In this final pre-Christmas edition of the blog, I’m going to talk about something that has been an issue with my own business – and something that I know many businesses suffer with…

The story:

Like many small business proprietors, my workload is not steady… you spend weeks touting for business with clients that have many other priorities and distractions and then three projects land at the same time!  You then spend the next few weeks focussed entirely on delivering those projects and, guess what, when they are finished, you haven’t got any new projects lined-up, so you start franticly reaching out to contacts and touting for business.  And, thus, the cycle continues…

It’s the same for all early-stage businesses, whether you are offering consultancy services or a new technology or product.  It leads to surges of activity within the business, which inevitably lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities.

The impact:

I’m fortunate in that our financial situation doesn’t depend on a regular pay-cheque coming in every month (it was this that allowed me to even consider going self-employed).  It does still cause stress, though – nobody likes uncertainty. 

Marketing your business under stress (i.e. when you don’t have enough customers) is also likely to lead to poor decisions; I have caught myself offering services to people who don’t need them or who don’t actually have money to pay for them.  It also leads to inconsistency and lack of clarity in the “product offering” (something I’m always coaching my clients to do, but don’t always do myself!)  For companies offering a physical product, it can lead to engaging with the wrong customers, necessitating lengthy and expensive product redesigns and customisations.

Putting myself in the shoes of a purchaser, I know I would only engage with someone that I trust to deliver; and trust is built on consistency.  So any lack of consistency will almost certainly lose business.

Reflections:

An organisation’s brand is built over time and this needs consistent input, nurturing, and review.  Looking around LinkedIn, there are some great examples of people that post consistently and regularly – I know exactly what they do, whether that be writing engaging content, offering a technology or service, performing research, or investing into start-ups.  I know I need to learn from them.  Similarly, at trade shows, there are some companies that you instantly “get” what they do without needing to walk up to the stand and ask.  I like situations like this as you know you are not going to be wasting time when you engage with them.

I now have regular calendar slots to review and update my LinkedIn profile and have a regular cadence of attending events and reaching out to contacts to maintain my profile with potential clients.  This is good practice in any business.

When there is too much work, you worry that you might not be paying enough attention to friends and family, and when there is too little you still don’t pay enough attention to friends and family as you are focussed on finding work!..  I guess the lesson here is to always put friends and family first.  They will be far more enduring and rewarding than any project that you might get involved in.  Downtime over the Christmas and New Year break is a great opportunity to reconnect with friends and family – I certainly intend to use it (in-between delivering those 2 last minute projects!)

Telegraph Materials offers advisory services and practical support to fast-growth businesses bringing new materials-science based technologies and processes to international B2B markets. 

In this latest blog on skeletons that have disrupted organisational growth, I cover something that I have seen to different extents in different businesses – and always with negative impacts on efficiency and staff engagement…

The story:

I’ve worked for many organisations during my career and have seen a range of different organisation structures from hierarchical to near-flat and some attempts at matrix management.  One factor is common… projects where there are clear and agreed responsibilities for decision making tend to run more smoothly.  One manager I worked for used to joke during brainstorming sessions… “this is not a democracy!” He wanted everyone to give their input and ideas, but was very clear that the final decision was his and he would own the consequences.

In contrast, I’ve worked for other organisations where decision making responsibility was less clear.  Discussions were open and everyone was encouraged to contribute, but decisions were never really finalised – often because someone outside the room needed to review.  In the worst cases, nobody seemed to know who had the final say resulting in projects ending up in limbo, unable to progress due to a constant stream of additional people being asked to review.

The impact:

Obscure decision-making responsibilities have a disastrous effect on the efficiency of an organisation.  I’ve seen topics where everyone has an opinion (colours to paint the walls, office desk allocation, the choice of biscuits to have in the kitchen…) consume huge amounts of time; time that could have been spent listening to customers or improving the core product. 

Conversely, detailed engineering decisions are sometimes made by a single expert when those decisions could have benefited from some additional challenge or review from another viewpoint.  Mistakes made at the design and engineering stage of a project will have a more lasting impact and are more difficult to correct than an unpopular choice of biscuits.

