other services. Such a service is the soft-landing option where we basically invite startup-preneurs or people who would like to set up a business and launch it from North Macedonia. And it's very simple, and it's very easy in terms of the ease of doing business.

The World Bank has ranked on its last report, North Macedonia on the 10th position. Because of the digitalization of the administrative and bureaucratic procedures for setting up a business, you can set up a business within 24 hours, and you obtain a working permit and a residence permit within two weeks. Startup Macedonia offers those legal services, in particular to non-Macedonian citizens who would like to obtain all of the permits so that they actually can set up their own satellite office here or open and launch a business from North Macedonia.

Katherine Ann Byam 7:09

What are the incentives to living in Macedonia? Tell us a bit about the culture and the people?

Marija Dimovska 7:14

Like all the other Balkan countries, we have had a tumultuous history. But in terms of where we are heading and where we would like the country to further grow and prosper, we're a young democratic country, and we have a low living cost of expenses. Also, lower corporate taxes have a great tech talent pool due to the fact that we have 11 faculties within the state and private universities. The Employment Statistical Office shows that there are 10,000 graduates per annum, and 80% of them are bilingual. When I say bilingual speaking, I'm thinking from the terms of languages spoken in the European Union.

Most of them have between C1 and C2 English language proficiency. And between B1 and B2 second foreign language proficiency. In Macedonia, the second foreign languages that are most often spoken are German language and French language. We also have three startup cities within the country. Skopje, the capital, is probably the most developed in terms of startup resources and tools. Bitola also has a great tech talent pool.

And that was well, we have three co-working spaces in the capital two in the western part of the country, one in the north western, and another one in Ohrid, which is probably the most renowned city in the country due to archaeological sites and it's a famous tourist attraction. And we have three accelerators and one Science and Technology Park. Out of the three accelerators, one is positioned outside of the capital because we wanted to democratise innovation and make innovation resources available to young entrepreneurs outside of the Capitol so that we have startups headquartered not just in Skopje, but in the smaller communities of the country as well.

Katherine Ann Byam 9:20

Fantastic! Tell us about the platform that you've built and how beneficial it has been for getting this community up and running.

Marija Dimovska 9:29

The platform in itself is actually a technological tool to do precisely that - to democratise the resources and tools for those innovative ideas and transform into SDG-focused businesses. Back in 2018, Startup Macedonia made the research of the ecosystem. We wanted to map out the existing partner organisations. When I say partner organisations, I mean service providers institutions and organisations that offer growth services to startups and young entrepreneurs, and to see the pain points of the startups as well.

And the analysis showed that there was a mismatch between what the startups were looking for in terms of help and assistance. They struggled with access to finance. They struggled particularly with access to the market. Because we do have a club of founders. that constitutes not startups but more concretely scale-ups - startups that have already are positioned on foreign markets and want to expand on another market. And on the other hand, we had the service providers who offered some kind of help, but it wasn't the exact type of help that the startups were seeking.

So while this data-driven platform, which currently is up and running, (the beta version was launched back in 2019) we launched the 2.0 version throughout COVID. At the end of June, early July 2020, we are automatically matching the startups with the service providers. The most important thing is that startups provided us with the detailed information about their growth stage and the type of services and help and assistance that they're looking for and need so that we can actually make the respective match for the corresponding match.

We have an additional feature that is currently being implemented within the ecosystem platform that's a mentorship network where we are trying to aggregate not solely of domestic mentors that come in the form of experienced entrepreneurs that have already gone through the entrepreneurial journey, but also international ones so that we can provide the scaleups who want to reach another market with the adequate, seasoned entrepreneurial experience. The Macedonian ecosystem is not shy when it comes to having a business idea.

What we lack is basically sociological entrepreneurial support. And this is why the Ministry of Education and Startup Macedonia's as an umbrella organisation has tried to engage governmental representatives and academia so that we explain to them the challenges that there are within the national ecosystem, and also engage academia and governmental representatives in transforming the education and introducing varieties of entrepreneurial courses in secondary level education and university level education, so that we have more experienced emerging talent that will be more mentally ready or emotionally ready for starting a business.

Katherine Ann Byam 13:14

And does this include the experiential side of it? Because as an entrepreneur myself, I feel as if the experience of doing it beats any kind of book or text or course you can do to learn about it?

Marija Dimovska 13:27

Yeah, absolutely. In terms of sharing experiences, Startup Macedonia has been quite the focal proponent of different kinds of meetups, even failure sessions, where we invite the entrepreneurs who have failed several business ideas, and they're working now on their fourth or fifth. I've mentioned AirCare earlier. Gorjan is one of the most proactive ones. But if you look at his digital portfolio, you'll see that he's not only working on AirCare.

