Wim GE De Vos

Small businesses with a BIG impact

🖖 Smart Sparks ⚡️at the gate: HELP !!!

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Disney Bolt on Steam

Getting a lot of sleep 😴 is good for you. And I agree.

Helping 🤲 others is good for everyone. Here I hope you agree… #payitforward.

Over the last 10-20 years the home tech industry went to bed happy and content. And woke up relaxed and confident.
Small incremental change, growth and the feeling of being almost alone on the hill were the order of the day.

Until one sunny morning 100 “Smart Sparks ⚡️”* showed up at the gates.
Then 1,000. And soon 10,000´s…

*Smart Sparks ⚡️ – term used in the United Kingdom for electrical engineers getting into the home tech industry. PS how cool of a name is that 👊🏼!

The Smart Sparks ⚡️ wave and smile 👋🏻 at the incumbents. They try to make contact. They bring gifts 🎁 like loads of talent, engineering skills, ambition, a strong workforce, leads on projects, relationships with builders,… all shiny and valuable things the home tech industry needs and wants. 

Smart Sparks ⚡️ are different from the incumbents when we (yep I am one of those “old boys” in that sense) got in the industry, often from an AV background.

engineering vs sales
services vs products
roadies vs rockstars
…

I want to make the case to invite Smart Sparks ⚡️ into the home tech industry. Make them fellow companions on the journey to grow the home tech industry.

Let us welcome them in and share knowledge insights and opportunities. together form and create a more diverse community of home tech professionals. If we work together as a dynamic mesh of small businesses we are better equipped to serve homes of today and tomorrow. #hometechcoalition

But before we can help each other we need to identify and accept a few facts and differences when it comes to Smart Sparks ⚡️ & Incumbents:

  • Incumbents: Incumbents have the opportunity to define the relationship. Facilitating and helping vs confronting and competing. That is the choice that will determine the type of relationship we will have with each other moving forward.
  • Patience: Being new is a temporary state. Give ambitious smart entrants help and the benefit of time. We all started with an ambition to expertise ratio of 100:1.
  • Perspective: Applying what worked for Incumbents back in the day will/may not work for new entrants (business model, training, …)
  • Skill set: Smart Sparks⚡️ have a skills set our industry desperately needs, namely engineering, labour and the capacity to charge for it
  • Complementary: There is more demand than capacity to design and install solutions anyway in the home tech market.
  • Waaaaay cooler label (marketing is everything these days):
    “Smart Spark ⚡️” is way cooler😎 than the “Hifi 🔊 or TV 📺 guy turned integrator”. You always want to join the cool kids.
  • Community feeling: Smart Sparks⚡️ are acting like an open source community. That contrasts with the incumbents looking to build moats around their business. Just surf social media groups and communities and find out for yourself.
  • Timing: Smart sparks are on projects well before other trades. Timing is everything in life they say…
  • Relationships: Smart Sparks ⚡️ have relationships with builders while incumbents have relationships with home owners. How cool and complementary is that 👍🏻.
  • Infrastructure: Smart Sparks put in the actual cable infrastructure upon which the connected home is built.
  • Numbers: Smart Sparks ⚡️ have the numbers compared to Incumbents. A ratio of 100:1. Very similar to number of architects:incumbent integrators
  • different well…. let me say car they drive (everyone can extrapolate from there…): A ford transit vs a jaguar …

What everyone has in common is a need for business building skills; solution selling on emotional value (value proposition), huge market potential ahead of us and a common monstrously voracious 🦖 competitor (big tech and amazon in particular)

To the incumbents: the competition is NOT Smart Sparks⚡️ entering the home tech industry. There are more than enough homes for everyone to work in.

The competition is the so-called smart devices that are sold at or below cost to harvest data from consumers.

🖖 Smart Sparks ⚡️at the gate: HELP them.
Let´s open these gates and welcome them in. 

👉Disclaimer: few ideas are my own – fewer are perfect or polished – all of them are meant to accelerate debate and change (yes indeed, stir shit up).

This is the second post as a follow up of my previous call to action to the home tech industry to form a #hometechcoalition and #buildtogether. You can read my previous post here: A new mission 🚀 – #smallbiz #hometech #coalition.