Reflections:

Every person in an organisation is there because of the expertise that they bring.  Allow them to use this expertise appropriately in their decision making.  Ultimately, decision making comes down to trust and risk.  Do we trust the office manager to choose the right biscuits (and perhaps some fruit too!) – if so, let them get on with the job.  Do we trust the junior engineer to design the most cost-effective component for a key customer?  Hopefully, yes, if they have reviewed the design with the purchasing manager as well as their peers and the engineering manager before it is finalised.

The most important point for a manager is to be clear on who is responsible for what.  Every employee needs to understand their personal decision-making responsibility and also needs to understand the responsibilities of others.  This should be communicated regularly in a growing organisation, since responsibilities will be shifting over time.  I’ve found tools such as a RACI matrix useful in situations where this becomes contentious or confused, which is inevitable in a fast-changing environment.

Telegraph Materials offers practical support to fast-growth businesses that are bringing new materials-science based technologies and processes to international B2B markets.  For more information, see www.telegraphmaterials.com, where you can also find the previous editions of this blog series.

Skeletons can be scary monsters or useful teaching-aids, depending on your attitude!  This series of blog posts pulls together a few short lessons from skeletons that have jumped out to disrupt the growth journey in companies that I’ve been involved with, together with reflections on what I would do differently next time around.

This one didn’t appear a real problem at the time; hindsight helped me see it in a different light…

The story:

When designing production equipment, there’s often a balance to be struck between process through-put and batch-size; larger batch sizes generally lead to higher throughputs but cause more disruption to a continuous production line as products are no longer coming out at regular intervals.  Some industries have standard batch sizes which are used across all processing equipment (semiconductor wafers, for example, are always processed in cassettes of 25 wafers) and others, such as mobile phone assembly, work with variable batch sizes depending on the process step.

At one production equipment company I worked for, we had lots of discussions internally about the optimum batch size for our process.  Some engineers argued for a small, fast machine that could process individual items at high speed – this would have given the most flexibility but was the most challenging to deliver given that the process needed time at the start and end of the cycle to pump down and vent up the vacuum chamber.  Other engineers argued for a larger machine that could process large numbers of items for each pump-down and vent-up cycle, leading to higher overall throughputs.

Cost and throughput led us to conclude that bigger batches were the better solution.

What we didn’t consider was the impact that this would have on the adoption of our process into the production environment.

The impact:

Larger batch sizes present more risk to production – especially if the items being processed are high value.  If the process goes wrong, you’ve potentially scrapped a lot of product and left the next few steps of the production line starved of work.  As we were a new process and equipment supplier, the customers were understandably nervous!

Reflections:

With hindsight, the large batch size of our process was a major barrier to adoption.  The economics of a smaller machine would undoubtedly have been more challenging (more equipment would have been needed to deliver the same output), but we would probably have made more sales and earlier as we would have been seen as a lower risk.

We made our decisions based on our priorities, not those of the customer; we took the easier route from an engineering perspective, which made the product less attractive to the customer.  We still made good sales, but I always wonder whether we could have made more if we had paid more attention to our customers’ process flows.

In the next instalment of this blog, I’ll talk more about the importance of independence and autonomy at all levels of a business.

Telegraph Materials offers practical support to fast-growth businesses bringing new materials-science based technologies and processes to international B2B markets.  For more information, see www.telegraphmaterials.com, where you can also find the previous editions of this blog series.

This is number 7 in the series of lessons-learned the hard way together with reflections on what I would do differently next time around.

This skeleton always gives me nightmares…

The story:

I thought I was the hero; I’d landed a major order for a piece of equipment at the end of the quarter and the technical specifications were relatively easy for us to achieve (the customer hadn’t pushed too hard during the negotiations on the specs – they just wanted to just get the project moving and get into production as soon as possible).