He has other business ideas, other applications that he has developed like volontiraj.mk, mypet.mk, and akreditator-mk. Some of them are dormant due to COVID. But with AirCare, he has expanded and he has launched it in other cities. So when we share, make sure that those entrepreneurs actually share the experiences of the failure and learn-as-you-go process with aspiring entrepreneurs, it's a lot easier to convey the message that it's okay to fail, which is not just something that goes against the type of Macedonian mentality but I would say European mentality in general. I think that the American model of thinking in try-fail, try-fail is a little bit more DNA-instilled rather than what one finds in the European continent?

Katherine Ann Byam 15:05

What advice is finally, would you give to a startup getting launched today and this is independent of Macedonia?

Marija Dimovska 15:11

I would say that they need to be agile and driven by a sense of urgency to adapt to the changing needs, especially those that have been brought about by COVID. And their social capital is probably their greatest currency that they have. The more people they know, the better because you never really know which one of your connections and networks will provide you with either an answer, or they might not have the answer, but they may have a connection that gives you the solution to the challenge that you meet.

And not to give up on your idea because if you give up on your idea, it will fade away. And if it's your idea, and you're passionate about it, only you have the passion and the resilience to make that idea come to fruition.

Katherine Ann Byam 16:10

Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us, Maria. Thank you for having me, Katherine. 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 leadership development and coaching brand offering personalised career transition and transformation services. This space where ideas launch offers high performance group leadership, coaching and strategy facilitation to businesses and the food and health sectors. To find out more contact Katherine Ann Byam on LinkedIn

018 The Milkman for Beauty

About this Episode

My next guest Claudia worked in financial services for nearly a decade. Unfulfilled and miserable She decided to take some time off to work on an idea that had been niggling in the back of her head for a few years: The milkman re-imagined for beauty.

In her words:

This was the start of my journey to starting Circla, born out of frustration on the amount of single-use plastic packaging in my beauty routine. I raised pre-seed investment from Sustainable Ventures and in August last year quit my corporate job for good! The last year has been a rollercoaster, we have pivoted the business model twice due to Covid-19 and now finally about to roll out our new model across the whole of central London. I run the company by myself with help from friends and family.

Circla contributes to 6 of the UN Development Goals but our main focus is Number 12 - Sustainable consumption and production

We talked about:

Simple change in your beauty routine can save thousands of kilos of plastic waste ending up in landfill
Moving from a linear to circular business model while retaining convenience, price and quality
Staying true to your mission despite the challenges of 2020

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam 0:01

So welcome, Claudia. Welcome to our show.

Claudia Gwinnutt 0:48

Hi! So great to be here. Thank you so much for thinking about us. And asking me to come and join.

Katherine Ann Byam 0:54

Yeah, it's lovely to have you. And I'm really interested in Circla because it's a unique sort of business model. Especially in the sustainability space, I have not heard of a model quite like this. So why don't you tell our listeners about what Circla does and what it's about?

Claudia Gwinnutt 1:11

Yeah, sure. So I think the easiest way to understand what Circla exactly does is that we are the traditional milkman-like service, and most people might be too young to remember what that is. But I think most people have an idea. But instead of delivering milk, we deliver beauty products. So exactly like the milkman, you can order the products that you need online, we have a whole range of different brands and products, we deliver them directly to your doorstep, you use them, and when you're done, we pick up your empty packaging, and then we deal with all the kind of faff around cleaning it and refilling it and getting it ready for use. Then you got a kind of filled bottle ready to go. So yeah, that's us.

Katherine Ann Byam 1:53

And how do you separate this from your traditional recycling trash? Like, what are the rules?

Claudia Gwinnutt 2:00

Yeah, so I mean, the way that it works is that when we deliver your products, we deliver it in a Circla reusable bag, which we ask you to keep and you're obviously welcome to use it in the shops or anything else. On the day that we do the refill, for example, we get an alert that says, you might be running out of shampoo, and we message, “Do you need to top up?” “Do you need to refill?” Yep, we organise a delivery date. And while in this pandemic, or at the moment, most people are leaving it outside. And then we'll drop you a message to say when we're about 15 minutes away. Most people just leave it outside, we pick up that empty bag and drop off a new one.

Katherine Ann Byam 2:45

Well, and what sort of network, how far-reaching is your organisation at the moment? Because it sounds like a logistical challenge.

