Sports and Business: "Refuse to Lose"

I am sports mad – I always have been. As a young man I played representative rugby at school and in the Army. I sat on bench for the County under-18s. My consolation at not making the starting fifteen is that the position was occupied by one Richard Hill who went on to captain England. I ran cross country for the County at schoolboy level. I played football for the Academy first eleven when I was at Sandhurst and I played Rugby, cricket and football for my regiment, I captained the regimental cross-country team and I was the regimental 800 metres champion. I only list this achievement to illustrate that I have a small insight into the psychology of the sportsman.

I discovered my passion for business in my late twenties at about the time my serious sporting days were beginning to wind down. I don’t think there was any connection between the decline of one and the rise of the other. However I do think there is a remarkable analogy between successful sportsmen and successful businessmen and this is something I want to explore in my blog over the coming weeks and months.

I have enjoyed this year’s Wimbledon as much as any of recent years. I especially enjoy watching Rafael Nadal play. I would love to know what goes on in his head when he is playing. Whatever it is, he has built a mindset that I describe as “Refuse to lose”. How often do we see him chase down shots that other players would give up on and concede the point? Often he still loses the point but sometimes he doesn’t – he rescues a point from a seemingly impossible position and turns a certain lost point to his favour. The key here is that unless he tries he won’t know whether he will win it and he is willing to try anything and everything.

This translates almost perfectly into the world of business and particularly into the world of sales. In my experience there are two types of salesman – there are those who give up on an opportunity as soon as it starts to get difficult. They only seem to want to work on low hanging fruit. And then there are the Rafael Nadal’s – people who keep fighting even when the odds seem stacked against them. Like Nadal they will lose plenty of these seemingly lost causes, but they will also win some and everyone they win is one more customer for the company that you would not have achieved from the low hanging fruit pickers.

As an example I remember a situation in my days at Transmit International, my first business start up. We had been through a formal tender process with the London offices of a leading Swiss investment bank. We were already an incumbent supplier to part of the bank and we knew they were very happy with what we did so felt we were well placed. So we were very surprised and a little confused to receive a letter out of the blue announcing that the bank had selected another company. Now many people would have accepted an official letter as the end of the matter – but we didn’t. We pulled some strings with our existing contacts and after a number of phone calls we managed to get an audience with the Managing Director of the division concerned. We met him and laid out our case that we felt we had been treated very unfairly and surely the low risk option was to use us as a known quantity rather than try someone completely untested. To cut a long story short, the decision was reversed and we were awarded the new contract. It was always a long shot, but on this occassion it worked.

So when things don’t seem to be going your way, remember Rafael Nadal sprinting to the far boundaries of Centre Court chasing down a ball that to most players would be dead. If you apply the same “Refuse to lose” mentality to your sales campaigns the worst that can happen is that you will be no worse off than if you hadn’t tried. But occasionally you will win business that you would otherwise have lost and in doing so you will also make yourself a very valuable asset to your sales team.

There is no place for unethical practice in business

Someone asked me recently in a profiling questionnaire if I thought there was any place for ethics in business. My answer was immediate and almost involuntary. I said that I thought that there was no place in business for unethical practice.

Nowhere is this being more graphically illustrated at the moment than in the case of Rebekah Brooks, the embattled Chief Executive of News International. Brooks was The Editor of the News of the World (NOTW) when a private investigator, allegedly working on its behalf, hacked into the mobile voicemail of Millie Dowler when she was missing and a full scale police search for her was underway. The discovery that voice mail on Millie’s mobile phone was being accessed gave the impression that she was still using her mobile phone. We now know the dreadful truth was that Millie was dead and the activity was a private investigator without scruples or morals working to find a story for the NOTW.

Brooks yesterday told News International staff it was "inconceivable" that she knew of or sanctioned the hacking of Milly's mobile phone. But this is not a defense – it is utterly irrelevant. I don’t think anyone is accusing her of personally organising this action. But as the Editor of the paper she can’t distance herself from it by pleading ignorance. That is as weak a position as it is possibe to take. She was in charge, she was responsible for setting the culture at the NOTW and I am afraid it stretches credibility that she didn’t know that this kind of behaviour was prevalent. If she didn’t know about it she should have done – she was the boss.  It may not have directly been her fault but it most certainly was her responsibility.

So it is time for Rebekah Brooks to show some moral courage and set an example to her staff. She has allowed her organisation to behave in the most despicably unethical way and she has no option but to resign. Her attempts to distance herself from the act beggar belief. She was in charge; there is no distance between her and the tactics of her staff. Every day she clings on to her job is another day when she is making the very clear statement that she condones unethical behaviour. Far better to hold her head high, stand up for stong ethical business practice, admit responsibility (if not fault), be accountable and resign than to be forced from office by a public campaign that shows no signs of relenting.

