jbsh

Uploaded on September 27, 2008 by Steve Wampler

…after you’ve crossed my palm with silver.

There’s always been a healthy market in one group of people selling access to a small second group of people that a third, larger group of people value. In many circumstances this is entirely right and proper.

I was recently at the 31st International Conference on Small Business & Entrepreneurship, this was a massive gathering of academics researching the world of the small business and entrepreneur (slightly devalued by the lack of small businesses and entrepreneurs but that’s another story). Part of the value was the stellar network of UK and International academics interested in supporting and developing businesses. It was certainly cheaper than schlepping my way around the UK and most folk were already in an ‘open mindset’ to making new connections. For the academics, part of the value was in presenting their research to other academics.

On the other hand, there are plenty of networks and the like that will provide access to potential investors (for a fee). It could just be coincidental timing but I’m seeing more of these networks and events pushing themselves harder than before.

I’ve nothing against introducing people to potential investors (something I try and do in a small way around Bristol), nor have I anything against events to get people networking for business benefit (e.g. OpenCoffee). It’s the bit where you fork out hard cash for the opportunity, to possibly, meet someone that might be interested in your business. And lets face it, no one sensible is going to hand over a wedge of used £20’s on the basis of a 1 minute pitch over lukewarm coffee and limp biscuit.

I can see a valid business case for someone that can introduce me to a sizeable chunk of funding receiving a suitable fee for that service, but a fixed fee rather than an arbitrary % and that should be no-win-no-fee.

As a business development professional, I would expect to get paid for adding value to a business. Sorting out a business strategy, or identifying new markets and executing an exploitation plan, or implementing an efficiency plan following some process mapping, etc.

I can see that with the profile of Kliner Perkins / Sequia / etc comes a great deal of attention and that access might need to be managed. On the other hand, folks like Fred Wilson, Rick Segal and others are openly out there sharing their stories of how to approach them (and how not to)! So why pay someone else good money to preview your business plan and then mailshot their contact list?

So get out there and have confidence in your business. If you feel you need support with the business of building a business, have clear deliverables contractually agreed before you hand over the cash. It’s a sales channel just like any other, the only difference is that you’re selling a stake in the business (or buying entry to a particular market) rather than a website or set of APIs.

Uploaded on April 3, 2008 by BottleLeaf

I just posted an example where I’d worked up an Addressable Market calculation based on fairly good data. Of course, this data isn’t usually available; or it’s really expensive.

One of the services that jbsh offer is business consultancy, mainly strategic growth plans and help with the business planning activity. So what’s the addressable market for that?

Well according to the Office for National Statistics there were 2.16 million business enterprises registered for VAT and/or PAYE in March 2008, compared to 2.10 million in March 2007, a 3.0 per cent increase. As an aside, the ONS also report a continued move towards incorporation and away from sole proprietor and partnerships, perhaps reducing personal exposure in the downturn?

VAT is only compulsory when the value of your taxable supplies goes over £67,000 which isn’t that high. The ONS also offer us a cut for businesses between 10 and 50 employees, in fact there are 196,560 such businesses. The number of employees isn’t a great measure of which companies that will engage our services, I’m really more interested in those with a strategic growth challenge, and the revenues to pay our fees.

This information is available in the handy pocket-sized 432 page document that ONS produce on UK Business: Activity, Size & Location 2008 (well I can download the pdf to my phone but I’m not sure I’d want to read it there). On page 172 is the data about geographical regions by turnover.

Those businesses turning over less that £250k probably can’t afford us. That still leaves 573,515 which is much more attractive than 196,560 so there must be a lot of businesses with under 10 employees and over £250k turnover.

The next 17 pages detail companies by region, so for my local Unitary Authorities:

Using the same criteria as above there are 8.195 businesses with a turnover >£250k in these three regions of the UK. You can do the same thing for Standard Industry Classification codes (SIC codes) within broad regions (North East, South West, etc). SIC codes don’t work for everyone but we’re not trying to identify specific clients at this point, just gather enough data to be able to say if there is a big enough potential market to sustain the enterprise. If you don’t fit one code exactly, pick a couple that make sense and interpolate.

So it turns out that if you’re selling to businesses, there’s quite a lot of data out there on how big your addressable market is. Of course, that doesn’t mean all 8,195 businesses in this area are looking for a business growth consultant, but if we can make a compelling enough case then they could be.

What markets are you in?

Is there good data?

If you think not, leave a comment and I’ll have a go at finding some sources.

Uploaded on December 2, 2006 by Stuck in Customs

Something that makes an appearance fairly early in a business plan is the addressable market size. This is usually the point where after some mumbo-jumbo you’d end up with something like “…and thus we only need 1% to secure $100m turnover.”