Claudia Gwinnutt 2:53

Yeah, so at the moment, we're focused on London. One, because you have such a high density of population. But it's definitely something that we're looking at at the moment is how do we grow beyond London. I mean, I think the answer lies in probably focusing on other kinds of metropolitan, high-density areas, and then looking at how you expand into more rural areas, you've also got kind of different shopping habits. Generally, the population in London is a lot younger, kind of much more used to delivery type services, and things like that. But you know, these are the same challenges that Uber and delivery face as well because they exactly work better in high-density areas. So I hope that we'll get to that challenge one day.

Katherine Ann Byam 3:42

That's great. And in terms of Uber and delivery, etc, I was thinking about them in terms of picking up those things for you as well. You know it’s like almost a reverse model for them. Is that something that is actually done anyway, I don't even know if that's done.

Claudia Gwinnutt 3:59

Yeah, it's not done anywhere. I mean, there are certain companies. I basically use a company every now and then, particularly during the lockdown. I treated myself to a monthly delivery of flowers. And there's this amazing company in the UK called Freddy's flowers. And they've actually arrived in a cardboard box. Actually, they're really really good with their packaging. It's most flowers we buy in the supermarket are filled with plastics. There's actually isn't and they've actually started because they've got such scale in London.

If you leave your empty box the week before or the month before outside, they actually take it back. So there's definitely a lot of thought going into it. Companies are becoming more thoughtful around “if we're delivering a lot of packaging, how do we take that back?” I get my cute little pet dog the food and it arrives every month. Because part of it's frozen and it has these ice cube packs. They ask you to collect some of that insulation. And then you can keep it and post it back to them. Whether they're reusing it or not is to be debated. But I think what's more interesting is that companies are starting to think about that because there's a demand from consumers.

Katherine Ann Byam 5:14

Now, that's really interesting. Can you tell us about your background before you started Circla? Because I think other people will want to know.

Claudia Gwinnutt 5:21

Yeah. I didn't come from the beauty industry. And I wasn't even a hardcore environmentalist. I actually worked in Finance, finished university, joined Barclays, worked there for about under 10 years. Quite scary to say it really shows my age. There was nothing necessarily wrong with what I was doing, I actually had a really great role. I've been given loads of great opportunities. It was just that inside of me, I was like, “this is not my purpose, I'm not feeling fulfilled, there must be something more.” And then that kind of started my search for it.

Katherine Ann Byam 6:02

Great. So I wanted to ask one more thing about your product. And that is really what's in it for the consumer, like, what's special about the product itself? Is there a price differential? Or is it just that feeling of being responsible?

Claudia Gwinnutt 6:18

I think the main part of it, I think, is the kind of feel-good element that you're not contributing to waste. But I think the other part of it is when you look at sustainability. For example, a lot of beauty brands and products of brands telling you lots of stuff. And for consumers, it ends up being a bit confusing, overwhelming, what to believe, what is good, what is bad, should I be buying this, or should I be buying that.

So, I think one thing that we should start to care is we make sure that the brands that you're actually buying have been kind of thoroughly vetted, you know, not just from their products are really great, and we love them, and they really work and feel gorgeous in your skin or in your hair. But actually, the company itself is also doing good, you know, because I think one thing that will make sense for me is, okay, I'm solving this packaging problem. But then I'm working with a company that, you know, doesn't pay a fair wage, or has no idea about their supply chain. So it's much more holistic than just the packaging.

I think that's one of the bits that we do some of the work for you. So you can rest assured when you're buying from Circla, you're also getting a really great product from a really amazing brand, who's committed to doing cool stuff. The other part of it is, we try to reward positive behaviour. So there are other kinds of refill companies that have come out which have put big deposits on you being able to use the packaging. And for me, whilst that might make sense from a business perspective, and commercially,

I just felt like it’s a hindrance to the customers. I really believe that making things mainstream sustainability-wise is like, it needs to be the same as it is today, but better for the planet. And therefore we reward positive behaviours. For every bottle you return, we give you points which you can use as a discount. So the more you refill, the cheaper it gets. And that's my ethos. I mean, it may be we have to, we might have to change it in the future, but I hope not. Because I think that's kind of the core of what Circla is about. And I think that's why customers choose us.

Katherine Ann Byam 8:30

So you've kind of gamified the process as well.