The machine build went to schedule and we delivered the machine on time.  The commissioning engineers optimised the process on the customer product and we achieved all of the parameters defined in the specification.  The customer, however, refused to sign-off and accept the machine… it wasn’t running as fast as they were expecting.  I pointed out that speed wasn’t part of the contractual specification and asked that they sign-off, offering to work with them to optimise the process speed as they ramped up production.  They refused and we entered a painful period of stand-off and negotiation.  What I hadn’t appreciated was how tight their business planning had been… the machine running at the current speed would actually lose them money.  They had based their throughput and production cost calculations on some “ball-park” numbers that had been bounced around during the demo stage.

After a few weeks of additional engineering trials and several tough rounds of negotiation, we agreed a commercial settlement which saw them buying consumables (process chemical) from us at a reduced price, so that they could at least break-even on their production.

The impact:

The stand-off undoubtedly soured the relationship and certainly resulted in us losing the opportunity for future revenue; we were now selling consumables at close to cost price and the customer was reluctant to come back to us for further improvements and upgrades.  As a business, we also spent a lot of time trying to get to a satisfactory resolution – time that could have been spent winning more business or developing our products further.

Reflections:

I learnt the hard way that the job of a sales-person is not simply to win sales… it is to ensure that the customer benefits from your products and services; resulting in them coming back for more and also referring others to you in the future.  Contracts and specifications should be used to clarify and define expectations – not just minimum standards.  I should have known the customer well enough to understand that the process speed was important to them and made sure that this was included in the contract, even if it would have made our job as a supplier more difficult.

In the next instalment of this blog, I’ll talk more about the importance of understanding exactly how your customer will use the product.

Telegraph Materials offers advisory services and practical support to fast-growth businesses bringing new materials-science based technologies and processes to international B2B markets. 

Last month’s Halloween season got me thinking… I’ve pulled together a few short lessons from skeletons that have jumped out at me over the years to disrupt the growth journey in companies that I’ve been involved with together with reflections on what I would do differently next time around.

This one chewed up several months of time…

The story:

Our board was keen for us to act like a “grown-up” company and one recommendation was to get professional IT systems in place to manage the business – an enterprise resource management (ERM) system was proposed that could track everything from stock levels and process conditions to employee holidays.  We spent some time looking at systems offered by a range of big software providers, but all seemed somewhat inflexible and none of them worked in the same way as our business.

We eventually found a system that was highly customisable; in fact, this was one of their selling points as they offered a team of engineers who could come into the business and help get it set-up to match our business processes – it seemed perfect for us.

As an ambitious production engineer, I volunteered to work on the programme and was soon working nearly full time with the software engineers to get the system set-up.  Predictably, we had some push back from other members of staff who didn’t see the need to change from their paper notebooks or Excel sheets, which we overcame with some training and further tweaks to the system to make it match the existing spreadsheets.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the system didn’t bring any increase in product quality, output, or profitability.  In fact, it became a burden to maintain as any changes to process needed a corresponding change to be programmed into the ERM system, which often entailed the expense of bringing in a software engineer.  The system was quietly dropped from production and used only in a few (more stable) areas of the business such as purchasing and finance.

The impact:

The system almost certainly reduced innovation within the production team, since any changes would require a further chunk of work (and expense) to customise the ERM system, which was a disincentive.

We also consumed many hours of valuable engineering time getting the system set-up without any perceivable benefit.  Time that could have been spent making improvements that would benefit our customers.

Reflections:

With the benefit of hindsight, we should have asked ourselves more carefully why we were implementing the system.  We could then have assessed every decision against that goal.

Another company that I worked for took exactly the opposite approach and delayed the implementation of a system until as late as possible; their logic was that we would probably get acquired at some point and our new owners would then want us to integrate to their existing systems.

At the end of the day, you need systems in place to monitor and control your business – they provide the evidence for action.  The systems don’t need to be complicated and for many situations, a well-designed Excel spreadsheet in a shared location will do the job perfectly well.  Utilising established software applications such as Excel and OneNote also reduce the barriers to adoption as minimal training will be required for people to figure out how to use it.

The most important thing to understand is why you are implementing a system…  focus on the data you want to get out of the system before deciding how you will get the data in.

In the next instalment of this blog, I’ll consider the importance of the technical specification in the contract.

