Expert Financial & Business Insights for South Africa
Strategic analysis from Idea Accelerator and ready-to-publish content from Financial News Daily.
A young man hitch-hiked from Cape Town to the Eastern Free State to attend a funeral in a rural area. He can’t afford the taxi bus fare because the price has gone up. The rising fuel price is bringing the return of the hitch hiker.
A craft shop in Hanover, a pass-through town in the Karoo, displays crafted furniture, paintings and ornaments – all made with care and quality you’d previously only find in city stores. Even back water crafters have upped their game. Continue reading “From the road”
I’ve just woken up in a strange place, tossing and turning in the dark with the autumn wind howling against the mountain side. I’m staying for a few days in a cottage high up mountain, next to a vineyard, with a view down below of the Atlantic Ocean.
In the night with the cottage creaking from the wind all the primeval fears come out. Winter is coming and there could be trouble the way the global economy is going. Business is down in this coastal town where I’m staying. Walk through the malls and main road and you see windows plastered in paper – several businesses shut down.
A business-owner I was talking to yesterday mentioned that a competitor was setting up shop nearby. Although some business owners simply brush off competition with “there’s room for us all”, it’s never a simple matter to decide whether competitive threats will make an impact or not.
It’s easier to explain what’s happened than to predict. When a business fails people want to know why. Was it the competition, the owner, the bank, customers, technology? One of the reasons or a combination makes sense. But it’s a lot harder to forecast, estimate, predict, divine what can and will happen in the future.
If you look at the advice small business owners themselves give to fellow business owners, you’ll find three main themes:
1 Ignore your competition and get on with obsessing about your business and customers.
2 Analyse your strengths and weaknesses. Identify opportunities and minimise threats. Differentiate with personalised service.
3 Make friends with your competitors, love them, unite with them, help each other.
Two main distinct groups here: the aggressive warriors and the relationship builders.
For me who has had “don’t just stand there, do something!” drilled into my early survival and witnessed many businesses successes and failures, I would keep an eye on them but keep stepping up my value for customers.
Did you know that the McDonald’s brothers started out in the drive-in food business? Stiff competition and their increasingly high-cost, labour-intensive format made them decide to sell their drive-in business and open a new hamburger restaurant in one of the new strip shopping centres. That’s where they began to develop the concept of speed, lower prices and volume. The system they were about to build and innovate would be the beginning of a revolution in food service.
Competition is good because it keeps you on your toes. But what’s far better is innovation – finding ways to look after your customers and attracting new ones even if it means a step-change in your entire business model.
I was talking to a Chinese restaurateur the other evening about foods in South Africa. He’s newly arrived from mainland China and wants to know the different kinds of foods that South Africans eat and is fascinated by the different cultural influences. He makes a delicious tuna seaweed wrap by the way but that’s another story.
We got talking about the many ways chicken is prepared in the country from rotisserie grilled and deep fried to flame grilled. I mentioned that I had recently bought a smoked chicken from an organic farmer who had discovered a 300-year-old family recipe using hickory wood. The newly-arrived Chinese restaurant owner said he had seen a smoker in America and would love to give smoking a try.
I couldn’t help thinking of the old smoker that my father bought when I was growing up in Kalk Bay. He bought it from a man who had gone into smoking fish commercially out along the old Kommetjie Main Road above the Noordhoek Valley which was only farming land and small holdings in those days. A pioneer, he had been unsuccessful in making a go of it. Continue reading “The secrets of how a mom turned an old smoker into a cash machine”
When it comes to conserving water we often just see the obvious – leaking taps, mismanaged water systems, and chemically-polluted water effluent.
But what about mundane objects, every day items that we never think of that consume vast quantities of water without us sometimes even knowing about it?
Some of the larger companies who are massive water consuming or have massive water consuming processes, have begun to look into their processes and find opportunities to reduce their water footprint.
Continue reading “Denim jeans – from fashion statement to ecological leg print”
If imitation were that simple, small business owners could come up with knock-offs of other products and services and ring their cash registers.