Mark Davies has a good post on the subject from a VC perspective but I thought I’d add some examples from real life. The first benefits from solid data, the second is more speculative.

An enterprise I’m working with have a new game for the education sector (and several others but for the purposes of this example I’m concentrating on the education sector). Education is great (as are most public sectors) because there’s so much great data out there to use. Tt doesn’t mean they’re any easier to sell into but that’s another post.

So this enterprise happens to be in Canada, and one of their markets is Quebec. Helpfully for me, the Ministère de l’Éducation du Québec has most of the data I need. With a bit of digging (and guess work, some of the better data is in French) you can find the 9 English School Boards, and 17 French School Boards. Between them there are 512,515 students in Secondary education (enrolled for Academic Year 2007/2008). Which is nice and big.

Trouble is, we’re not selling to all those students. We’re actually only interested (at the moment) in two of their 5 years at Secondary School, so we need to divide that number by 2/5 to get a more accurate number (371,739) which is still nice and big.

The next bit needs a bit more knowledge about the fundamental business model. The game is sold to a school, or school board, on a tired license model. The more licenses you buy, the cheaper the per student price. So one addressable market is to sell a single license to the whole of Quebec, ka-ching!

However, more likely is that we’ll sell to each school board separately (or even each school). Again, data is our friend here as we can find the enrolled student numbers for each School Board. Time to fire up Excel.

And so on…

Now I can apply our tiered pricing model to each School Board and see what our ‘true’ addressable market is for Quebec. Of course these numbers include special schools that might not purchase a license; equally, it doesn’t include the private school sector which hopefully will.

I could drill down to individual schools (I have the list of schools, sizes, locations, who the Principal is and contact info) but we don’t really want to cold call each school and try to sell them each a separate license as we’re in bootstrap mode and the cost-benefit just isn’t there. Early conversations have indicated that School Boards are the most likely point of purchase so that’s enough detail.

This means I can say with high confidence that our addressable market for Public Schools in Quebec is $350,250. Shake rinse and repeat for the other Provinces and Territories in Canada and (for this business model) the Public Sector education market is $3,415,300.

How confident are you of the numbers behind your addressable market forecast?

What do you do if you don’t have those numbers? Stay tuned for my next post.

What makes successful companies different? What a great research question, and one that the University of Strathclyde posited a couple years back. They followed up with 37 companies, in 8 EU countries and gathered over 1,000 stories (interview descriptions of processes and activities).

Catherine Maguire from Strathclyde was presenting their findings. They began with the CIM-OSA model of business processes (one I’m very familiar with as it formed a good chunk of my research career). Turns out my supervisor was on the advisory panel for this work also, small world!

Basically, CIM-OSA identified three key processes that all businesses do: Manage, Operate, and Support. The research focus has been around Operate (and to a lesser extent Support). The research group I was with in Plymouth did most of the early work developing a reference model for the Operate Process. Catherine was looking at the Manage process.

Being a very industry orientated researcher (probably why I wasn’t very good as an academic) I always suspected that the actually process maps were less interesting that the activities and practices they represented. In my own research I concentrated more on these activities and the social systems around them, than the formal modelling (drawing boxes & arrows).

Catherine’s group has now confirmed what we all ‘knew’ but hadn’t ‘proved’. The actual processes in successful companies are the same as for less successful companies. Successful companies are a bit more integrated; the big difference is in the “how”.

Hugh MacLeod from The Hughtrain

Or as the song goes, “It ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it”…

There are a hundred+1 jobs to do when you’re running a business, and they’re all important. Fulfilling Orders and Getting Orders (to use process speak) are probably the most important, but I was talking to a HR exec a couple nights ago that insisted that hiring the best people was the most important because they’d then make the business work (might have been a vested interest there).

So where do you start?

The more successful companies were generally more mature in all their Manage activities but Strathclyde did find that there were around 15 activities that seemed to differentiate more successful from less successful companies.

What Catherine’s research has found is that given equal resources, and for their 37 companies, higher maturity in these 15 activities was a reliable indicator of a successful company. Catherine flashed the activities up on screen and they were largely around communication (as I’d expect) but I didn’t get a chance to write them down, hopefully I’ll be able to update this post shortly with that list.

I did ask if they’d looked at how the Manage Processes that these activities represented subsequently interacted with the Operate Processes. From a business change perspective you’re generally presented with a whole load of symptoms operationally and have to analyse your way back to root causes. This research could really help by making explicit some of the implicit links that are learned from practice.

I’m following up with Catherine to see if I can reproduce that list of Activities here together with links to the online tool they’ve developed to help companies self-rate themselves.

Personally I can’t hold 15 things in my head simultaneously; what 5 activities are embedded in your organisation that differenciate you from the competition?