Claudia Gwinnutt 8:33

I mean, we've got some exciting things and plans. One thing I would love to have is that the minute someone buys a product, they can see the direct impact of buying that product, and also their kind of collective impact. The more that they use Circla, they can be like, “oh, I've saved this much in waste,” or “this much in CO2 and emissions and etc.” That's our kind of roadmap for this year. And then you can also do it collectively. As a brand, we've done this. But yeah, I think there are a lot of people actually wanting to see in actual numbers that they can believe in the good that they're doing.

Katherine Ann Byam 9:10

Now, that's super important, I think. So the last question is going to be around the challenges of getting a sustainable business off the ground. Tell us about that journey, and what you've encountered, and how you've gotten over it.

Claudia Gwinnutt 9:25

Our journey has been a little bit crazy, because actually, before we had this model, our model was focused on hotels, and a B2B model for refills. think all those hotel amenity products, enormous amounts of waste. And in April of last year, we were due to roll out three commercial pilots with hotels to test this business model. Obviously, COVID happened and that rollout didn’t happen. And I guess the year 2020 pivoted into this new model. But I think, more about your question around the challenges of having a sustainability brand, is to have a bit more patience, because things are sometimes harder to do. And you can't just go in, you need to do a bit more research into what or who you're supplying things with? And how does it really work? And is it truly sustainable? I think the second biggest challenge is that you know, you've got to be really realistic to your customers. Most people who start sustainability brands are so passionate about the environment, and they immediately think everyone else is as well. And we all want that. And I do believe that everyone has good intentions, but you have to be realistic too - like the busy mom, who has got no time to go to refill shop or the times that you're out with friends having a coffee, and you have forgotten. You have to remember that that's not that how we might want people to live their lives is not how they are living their lives. And I think that's, you know, a really interesting challenge for sustainable brands.

Katherine Ann Byam 11:10

I think one of the biggest challenges I found, at least in actually working with the group where I met you and looking at sustainability in general, were a lot of small players trying to grow an idea. It's the same idea, but in small little pockets everywhere. And I guess my question is around how can we make this more sustainable for ourselves? You know, I think even before we got live on this call, we talked about this, this idea of being this entrepreneur who's doing everything, and maybe one of the questions I have as well is around things like franchising, like, how can we scale this? What are your thoughts on that?

Claudia Gwinnutt 11:49

Yeah, It’s really interesting, I completely agree with you, I think there are two things. The reason why sometimes they stay in small businesses is that consumers tend to not trust really big brands saying they're doing sustainability. But on the other hand, is that all those small guys keep themselves so authentic, it means that it's quite difficult to grow because it can be really, really expensive. And also sometimes when you see eco brands becoming corporate and big, all of a sudden, the loyal customer base actually starts attacking them.

I think that was kind of the case of Oatly, for example - the oat milk brand. They took money from a massive VC firm, I think in the US, and they got obliterated online for it. Those are the bigger kind of challenges I think you face. For us at Circla, I think one of my biggest focuses for this year is a collaboration with other brands and tapping into each other's communities. Because, I think not to see each other as competition, but to see us like actually, we're all working towards a greater goal. So I'm desperate to work with meal companies that are maybe serving healthy local, vegan food, or organic food delivery companies, or anything like all these different sustainability-type products that exist. How can we actually come together and find a way to promote each other, whether it's your delivery of operations, or logistics, you know, marketing each other? Because that's how I think we become really scary and competitive to some of these big brands when we start working together.

Katherine Ann Byam 13:37

Yeah. I like this idea. Finally, any advice for other sustainable brands like yours.

Claudia Gwinnutt 13:45

My biggest advice is, you're gonna hear “No” so many times, and there's going to be people who don't believe in what you're doing. They're going to give you a million reasons why it won't work. And it comes in a day for people who run a company, they want you to accept that it's just not gonna work. But I think if you've got a really great idea, and you're finding a way to test that, and you really believe in it, you've got to have just a really hard skin and believe in yourself and be able to pick yourself up. Because there's gonna be great days when you get invited onto a cool podcast, and then you're gonna have days where no one buys your product the next day, and no one is interested, and everyone's telling you that it's not going to work. And finding a way to get that kind of thick skin to keep going and believing in yourself, and being patient with the process I think is my biggest piece of advice.

Katherine Ann Byam 14:40

Wonderful! How can people find out more about you especially I know that you are based in London now but how can they find out one about how to buy your products but also about how they can work with you and support you?