Telegraph Materials offers advisory services and practical support to fast-growth businesses bringing new materials-science based technologies and processes to international B2B markets.  For more information, see www.telegraphmaterials.com, where you can also find the previous editions of this blog series.

Halloween may be behind us, but there are still plenty of skeletons coming out of the closet. This is number 5 in my series of short lessons-learnt from the companies that I’ve been involved with over the last few years together with reflections on what I would do differently next time around.

This one always makes me feel uncomfortable…

The story:

I’m generally a positive and tolerant person and like to see the best in people.  Unfortunately, this can lead to an “over-tolerance” of the corrosive influence of a toxic employee.  I’ve seen the negative impact of this several times in my career.  Sometimes the person is good at their job, sometimes they are merely adequate (but at least they are there and get the job done!).  Perhaps with some coaching and training I can help them improve.  Sometimes they result in other, often good, people leaving.

When the toxic employee does eventually leave the business, I’m always surprised by the positive effect on the rest of the team.  I shouldn’t be – I’ve seen it many times now; seeing poor behaviour tolerated is a massive demotivator for good people.

The impact:

The loss of energy caused by a toxic or underperforming employee is enormous.  As a manager, they consume a disproportionate amount of time and generate an awful lot of stress; they chew-up time and energy that should be devoted to driving the business forward.

The demotivating effect on the rest of the team from seeing poor behaviour tolerated saps energy and output.  We will never know what creative ideas have been lost as a result of good people keeping quiet in the presence of a workplace bully or slacker.

Reflections:

In every case, I wish I had acted sooner.  I think a lot of the reluctance to deal with a toxic or underperforming employee comes from the hassle of recruitment… it takes a lot of time and effort to recruit new staff and others have to cover the workload whilst the team is short-staffed.  Doing a “culture test” at the interview stage is useful – get people-minded team members to meet a prospective employee and listen to their gut-feelings on the character of the candidate.  Some companies are better than others at managing the probation period and use this to really test out a new employee – deliberately challenging them to see how they perform under stress and getting existing employees to feed-back on what they are like to work with when the manager is not in the room.  Ultimately, it’s about being honest enough to admit when you have made a mistake during the recruitment process – we all do it and it’s better to fix the situation rather than persevere with a bad decision.

In the next instalment of this blog, I’ll consider the importance of keeping IT simple.

Telegraph Materials offers advisory services and practical support to fast-growth businesses bringing new materials-science based technologies and processes to international B2B markets.  For more information, see www.telegraphmaterials.com, where you can also find the previous editions of this blog series.

With recent memories of Halloween, I’ve pulled together a few short lessons from skeletons that have jumped out at me over the years to disrupt the growth journey in companies that I’ve been involved with together with reflections on what I would do differently next time around.

This one resulted in a lot of wasted metal…

The story:

Shrinking geometries in the semiconductor industry result in device features being squashed closer and closer together in the x-y plane.  Layer thicknesses in the z-direction don’t reduce to the same extent, as certain thicknesses are required to provide sufficient electrical isolation between conductors.  This results in higher and higher aspect ratios in the interconnects between layers, making them more difficult to fill with metal to form the electrical contacts.  We had a highly innovative process that used a high pressure and temperature to force the metal into these narrow (sub-micrometer) interconnects.  This worked well providing you could hold the temperature and pressure within a narrow process window: too low and the metal didn’t flow into the hole, too high and you would damage the other layers in the structure.

The impact:

The extremely narrow process window led to enormous engineering effort being applied to control the process conditions throughout the process chamber.  Months and months of engineering time were applied to new heater designs, new control systems, and modelling of thermal profiles.  Several customers adopted the technology on a trial basis and continued the engineering effort by running huge matrices of experiments at different pressures and temperatures to identify the optimum process conditions to get the metal to flow into their structures.  After several years of effort, it was finally concluded that the process window was impossibly small so the process could not be taken into production.  Meanwhile, our competitors had developed a new process using a different metal and a different deposition technology which, despite having a lower electrical conductivity and higher cost, was controllable enough to go into production.