The future is not like the weather. It doesn’t just happen. People make the future. It’s not a destiny or hope; it’s a decision. 👊🏼

19th jan 2021 – firing ⏏️ myself – 748 days later…

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Firing yourself is one of the most important rites of passage for anyone who is used to helping with everything. As a company grows, the pie gets bigger and the percentage of it occupied by one person needs to shrink. Why? Because there is only so much time in the day. And because organisations all have a natural tendency to turn their founder/ceo/director into a bottleneck. (And some people gladly hang on convinced they are crucial and essential).

In my experience all organisations tend towards complexity and concentration of power. This never ends well… The promotion of simplicity and autonomy are the antidote 🧪.

So as a company enters a new phase in its growth it must shed its skin, reinvent how it works, and the best possible thing you can do is join in on the metamorphosis.

Communication and structure will change in a growing company, but its values, vision and mission should remain the same. The reason why we started the business and the problem we are trying to fix has only grown more meaningful. That is why we write it down, share it constantly and let it guide our actions every single day. What does need to change is the way the company operates, how work gets done, and who does what. 

So on January 19th 2021 it was time🕛.
Time for the old to make space for the new.

I informed the team over Zoom (not exactly the way I had imagined doing this 2 years earlier) and we briefly reviewed our success so far and the great opportunities that lie ahead.

I ended the meeting with explaining that their time had come. They were ready. Or at least as ready as they would ever be. You learn how to swim by swimming. Not by watching Youtube videos.

It was time to step up – yet again – as everyone has done so many times before. Time to embrace the opportunities ahead. To decide to always be learning. To agree to compete with our past selves. For each and every one to take on a bigger challenge and more active role in the team and in the business.

It was time to leave the comfort zone. For all of us.

The results will be phenomenal. It is written in the stars. ✨

I sent everyone a letter. The letter of resignation I had written months earlier during the 2020 lock down. The letter is titled “Autonomous Flight 🚁🚀”. And you can download the original version here.

Now the word was out, the letter had been delivered. I did it. I had fired myself after more than 15 years.

I had a deep feeling of pride and excitement. The business – even though technically still mine – could not be in better hands.

As I went surfing 🏄🏻‍♂️ for the rest of the day I knew Genesis Home Technology Architects was set up for tremendous growth ahead – more on that in tomorrows post.

Note: This is part II of a series of V stories this week on my entrepreneurial journey of the last 2 years.
Episode II (previous) – here.
Episode IV (next) – here

26 dec 2018 – the day I knew I had to fire ⏏️ myself

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Every year over the Christmas holidays I reflect on the year gone by. I set aside a full day only to look back on my performance at work. What did I do and how did I do? When did I perform well and when did I bomb? Where had I learned and where did I plateau? (“Plateau-ing” resulting in a more negative score than bombing – except if it was the result of stupidity or act on pure emotion).

On 26th of december 2018 I almost gave myself one of the best self-evaluations ever 🎇. The business had just reached a 5 million in sales, profits where at a record level, the team was growing and performing, we had successfully started rolling out our digital platform (which would prove to be vital in 2020 aka “the year of digital transformation”), new experience centres opening but most of all customers and suppliers were very satisfied, even happy.

So no real surprise my personal score did not drop below a 7/10 and mostly 8´s or even the occasional 9. Except for two parameters. They were at an all-time low. 3/10 for “self-development” and a 4/10 for “leaving my comfort zone”… Not good Wim. Not good at all…

It hit me hard. I was on a high because of all the “objective” business metrics. Even the “soft” parameters (but more important ones) were looking better than ever. And then completely flunking the 2 most important parameters… What happened? Is business success inversely related with personal development and risk-taking? That would go against everything I believed in.

Studying things closer I could also see that all the high scores where for things I had already done numerous times before over the last 20 years. Hiring, firing, launching a new brand or product, building a team, co-create processes, motivation, communication, marketing our value proposition, expanding our business and scope,… Then it struck me. 👊🏼 In the face yes.

I had been working on auto-pilot for the whole of 2018. Major personal fail 🙅‍♂️.

It kind of all made sense now. We had proven and refined our strategy. We had been executing well in a booming market. Everyone was doing what they did best. And we were enjoying the ride 🍾 more than we were pushing the accelerator…

That is when I knew I had to fire myself…⏏️

Complacency needed to make way for ambition and learning. Leaning back replaced by falling forward. Not just for me, but for everyone on the team.