Claudia Gwinnutt 14:52

Yeah, definitely please visit our website. It's www.circla.co.uk . You can also find us on Instagram, we're at @circular_., I'd love to hear from anyone who'd like to collaborate. You know my emails, claudia@circla.co.uk. Find me on LinkedIn. I’d love to speak to you and also really happy for anyone who is based in London if you'd like to try Circla and you can get 20% off with CIRCLA20 at checkout. So please come and try us.

Katherine Ann Byam 15:26

Wonderful. Thanks for joining us, Claudia.

Claudia Gwinnutt

Thank you so much.

013 Idea to CEO

About this Episode

In this episode, Idea to CEO, we take you on a journey through 4 key elements to building your business, going through the Idea, Development, Commercialisation and Growth.

Neema Amin (MBA) – Escape Strategist, is a business coach supporting freelancers, consultants and micro businesses to obtain financial freedom and create a life and business they love. She has built several 6 figure businesses over more than a decade of Entrepreneurship.

Katherine Ann Byam (MBA, FCCA) is a sustainability business strategist, consultant and career coach. She is the founder of Dieple, Digitally Enabling People, A digital transformation consultancy firm based in the UK helping start-ups to scale up, and coaching executive business leaders.

Together we run a group and a purpose-driven movement called collectively driven, a community for women to grow sustainable businesses and incomes for their families. We formed this collective as we wanted to make an impact using collaboration as our model. We believe in a system that serves everyone and not just a few. We believe in levelling up incomes so that we all can live an outstanding life.

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Episode Transcript

Katherine Ann Byam 0:01

Today, our guest is Neema Amin. Neema serves as a coach, advisor, and sounding board to founders and entrepreneurs, helping them to reach their vision by defining the fine details, and merging this with the clarity and core values to achieve their vision of success.

By the age of five, Neema lived in three different countries, spoke three languages fluently, and was a regular guest accompanying her dad to work. She knows what it takes to build something from the ground up. Welcome to the show, Neema.

Neema Amin

Thank you so much for having me, Katherine. It's wonderful to share another forum with you.

Katherine Ann Byam

Neema and I are business partners at Collectively Driven. And this is a group designed for people who are underrepresented and who want to grow businesses that they love, and purpose-driven businesses. And one of the things that we go through in this group is that journey of going from idea to CEO. And this is what we're going to be talking to you about today. So this session is going to be a little bit more fluid and a little bit more mixed between Neema and myself. Typically, we like to start with “mission.” And I wanted to know from your perspective, how important is the mission in getting your idea to grow?

Neema Amin 1:18

It's incredibly important because if you don't know why you want to start something and what you are aiming to grow, then you have no foundation essentially. Your business and your idea is a combination of your values and your desires. It's mixing the financial alongside the responsibility. So your mission essentially compresses all of those things.

Katherine Ann Byam 1:49

I totally agree. I like to call it a question. So it's really about the question, the problem that you want to solve in the world is formed by a question, which you then need to tailor somehow. And this is when we get into the jobs to be done or the problems to be solved for your customers. So I like to poke on this a bit. Because often we want to solve a problem that we have imagined exists. But maybe that's not the only way to do it.

Neema Amin 2:20

Exactly. And I think when we start out as entrepreneurs, we have a desire to execute on a product or a service because we are really excited about it. It's something that we want to do. And starting out, most entrepreneurs, myself included, actually going out there and talking to people about it is really scary. Because what if somebody tells you it's rubbish or people aren't interested. You're not also ready to hear, "that's a terrible idea. I don't think you should go forward with it." But it saves you so much time by actually going and asking those really tough questions at the beginning as opposed to getting much further down the line, getting absorbed by your idea and finding that it doesn't solve a problem or it's not an idea that your audience is ready for right now. They need something before that idea to get them to your actual idea. So you've got to think about it from lots of different perspectives.

Katherine Ann Byam 3:26

Absolutely. I agree. And I think one of the one of the safest ways to approach this is kind of looking at the job that your customer is trying to get done within the context of the idea that you have, what problems are they facing with that job. And the way to go about this is to get into market research. And I think a lot of people are daunted by market research, and I think it's where most entrepreneurs fail. I don't know what your thoughts are.

Neema Amin 3:51

Absolutely 100%. I am yet to work with a client that hasn't done the market research and is excited about the market research. I guess I'm a little bit of a freak who could stay in the research and analysis rabbit because that's my background. That's how I started my work. But most people are so excited to move on and actually bring their idea that product to life that they feel that they themselves are the research that they know that this is what the market wants. And unfortunately you have to ask the market.