Reflections:

The engineering developments achieved in this project were amazing; we gave some very clever people a really tough challenge and they delivered some incredible hardware.  With the benefit of hindsight, we probably should have applied some more effort to the fundamental science… were there some other metals or alloys that would have allowed a wider process window?  Were there other ways of getting the metal into the interconnects?  Were we keeping a close enough eye on competitive processes?  We probably should have also investigated and understood other variabilities in the production process more fully – even if we could control our process perfectly, would other variations in the incoming materials and customer product have meant that our process couldn’t have worked every time?

In the next instalments of this blog, I’ll consider the importance of keeping the right people in the business. Telegraph Materials offers advisory services and practical support to fast-growth businesses bringing new materials-science based technologies and processes to international B2B markets.  For more information, see www.telegraphmaterials.com, where you can also find the previous editions of this blog series.

In this season of Halloween, I’ve pulled together a few short lessons from skeletons that have jumped out at me over the years to disrupt the growth journey in companies that I’ve been involved with together with reflections on what I would do differently next time around.

This one really hurt…

The story:

It was all going so well… we had a big-name customer who loved our people and loved our technology.  We fully expected that they would buy the whole company one day.  We based the whole business around them, allowing them to define (and in some cases actually purchase) the equipment that we had in our lab and the research that got done.  Understandably, they got nervous when we started talking with their competitors, so we didn’t.  They were paying us generously and we had a good relationship with long-term plans, so it didn’t feel sensible to rock the boat.

Then something happened… international events forced a rethink of their strategies and budgets which resulted in our project being stopped.  Not scaled-back or delayed, stopped.  Our revenue went to zero overnight with nothing in the pipeline.

The impact:

The business was forced to down-size immediately to a core team that spent a year frantically trying to find new markets for the company’s technology.  A team of over 50 people was reduced to less than 20.  Ultimately, there was not enough time to get new products into new markets and the board reluctantly decided to close the business.

Reflections:

With hindsight, I wouldn’t change our approach to the big-name customer.  We got paid fairly for the work done, did some very interesting science, and built some long-lasting relationships which will benefit other sectors and companies going forward.

What we failed to do was develop any serious contingency plan or seek to commercialise our know-how in sectors that wouldn’t have been considered competitive by our main customer.  Yes, we did have some other small projects in the wings but they were mostly high-risk ambitious projects aiming to sell new technologies into new markets.  We probably should have had one or two lower risk (and quite boring) revenue streams that could have provided a longer runway when the big project was cancelled.

I also think we should have talked more to the competitors, partners, and suppliers to our main customer.  Not to try and get more immediate business (which would have jeopardised our relationship with our core customer), but to get a better understanding of the market dynamics and a wider range of inputs into our understanding of the overall ecosystem. 

In the next instalments of this blog, I’ll consider the balance between engineering and science in a technology business.

Telegraph Materials offers advisory services and practical support to fast-growth businesses bringing new materials-science based technologies and processes to international B2B markets.  For more information, see www.telegraphmaterials.com, where you can also find the previous editions of this blog series.

As we approach Halloween, I’ve pulled together a few short lessons from skeletons that have jumped out at me over the years to disrupt the growth journey in companies that I’ve been involved with together with reflections on what I would do differently next time around.

This one caused a lot of heartache at the time…

The story:

Taking a new technology to high-volume production is an exciting and daunting time for any business.  For process technologies, the timing of this stage of growth is determined by the customer not by the technology supplier.  If you are designed in, then you’ve got to keep up with the production ramp.  If you miss the design-freeze, then you remain on the side-lines as a demo.  At this stage of growth, the focus of a business is understandably on operational issues such as ensuring the right equipment and supplies are in the right place to support the production ramp.

I was involved in a business where we were having great success coating fashion items such as shoes, gloves, and hats with a novel coating that made them water-repellent.  Every week our customers were coming to us wanting to start processing new products.  Being a fashion industry, they also regularly introduced new materials and frequently moved production locations to take advantage of fast-changing supply chains.  Production volumes changed rapidly and with relatively poor visibility.