Entrpreneurs are not driven by a love of winning but by a hatred of losing

I have long held a view that great sportsmen and great entrepreneurs share a common motivation. They are not driven by a love of winning but by a hatred of losing. An extension of that theory is that entrepreneurs are also driven by the thrill of the battle and not by the reward. There is a big difference.

As an example of this consider some of the great sportsmen of the modern era -  Ian Botham for example. I don’t doubt that “Beefy” loved to win – especially if the opposition was Australia. But he seemed to produce his most dogged performances when the chips were down. There was none more memorable than his batting heroics in the Ashes test at Headingly in 1981 when England faced certain defeat having followed on.  Botham’s incredibly determined 149 not out dragged England back to a position from where they won the match.

Another iconic sporting success born of a fear of losing was Seb Coe in the 1980 Olympic 1500m final. Defeat would have consigned him to the history books as a failure having botched the 800m final days before. His arch rival Steve Ovett, still basking in the glory of his 800m gold medal couldn’t match Coe’s fierce determination, driven on by the pain of his earlier failure.

Others who were able to find something extra to pull victory from the jaws of defeat are Seve Ballesteros, Jimmy Connors and Chris Ewbank,

There is a direct parallel between this “refuse to lose” attribute and being an entrepreneur. I don’t believe that the great entrepreneurs are those that like to succeed. Entrepreneurs are not driven by making money. They are driven by something more instinctive and fundamental and it comes to the fore when the chips are down.  The great businessmen that I know have a glint in their eye when times get challenging - they love the fight.

I am not saying that entrepreneurs don’t enjoy the rewards that come from their efforts. But I know from speaking to a number of them that they simply regard the big pay day that comes from selling a business as an indication that they have done a good job. I speak from first-hand experience when I say that the real excitement comes not from the rewards of an exit. The real thrills come months or years earlier when you were fighting to win that deal that was slipping away or scrapping to establish your dominance over a competitor or fighting to get to break-even with the cash reserves running low. In sporting parlance it is those occasions that are like the pivotal moment in a boxing match or middle distance race when victory or failure is determined. The exit is more akin to the medal ceremony. Very gratifying but not the bit we revel in.

When is a cheap flights not a cheap flight? When extras increase it by 337%

We have a mid-year meeting for our leadership team in June. We had a great year last year and so far we have done well this year – so as a thank you to the team we have decided to hold our mid-year get together in the South of Spain. To get the ball rolling I asked our office manager Ping to do some research into flights.

“Great news” she reported back, “Ryanair are showing flights from Stanstead for £36.98 pounds return”.

By anyone’s standards that is a bargain and I momentarily felt genuinely grateful to Ryanair for fighting the corner of the little guy against the big airlines by keeping their fares so competitive. Their price was a no-brainer and they had done a good job of promoting them.

“Fantastic” was my reply to Ping “Book them before they sell out.”

Just as I was basking in the warm glow of satisfaction that our Spanish trip was meant to be, my desk phone rang. It was Ping

“If you want to check in any luggage it costs £30.....” came the bad news. Just as I was about to complain of the lack of transparency in the advert Ping continued here sentence: “.....per person and each way.” £60 a head to take a suitcase!

In an instant Ryanair went from heroes to villains. They had hooked us in with a very cheap headline price and now we are interested they tell us that it will cost more to take a suitcase than they charge for the flight.

But I quickly get over my irritation – after all the flight was still under £100 a head. Still a bargain even if it is not the bargain that we thought it was.   

“Not so fantastic” was my reply to Ping “But go ahead and book them before they sell out.”

I returned to my work with a slightly less warm glow of satisfaction. It was only a few minutes later that my phone rang again. It was Ping – my heart sank anticipating more bad news and she didn’t disappoint me.

“There is an administration charge of £12 person for booking......” she announced. Just as I was about to complain that the only way of getting a ticket was by booking Ping continued here sentence: “......and a £12 person charge for checking in online.”

“Let’s not worry about checking in online” I suggested in an effort to stop costs mounting.

“I can’t find any way for you not to check in online – I think you have to pay it” replied Ping dolefully.

I felt the anger rising and stopped to count to ten. As I got to about seven the final insult was delivered: “There is £4 per person “passenger fee”” said Ping. She didn’t add that she couldn’t see any explanation of what this was for – but I could tell she was thinking it.

 This beggared belief. A fare that had been advertised at £36.98 return was actually nothing of the sort. It was loaded with extras, some of which aren’t even optional, that ended up increasing the fare to £124.98 a head – 337% higher than the advertised fare.