Imitation can be a more important source for new products and services than the original concept or innovation. In fact, researchers claim that copying ideas can be more valuable than inventing something new. Up to 98% of the value from innovation is realised by the imitators rather than the innovators. Continue reading “A new twist on imitation”
I was going through some design suggestions recently for products made from recycled materials. My jaw dropped – woman’s accessories included ear rings made from cool-drink cans. A supposedly ingenious product was men’s cuff-links made from recycled laptop keyboard keys. And to top it all, woman’s tote bags made from traffic signs.
There is certainly no limit to the human imagination. You’ve got to give full marks to this sort of creativity gone weird.
But to step back from this world of wacky ideas for recycling waste products, why is it that recycled products are so unappealing to all but the most fanatical green consumer? Where are the must-have products so well designed that consumers drool over them?
At an eco-friendly exhibition I met up with an ecopreneur selling bags (including tote bags) made from tyre tubes. Yes, these bags were robust, sturdy and leak-proof. But you’d need to be so committed to the cause to drape one over your shoulder. The poor guy running this business has got his heart firmly in the right place but his designs don’t leave you salivating.
No wonder then that his main selling channel for his recycled rubber bags are eco–friendly shows and exhibitions. He travels, living like a gypsy, from show to show in the main cities selling his novel wares.
Surely more thought needs to go into the design of products made from recycled materials so that they stand more than a fighting chance against their non eco-friendly competitors?
For me, a brilliant example of what can be achieved with recycled materials were outdoor Navy Chairs made from 111 Coke PET bottles using a US Navy design (I’m not sure why the US Navy was involved in chair design but it’s clearly marked on the product). This is a product with aesthetic appeal. If they weren’t so expensive, I would have ordered half a dozen.
It’s a fact that marketing studies are showing us that there is a growing group of consumers who want to buy products made from recycled materials. But design and marketing are important for any products whether they are eco-friendly or made with little or no environmental considerations.
The start-up or small business owner doesn’t have the huge amounts of capital to run focus groups, psychographic and demographic market surveys and product panels. Yet, there are low-cost ways of testing products and services for design appeal before they are introduced to consumers. Product designers, of which there are so many, would leap at the opportunity to give advice to small start-ups and small businesses who wish to launch “green” products.
“Green” product pioneers could do much better business if they introduced professional product design and marketing into their new product development. Instead of falling in love with their products – one of the biggest mistakes most innovators make whatever the product — they’d first find out if customers like them and want to buy them.
I recently saw an ad with a headline that said, “How to wake up with the financial genius in you”.
The business person then went on to explain how he and his wife had come up with a system to help others with increasing their wealth potential.
Any expert will agree that increasing your wealth to become financially independent is to be welcomed, especially in this economy when two incomes barely enough to pay for the monthly expenses. Continue reading “Can you really make money from ideas?”
A digital ad campaign for Clorox Green Works mocked people who are conscious about their impact on the environment and the products and services they buy. If you’d like to see the ad, check it out on the Internet.
While many sustainability professionals are calling for boycotts of the product, perhaps what needs to be looked at more closely is the publicity people. They need to be better informed about what eco-friendly products are really all about. Continue reading “Glib green marketing gets sustainability crowd all frothed up”
There’s more than meets the eye in this horse meat scandal. The shortcuts that large food producers are taking casts a spotlight on the shady practices that have been kept from public view. Substituting horsemeat for beef is despicable but finding no meat in a beef pie in Iceland is another thing. Smell a vegetarian conspiracy here?
All the fuss about substitution of beef products is important because we want to know what we are eating and paying for. But what about other foods such as bread, grains and fruit and vegetables? Continue reading “Horsing around with meat is one thing but investigators should crack the whip on carrots”
I just got back from holiday when I saw something wrong in my local shopping centre. There it was: another empty shop. A business that had run smack into the wall. It was the video shop. Now, video stores have been under threat for a number of years. A whole chain went under administration in the UK recently (528 stores employing 4,000 people). But I’m not here to talk about the reasons why video shops are collapsing (hint: the rise of e-commerce) and retail chains going under (50 folded last year in the UK alone).
Ever-rocketing energy costs didn’t force that business to close. But not caring about it may have been just one of the many indicators of laxness in the business. For example, I never once saw the owner ever in his store. Says something, doesn’t it? Continue reading “Will energy costs break your business?”