The impact:

As a process supplier, this meant that we were constantly working to re-optimise the process for new materials and products and frequently needing to ship people and machines from factory to factory as we tried to keep up.  Scaling up our process required an impossible-to-manage scale-up of our international support team and operations.

At the same time, other earlier-stage opportunities were being missed or insufficiently resourced.

Ultimately, we needed to make some tough decisions and ended up making a rather hasty and undignified exit from the fashion clothing market in order to focus on a more stable, easier to scale, and lucrative market: consumer electronics.

Reflections:

One question we should have asked ourselves more frequently was “what’s our plan if all this goes well?…”  Good operational people constantly consider back-up and contingency plans for things going wrong; in our case, we didn’t think through the success plan carefully enough.  Everything that happened was entirely predictable and we could have benefited by transferring capability and responsibility for process optimisation and new-product introductions to our customer and/or local staff.  This would have required the establishment of training and accreditation and some other modifications to protect IP, which would have left us more time to focus on new markets whilst continuing to benefit from the clothing sector.

Considering long-term support requirements is critical to the scalability and profitability of any business model.  Niche markets can be supported by experts and the added value of this needs to be “sold in” from the start.  Interactions between these experts and the customers will also drive innovation for future products.  Mass markets need to be served by highly automated systems, requiring minimal expert intervention with other mechanisms being used to gain customer input to future product improvements.

In the next instalments of this blog, I’ll consider customers and making sure that you are listening to the right ones.

Telegraph Materials offers advisory services and practical support to fast-growth businesses bringing new materials-science based technologies and processes to international B2B markets.  For more information, see www.telegraphmaterials.com, where you can also find the previous editions of this blog series.

As we approach Halloween, I’ve pulled together a few short lessons from skeletons that have jumped out at me over the years to disrupt the growth journey in companies that I’ve been involved with, together with reflections on what I would do differently next time around.

This first one is a biggie…

The story:

I’ve seen blatant IP theft twice during my career – once from an insider and once from a supplier.  With the insider (previously a trusted colleague), it enabled a competitor company to be established in China which at the time was our biggest market.  In the case of the supplier, they took our know-how and teaching and used it to become a competitor selling an equivalent technology with a different business model.

The impact:

In both cases, the impacts on the business were substantial and multi-faceted.  The financial impacts were significant in both cases as the new competition dramatically drove down pricing (and, arguably, value in the customers’ mind as the technology appeared more of a commodity).  The costs of the legal battles were enormous, as they involved international teams of lawyers to cover the multiple jurisdictions where we operated.  More importantly, the legal battles also consumed huge amounts of time and energy for senior management, which inevitably led to other areas of the business suffering or not progressing as fast.  Ultimately, each of these events had a permanent and negative impact on the growth of the business.

Reflections:

After these incidents, we put in place some simple, low-cost measures such as using code-names for the key chemicals used in the process.  We did this right from the start during the R&D stage, so that by the time a process was being scaled-up, the code-name was already embedded around the business.  It also made life easier for the non-chemists too, as they had simpler labels to work with rather than trying to remember or pronounce full chemical names.

With hindsight, it was also wrong to fully outsource equipment build and testing to a single sub-contractor.  At the time, it seemed like a great business decision… the risk for a complex set of equipment builds was shared, and the delivery time was shortened by shipping directly from our sub-contractor rather than bringing equipment to our factory for final assembly and testing.

It’s also worth paying close attention to relationships… would a fully engaged and motivated employee even have considered setting up as a competitor?  Would a trusting supplier who felt they were sharing fairly in the benefits of a business relationship be motivated to risk everything by competing directly with their customer?

At the end of the day, patents are necessary for the time you do need to go to court.  They should not, however, be considered a method for protecting your intellectual property… it is the day-to-day behaviours and decisions that will do this.

In the next instalments of this blog, I’ll cover markets and the importance of being in the right ones at the right times.

Telegraph Materials offers advisory services and practical support to fast-growth businesses bringing new materials-science based technologies and processes to international B2B markets.  For more information, see www.telegraphmaterials.com.