I am sure that Ryanair have an army of lawyers who have checked that they are not in breach of the strict letter of any advertising standards. But that approach misses the point by a country mile. Here’s why.

If Ryanair had advertised an all inclusive £124.98 fare to the South of Spain, we would probably have booked it and felt we hadn’t got a bad deal. Ryanair would be good guys. As it is I feel that Ryanair’s sales tactics are misleading to say the least. I feel as though I have been sucked in on a false promise of a very cheap flight and the actual price is much more than I was led to believe I was going to pay. So although I will end up paying the same amount of money, rather than thinking Ryanair are good guys I will go out of my way never to fly with them again. Does Ryanair think that is a good outcome? Does Ryanair think that is a good return on their marketing spend?

So when you next advertise a cut price deal stop for a moment to look at it from the customer’s point of view. Sometimes the eventual price isn’t the issue, it’s the customer’s perception of how they get there that counts.

Would I call the Winkelvoss Twins Dumb and Dumber?

Sometimes in this life you need someone to take you to one side and tell you some truths that you are probably not able to see or admit for yourself. That time has come in the case of twin brothers Tyler and Cameron Winkelvoss.

You may recall that the Winkelvoss twins have claimed for some years that Mark Zukerberg, Facebooks’s young Chief Executive, stole their idea in 2005 when they were classmates at Harvard. Their idea, they claimed in court, was used by Zuckerberg to start thefacebook.com – a social networking phenomenon that became Facebook. A business now valued at $60 billion.

An out-of-court settlement was reached in 2008 which saw the Winkelvi, as Zukerberg cruelly dubbed them, awarded $20 million in cash and $45 million in Facebook shares; a settlement that is now worth $160 million based on Facebook’s current valuation.

This week a Federal Appeals Court judge in the USA ruled that the Winkelvosses could not have the 2008 ruling re-opened allowing them to go back for a larger settlement. Their case was based on a claim that at the time of the settlement they were duped by Facebook regarding its valuation – meaning they got fewer shares than they believe they should have.

So here’s one way to look at this. Here are two Harvard Graduates, majors in Economics and attendees of business school at Oxford whose father is a very successful and wealthy businessman and who surrounded themselves with an army of lawyers. Now they want us to believe that this collective of extraordinary business acumen and mental horsepower weren’t able to come to the right valuation for Facebook. Come on guys!

Could it be that the motivation here is two guys who have ceased to be able to see the woods from the trees? Two guys who are eaten up with bitterness that a geeky computer science major made himself the world’s youngest billionaire with an idea they allege was theirs. I can’t think of any other logic – because I think everyone predicted the outcome of this appeal. Everyone saw that it was fatally flawed....except that is the Winkelvoss twins. It is time someone took them to one side and gave them a simple piece of advice.

Guys you have many extraordinary qualities. You are Harvard and Oxford graduates, you are Olympic oarsmen and you are worth $160 million – more than most people will accumulate in ten lifetimes. It is time to stop defining your lives by how much you hate Mark Zuckerberg for monetising what you claim is your idea. Harness all of the positive things you have going for you and move on and create your own Magnum Opus before you destroy yourselves wondering what could have been.

And would I call the Winkelvoss twins Dumb and Dumber – no! Not with their track record for litigation! Besides which these guys have rowed in an Olympics - they are much much bigger than me!

The golden rule of recurring revenue businesses – “The Rule of 78”

All successful owners or managers of small businesses that I know have one thing in common. They all have a good grasp of “the numbers”. They all understand the important moving parts of their P&L. They all also have a couple of key metrics in their heads that they watch like hawks. I need to sign x number of customers to break even or I need to sign y customers a month to be profitable this year.

Understanding your numbers is important – but if you run a recurring revenue business, there is one set of numbers that is more important than anything – I call it “The Rule of 78”.

A quick definition – a recurring revenue business is one where you win a customer – usually in a services business - and they spend money every month. For example if you are on a mobile phone contract you are a recurring revenue customer. You spend £20 a month for your phone package every month. For obvious reasons business owners crave it and investors love it. But here is something that a lot of people don’t always appreciate – how you can fall foul of the “Rule of 78”. So what is it?

A simple example – imagine you run a services business and you win one new customer each month and your customers spend exactly £1,000 a month each, every month for the foreseeable future. Let’s look at how your sales in the year build. You win your first customer in January and they bill £1,000 every month in the year – in other words you bill them 12 times - £12,000.

You win your second customer in February and you bill them for the rest of the year – i.e. 11 times. You win the next one in March and bill them 10 times in the year and so on.