And as an entrepreneur, you've got to be pretty thick skinned to hear, "You're not good at this or I guess you're not good at this. Your service or your product is not good for me." But I guess people don't quite phrase it that way. You know market research is tough because it's a process and most people don't like to follow a process. As an entrepreneur you think you just go and do things. You don't. There's a strategy behind it. It's a structured approach. You can start small by not going out and talking to people. You can do the book work around it. But at some stage, you've got to go and talk to your potential customers to find, do I actually solve a problem? Or am I the problem? And I need to find a different idea to solve a different problem?

Katherine Ann Byam 5:19

Absolutely. And I think that there are ways that these daunts you as well. Because if you don't find the right client to speak to about the idea, you can get misinformation, right? So you can get either false endorsement or false discouragement. So this is why when we get deeper into this whole concept and in the development of your idea, you really need to start thinking about a niche, an ideal client, and about finding the places where your niches are where your ideal clients hang out.

Neema Amin 5:57

Absolutely. So when you are doing your research, I generally recommend that you keep all your questions really open ended. People like talking. There's nothing that people like doing better than talking about themselves and about the issues that they're trying to solve. So don't box them in by asking, "Do you want this? Or do you want that." No tick boxes, keep it open ended.

The idea behind niching is that you can't solve a problem really really well if you are trying to solve it for ten different clients that will have ten slightly different issues. The idea of niching is really getting into that crux of who is that client that has these characteristics that has these issues that I can really focus on and create a product or service that is perfect that they will sing and dance about buying from me. That is niching and finding your perfect client.

Katherine Ann Byam 7:03

Absolutely. And I also think that with the open ended, you could still get things wrong, because when people phrase things in a certain way, there's an interpretation issue. So I like the idea of having a prototype - minimum viable product. And people look at me like, "I'm not building a product...” sometimes “so why do I need to do this?" What's this MVP about? But I think it's also relevant to service-based industries and companies, and ideas of coming up with a beta - a small version that you can test and really get the true feedback.

Neema Amin 7:40

Yeah, I guess it's just working in an agile way. If you're a solo business or a partnership, you can react to the feedback that you get from your clients even in the beta version like "I didn't like this, but I think I'd like more of that." So you can adapt very quickly. And that's quite difficult for a lot of corporations to do in the traditional sort of waterfall methodology that's used, which is why they're also moving to agile.

So the idea behind the MVP, I think even we've done this in our business where we went in with an idea of these are the kinds of clients we want to serve. And once we started taking action and talking to people, we started moulding it a little bit more around those ideal clients. So until you take some action and build out the building blocks of that MVP, it's difficult to move on without spending a lot of time or money on building something that might not be needed.

Katherine Ann Byam 8:45

And I think that the testing and the feedback is also important in terms of capturing the quality of it, capturing the white space of it. Right. So I think a lot of people we look at what's there without looking at what's not there and asking the right question about what's not there as well. So I think this is also quite an important step in the journey.

Neema Amin 9:09

I think with most product services, you are always looking to continuously improve on it, because you never sit on your product or your service. You always want to make it better. So the question that you can ask is what could we have done better? What did you feel that it was missing something? What would you like to see more of in the next product? You can be that honest with your customers. Because if you can't ask straightforward questions, you're not going to get those answers. They can't read your mind and you clearly cannot reverse.

Katherine Ann Byam 9:52

So true. Words have never been said. So the next bit, I think that when we're moving through this is you're getting ready to commercialise this thing, so you're really getting ready to, I would say your first tier of scaling, it's not the mass scaling yet, but you're starting to scale the idea into something that's a viable legitimate item or product - whatever it is. So you kind of need a strategy for that. And I want to tease out a little bit about going to market strategy from your perspective.

Neema Amin 10:28

I normally recommend having a soft launch because when you go all out with that big old launch, I think it puts a lot of pressure on you, it puts a lot of pressure on your product or your service as well, too. I guess I think of it in the big corporate launches, if you've got all of this going on. Even the corporate world is learning that a soft launch is not the end of the world. So you can soft launch with your MVP. And that's the way of teasing out what some of your clients find useful in that product. Getting those testimonials at that point as well.

If something failed in that product, whether it was your tech or part of the service wasn't great, you can improve that and put it into your bigger launch. And you've also got to work backwards from that launch date. So part of your strategy is looking at how big your product or your service is. And you can do this in terms of the overall price that you're charging for it, the size of the audience that you're looking at, and work backwards. So I normally recommend anything from two and a half months to sort of start putting information out there, what are you starting to do? What is this product or service about? Start warming up any partners that you're working with?

