Wim GE De Vos

Small businesses with a BIG impact

Simplify 🟡 & Triumph 🥇

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Simplify something for your customer and you may have a viable business.

If not, you won´t. It is that simple 😉.

Your consumer wants to have as little complexity as possible. And will pay and reward you with loyalty if you do it for them.

Forget image, forget positioning, forget marketing for now. These are secondary.

❶ Answer the following 5 questions:

  • What portion of your business (people and process) faces the customer?
  • How can you make each element of your business less complex for your customer?
  • What can you reduce from 3 steps down to just ONE?
  • What can you do for your customer so that they don’t have to do it themselves?
  • How can you save time, hassle, headaches, stress for your customer?

❷ Now get your team together and list small improvements for each of these 5 topics.

❸ Give full autonomy to each and every one and act daily to make life simpler for your customer.

Making things simple is a craft. Simplicity is art.

Simplify something for your customer and you may have a viable business.

Simplify something every day for your customer and you will become a Small Giant.

more on the power 💪🏻 of simplicity 🟡:
There is beauty in simplicity

Simplify. Everything. Always. Everywhere.

Your Digital Transformation… Why, How, What?

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The world is changing. It is changing fast. Faster and more profound every day. 🤯

To adapt to change is to transform 🐛🦋 ourselves and our businesses. Transformation is a process. It takes time. It takes commitment. It is more a journey than a destination.

Digital transformation is not black or white. It is a hybrid, phased and personal process.

Over the last few years, I have been working with several visionary and experienced business owners and operators on transforming our businesses using technology.

Digital transformation is the process through which companies take a new look at their existing self and remake themselves with the help of new technologies and new ways of thinking.

We believe in Open Source Business Building and want to share our process and journey with other SME business owners or operators. That is why we have crafted this document on digital transformation for you to download.
We hope it is useful 🙏🏻 and can help you thrive in the world of today and tomorrow.

Digital Transformation
– 5 lessons
– 9 Insights
– 7 questions

Short on time? Here is the bottom line:

The digital transformation of your business will be hybrid, personal and phased.

Wim GE De Vos

You have come too far, created too much value in building your business to now be left behind…

🖖 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. 👊🏼

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.

The winds have shifted ⛵️ and you are in charge.

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Bob´s advice…

The winds have shifted ⛵️ and you are in charge.

When the winds change suddenly it comes as a surprise. The boat heels over. What worked before does not work anymore…

You need to steer the boat in a different direction before you run out of energy or get into trouble. You need to act quickly and firmly, but without panic. And act as a crew.

Pay extra attention while you get a feel for the new direction and the strength of the wind before you can be sure to have got it right and are on a new course.

Accept it is your responsibility to guide your company out of harm´s way and to place it in a position where you can prosper in the new future. Nobody else can do this but you.

The last months I have been working on something to help small businesses deal with the impact of change. Something to help you find your way through uncharted territories and come out winning.

Part of it will be to raise your awareness of what it is like to go through cataclysmic changes and to acquire a framework in which you can deal with them.

Strategic inflection points force us to have a different mindset than the business-as-usual running of the business on autopilot we are so used to.

Strategic inflection points and the change they bring about sometimes push us in a corner, make us think about survival so much we only understand the significance of the change upon us (too) long after the fact.

Survive, transform and bounce forward. Together.
Right into a new better future packed with opportunity.

Stay tuned…