If you roll that model on throughout the year you will end up with 12 customers and you will send out 78 bills – hence the name “Rule of 78”. You will bill £78,000. But here’s the really important bit. Of your 78 “billing opportunities” 33 of them – or 42% - come as a result of business you won in January, February and March. In other words almost half of your year’s revenue comes as result of performance in the first quarter. By the half year it’s all over bar the shouting unless you do something really special in the second half. Why? Because in the final two quarters you only have 17 billing opportunities – or 21% of the total.

So what do you do with this information? Well I’ll tell you what I do as the Manager of a recurring revenue business. First and foremost we build some real incentives around performance in the first three months. The last thing a salesman can afford is a blank month between January and March. The second thing we do is we spend a lot of time around September of each year doing some marketing and focused sales activity in order to build a pipeline to set up the upcoming first quarter of the following year.

I am glad to say that with this Q1 just behind us, we hit or exceeded our sales numbers in January, February and March and in doing so have set ourselves up for a very good year. We still need to deliver the remainder but having done the hard bit, we have a good shot.

Those who haven’t appreciated the immutable laws of the Rule of 78 and who have exited Q1 with little sales success are now facing a long uphill climb during which they will be constantly behind the numbers. And with each passing month the chances of closing the gap gets smaller and smaller - literally.

If you run a recurring revenue business, your mantra must be: Recurring revenue businesses are all about first quarter performance.

Why invoice scanning and OCR is no more than an interim solution

Invoice scanning together with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) – digitising paper documents to you and me - is presented by many as the answer to everyone’s electronic invoicing prayers. In fact one company which I won’t name, which claims to be a leader in e-invoicing, is actively promoting it as their strategy. There are several reasons why invoice scanning is not the answer and represents only an interim solution.

The holy grail in the world of e-invoicing is that an invoice should go from creation, to delivery, to approval, to payment without a piece of paper being created. In other words machine to machine with software doing the work along the way. Not a pipe dream at all. Today we deliver hundreds of thousands of true electronic invoices a year that follow exactly this path. And with some ground-breaking new interfaces and tools currently in testing, we expect that number to increase sharply in the months ahead.

Invoice scanning and OCR (in the context of invoice processing) became popular because companies couldn’t persuade enough of their suppliers to adopt a truly electronic method of submitting invoices. This meant they found themselves in no man’s land – paying for an e-invoice solution but still having to retain a small army of employees to handle paper invoices. Scanning and OCR takes the paper, scans it and uses OCR technology to lift the data off the page so that it is useful and uses it to create an electronic invoice. But here is why it is no more than an interim solution:

1.       It is at best an inaccurate process. OCR software vendors will tell you they can read characters from paper with 99% accuracy. That may be so with a simple text document in a medium sized typeface. But when it comes to small print on invoices, the reality is that it is a lot less accurate. It only needs to read one character incorrectly in the wrong place for the invoice to fail in an electronic approval process. Someone has to manage these failures and exceptions. People involved in the process? Not what was promised from “electronic invoicing”

2.       Second – OCR on its own is not enough. The next thing a well run AP department will want to do is validate an invoice before it goes into an approval process so that it doesn’t get lost within the approval process. Validation, which is an automated process, includes all those pre-flight checks before starting an electronic approval process – is there a Purchasde Order (PO) number? Does it relate to an existing PO? Is there a supplier reference? Is there a VAT number? Does the invoice add up correctly? And so on. Even the most sophisticated solutions with people checking every invoice struggle with this. Suddenly the failure rate has risen. More inaccuracies and exceptions to manage. More people involved.

Of course the net result of this is that you or your outsourced provider has to incur some real costs to bring this error rate down. Guess who ends up getting stuck with those costs? So suddenly your business plan doesn’t look so good. Where you were expecting to drive the cost of processing each invoice down below £1, human intervention has resulted in costs being much higher.

Scanning and OCR has its place. Even allowing for the absurdity of taking an electronic file, printing it out on paper as an invoice, sending the paper to your customer for them to use an expensive process to turn it back into an electronic file – it has its place. But only if you build your business case based on there being a concerted effort to migrate from scanning and OCR to real electronic invoicing. You should aim over a three year period to turn a ratio of 80% scanned and 20% electronic on its head and have 80% submitted electronically. This is all about being good at persuading your suppliers to send you electronic invoices or online invoices. That is a whole subject on its own!

To see how a good e-invoicing deployment works download a case study here which shows how Essex County Council released 20 AP staff and will save £2.5 million next year by understanding the important distinction between scanning as a means to an end versus scanning as the answer. They now process tens of thousands of real electronic invoices – those that go from creation to delivery, to approval to payment without a piece of paper being created. Invoice scanning was merely a stepping stone which helped them to get there.