So I did this a lot with partnership-based businesses where you would have your partners going out to their partners to sort of tell them a little bit. And this is when we could do things face-to-face over lunch and over coffees like, "Hey, this client is bringing out this new product and it does X,Y Zed. Do you think you know you might be interested in it?" So getting all the arms of your business to start working for you. So you're not doing everything all the time?

Katherine Ann Byam 12:24

Absolutely. I love that you mentioned “launching” because launching is a big deal. I don't mean to scare you but launching is really consolidating your effort into one space, one channel, and I don't mean one channel in terms of one media channel, but it is about the effort that you're putting in toward one thing.

And especially if you want to be honest, it works for products as well as service-based businesses how you do at the launch phase. If you're a product base, you want to make sure that your stock is available in multiple places and multiple points so that once you bring that social media, or you leverage whatever media you're using to do your launch, it's all in place for you. So there's a lot of pre-work leading up to launch. And you really want to make sure that when you're doing your big splash launch, that you have synchronised every possible step of the way.

Neema Amin 13:21

Absolutely. And also, if your launch isn't going well, and that can happen, you can start looking at what are the points that are not going well? Start identifying what's not working, where are those issues? What can we do to turn this around? If you're not getting interest, where are the sticking points? Is it something to do in your process? Or are your customers not being reached? What is that? So that's the other reason for having that launch period over a longer period of time. So you can actually address those issues as you go along.

Katherine Ann Byam 13:55

Absolutely. And it speaks to your point about being agile as well and almost doing a pre-mortem as you say, working with what could possibly go wrong. What are the things that technically happen to other people and doing that pre-mortem helps to save you some time in the process as well. I think a lot of people when they get to this point, "Well, I'm just gonna fly. I'm just gonna get in my wings and I'm gonna fly," which is great because you're going to need that optimism.

You're definitely going to need the optimism to carry you through the points when it gets messy. But don't underestimate the importance of one, having a team to support that (which has probably a different way of thinking) but also in getting the steps in place so that you can anticipate and really see early on when the warning signs come. And I think a big part of this is metrics, right?

Neema Amin 14:55

Exactly. To be honest with you, I think you're taking “big corporation” thinking and putting it into your small, tiny business. The difference is you are small so you can be agile and move incredibly fast. You are the decision maker so you're not putting it in front of a different board and going through ten different meetings. You can move that quickly. As to the metrics, you've got to be looking across your channels - “Where are we doing well? Where are we not doing well and need further reach?” This couldn't be organic growth that you're looking at, reaching out through collaboration, through partnerships, and obviously, there is the paid route as well depending on which channel you're using.

Katherine Ann Byam 15:47

Yeah. Also, we couldn't underestimate the importance of tech. I mean, regardless of the type of business you run, we all need digital messaging. And part of that is the tech that you set up to support your launch. And the tech ranges. You can do chatbots, email marketing, social media, or guerrilla marketing. There's so many approaches that you could take great, but you need to have the tech to leverage this and to scale this especially when you have a small team of people working on this. Any tech tech tips that you've had on your journey, Neema?

Neema Amin 16:34

I would say keep it simple. Keep it inexpensive to start with. Because if you're not bringing anything in, you don't want to be spending thousands of thousands. On the tech. Once you've started doing your analysis and you've launched, you'll start understanding what kind of tech you actually need to build up this business because what you thought you might need might not be the ideal platform for you.

And remember, just as it is in a logical prep, once you're on a platform, and you've grown, it is incredibly expensive and complex to move to another platform. So be absolutely sure that what you're buying is actually what you need. But my advice is keep it simple to start with. You don't have to be perfect going out to market. You're nimble. You're small. It's okay to be imperfect. Perfection is overrated. I think I can't remember who said it. But there is an entrepreneur that said, "If you look at your first MVP and not be embarrassed, then you should be embarrassed that you're not embarrassed, it should be that ugly." And I know some of the things that you and I have done, I look at them and I think, "Oh my God, really we put this out there?" But we learned from it. And that's what it is, it's putting yourself out there and learning about it.

Katherine Ann Byam 17:59

Absolutely. Then we get to that point that we've done our first commercialisation, and we need to start thinking about scaling and growth in a really big way (and the way that you do that for service and product-based businesses could be slightly different.) For product-based businesses, especially if you're a sustainable supplier, you really need to think about a lot more things.

You need to think about the ethics involved, you need to think about ethical sourcing and do all of that research. If you want to have a third-party contract manufacturer for your product, etc. You need to think about who you're working with wherever they are in the world, and what are the standards, modern slavery, and all of these things. So there's a lot of complexity involved in a product-based business when you're looking to start scaling up. And for service businesses, it's about outreach, and connecting with more people.