I was determined to start 2019 with a growth mindset and a Big Secret Plan…🕵🏻‍♂️

Note: This is part I of a series of V stories this week on my entrepreneurial journey of the last 2 years.
Next up – Episode II – here.

My small business morning routine ☕️

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brain time…

Every morning I spend about 45 minutes on the following small business activities: working ON the business and monitoring.
It has helped me and our business greatly to make consistent progress. No quick fixes or magic bullet. Rather continuous development or kaizen.

My Morning “Working ON the Business Activities”
about 30 minutes before “chaos takes over”: I Pick ONE of the following activities and alternate during the week

  • Business Development: Stuff we are working on that grows the business. What new products or solutions with big potential are in the works? What strategic partnerships are we working on that can really bring a part of our business forward?
  • Offer Development: This is about using existing resources in a new way. Can I create a sale, a launch event, a new offer or bring best practices from one person/market to another to generate attention of our customers and income?
  • Fixing long-standing problems (big and small): This is about problems/friction we have started to work around instead of solving directly. Instead of ignoring or accepting these things, I use these 30 minutes to deal with the root of the problem. “fixing a 100 small problems” (and maybe a few big ones) needs “free brain time”. Kaizen.
  • Margin review: Where do we need to review pricing and margins upwards. Were can we up-sell, cross-sell or find new income generating offers.
  • Partner communication: This is not answering emails and messages, but about initiating communication with partners by giving updates or asking questions (social, email, messages, partnerzone updates, newsletters,…).

My Morning Dashboard Monitoring activities:
max 10 minutes to get a grasp of the “cruise speed” of the business – this is looking back of course. Activity is what drives success.

  • PartnerZone (=our digital workplace with partners) visitors – more than 40/day is a “good day”
  • PartnerZone projects (including drafts) – more than 10 projects and a total value of over 100K is a “good day”. Sometimes I also have a quick “deep dive” into projects per salesperson to see the dynamic of different “markets” (we have 6 right now but growing).
  • PartnerZone “Accepted”+”In Process” projects = our confirmed pipeline – more than 1 month sales is “good”
  • Xero – YTD Sales compared with last 2 years to get perspective and compensate for daily rush of good&bad news.

And then it is 9.00 AM :rocket: and the day starts…time to make WOW the standard. Together.

Every single day I have invested these early morning 45 minutes for more than 10 years now. I believe it has helped to build Genesis Home Technology Architects into what it is today.

Maybe some of these elements of my morning business routine can help you too.

Atomic habits with an exponential impact 👊🏼.

Towards a #newbalance ⚖️ – 3 orders of change ⍙

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Word from Nelson

Change brings about change. But how so and to what degree.

The way we look at change defines the type of transformation we can apply.

Here is my framework types of change we are facing in the years to come.

It also clarifies why I firmly believe a #NewBalance and a #betterworld are ahead of us if we choose it to be so.

1st order change – #newhabits are born

Change that is fairly predictable and brought about by new habits when it comes to work, consumption, entertainment, education, … sometimes called “new normal”. Often underestimated by “creatures of habit” or called a temporary fad.

2nd order change – #newmodels are born

Organizational change at the level of businesses, governments and society as these adapt to first order changes, #newhabits or “new normal”. Predicted by “visionaries” that see the future based on applying existing patters to new first order changes around them. Often these people were already “living in the future”.

3rd order change – #newbalance is born

Systematic change at a holistic level. Hybrid and more philosophical by definition. New equilibriums at a foundational level for individuals, organizations and societies. Impossible to “predict” because they belong to a more utopian goal-oriented realm. 1st and 2nd order changes and choices made define where the 3rd order change or #newbalance will end up. Looking at this from where we stand today this an n-dimensional matrix inhabited by people connected through changing networks.

And by looking at change in the above framework we can start to define what types of transformation we want to apply to the different facets of our lives and our worlds…

Small decisions with a BIG impact 💥.

Late evening brain dump after mixing ideas on the above from #caroldweck #andygrove #jocaudron #danielpink #kevinkelly.

Peace out 👊🏼

Note: I firmly believe people feel they either dive, bounce forward, slide or get pushed into the New Future depending on where they are positioned on the growth/fixed mindset axis as defined by C. Dweck.