Neema Amin 18:58

Yeah, absolutely. You should still be doing organic growth.

You should still be creating those relationships. But as you're growing and expanding, your time is going to become limited so you need to look at other ways of growing. So this can be through expanding your product range. This can be through (I think you're going to touch on this) partnerships, collaborations, and I think you touched on a really interesting point about the sort of people that you want to do business with.

And even in service-based businesses, there was a client who entered into a partnership with a partner that had questionable ethics and this is where it gets really tough. Do you want to expand fast and reach that goal? Or do you hold on to your ethics? And that's, I think, a really personal question for every entrepreneur to answer. My answer won't be the same as everybody else's. But there will be tough spots, because your desire to grow is going to play with your, with your ethics and your values.

Katherine Ann Byam 20:11

And I think this almost takes us back to the beginning because it is kind of above that mission that you start with, who do you want to be as a business owner that will help you through these extremely difficult moments?

Neema Amin 20:25

That's a really good point, I think. So, you know, obviously in big offices you have the mission statement, or you used to have it open at reception. Clearly, we can't do that in our home offices. But I think we need to find ways to remind ourselves of what those core values are. Of course, you know the right thing to do but sometimes you need a little nudge.

Katherine Ann Byam 20:46

Absolutely. And the last point (and by far, not the least) is about the whole business development and sales piece. And you know, when I talk to solopreneurs and stuff, I think this is easily the biggest challenge anyone faces - how to reach more clients, how to convert clients, how to take those leads into funds.

Neema Amin 21:11

It is the toughest part because nobody, or let's say very few people like doing sales. No one likes being sold to. And I think that's part of the problem. You know, when you're having a conversation with somebody, as soon as they dip into that conversation, “So I have this great product..” and you think, "Ah, you're gonna to sell to me," and unfortunately that is part of it. But this is all part of your building a relationship. You know, you don't go into a conversation saying, “so I'm gonna sell this to you.” You warm up your audience.

You warm up those relationships about what you're about, where you have some energy. And as you're expanding, you've got to find other ways of selling other channels. You can't rely on that one-to-one that one-to-few, you've got to be doing that one-to-many. So it's a lot about putting yourself out there. So getting rid of those working on those sort of mind blocks that you have around selling. It's almost as if you've got to play a different part. You've got to pretend you're somebody else, not actually somebody else but get in that mode of, "Okay, I'm the super saleswoman, and I'm gonna knock this out."

Because when you just go in as Neema is trying to sell. it's like Neema is hiding under a table, hiding behind our hands, and telling you that, "it's an okay service, if you really want to give me some money for it." But Neema the super saleswoman is not going to do that. She's going to tell you that, "hey, this is a great product, you should be so lucky to be buying this from me. And if you don't buy it, you're missing out." It's about putting yourself out there.

Katherine Ann Byam 22:56

Absolutely. And I think I think it's a challenge for a lot of people, but it's really about as you say being authentic in what you're selling, and in the value that you bring. And it's important to step into that and really think about your product as you enjoying it. So when you even come up with whatever messaging you want to message around your product or your service, it's really about stepping into, "how would I feel? What difference would it make to me if it were me consuming it?"

And this is your litmus test before you even go before someone? How would I feel about paying this much or working in this way or getting this additional bonus, or getting this feature that you want to add to your product. You really need to step into “how would I feel” in addition to all the research that you've done. So this helps you to become the persona as you talked about.

Neema Amin 23:55

Exactly. If you don't love your product, how can you sell it?

Katherine Ann Byam 24:01

So this was a really wonderful session. Thank you so much for joining us and for having this open conversation. I think it's great that we can share these tips with a lot of people. If you want to find out more about what we do, you can search for us I have a “Women In Sustainable Business” group on Facebook that you can also search for, and you can get into these communities and learn about what we're doing and how we're helping businesses to grow in these interesting times.

Neema Amin 24:35

Absolutely perfect. Come join us. All right, thanks very much for joining the show.

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Episode Notes

Commercialisation

Launching

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

Ideal Client

Summary – Ideal Client

Niche

Summary - Niche

Prototype and Test

About this Episode

Show Highlights

Speaker Introduction

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

Episode Transcript

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

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

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

How to solve your customers Problems

Why Every Business Needs Detailed Market Research.

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

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About this Episode

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About this Episode

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About this Episode

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About this Episode

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