Manufacturing Leaders

Why Business Leaders Need To Create A Strategy In Manufacturing

• Mark Bracknall • Season 8 • Episode 10

Share episode

Send us a text

Imagine transforming your business strategy just like a seasoned engineer tackles complex problems. Join us as we have an enlightening conversation with Dan Mottram, a strategic advisor to the manufacturing industry. Dan takes us on a journey through his fascinating career, from his beginnings in engineering with aerospace giants to spearheading transformation initiatives in a leading retail company. Learn how his deep-seated passion for STEM and physics not only served as a foundation but also fueled his transition into consulting, where he leverages strategic thinking to drive profound change.

Unlock the secrets of successful strategic planning as Dan shares his insights on avoiding common pitfalls that many organizations fall prey to. Moving beyond mere functional objectives, he emphasizes the value of clear, strategic frameworks like Roger Martin's "Play to Win," which guide businesses in making decisive choices. Discover how a well-aligned vision, coupled with coherent communication, can cascade through all levels of an organization, ensuring that everyone is on the same page. Dan reveals exercises that leaders can employ to assess and refine their strategies, fostering transparency and a focused sense of purpose.

Innovation isn't just about groundbreaking products—it's about enhancing business models with a keen awareness of customer needs. Dan explores the balance between exploiting existing resources and exploring new opportunities, drawing inspiration from nature's own innovators. Hear about the importance of direct customer engagement and the mindset shift required to embrace innovation without fear of failure. Empowerment, as demonstrated by companies like Amazon and Facebook, is crucial for nurturing a culture of resilience and adaptability. By imagining future scenarios and reverse-engineering success, businesses can navigate challenges confidently and create lasting economic growth.

Please subscribe to the channel for more content! Theo James are a Manufacturing & Engineering Recruiter based in the North East, helping Manufacturing and Engineering firms grow across the UK. Please call us on 0191 5111 298

Speaker 1:

A warm welcome onto the Manufacturers Leaders Podcast today, bit of a different episode we have, which I'm looking forward to, digging into Dan Mottram's journey. So Dan Mottram is a strategic advisor to the manufacturing industry. It's going to be a bit of a different episode. I'm going to be flicking to my notes. It'll be a little bit more Q&A based, because you're going to get some real value out of this one, but I won't do it justice, so I'm going to ask Dan to introduce himself and what you do, dan. So firstly, welcome on the show.

Speaker 2:

How are we? Yeah, very well, thank you, mark. I appreciate you inviting me on and looking forward to the conversation.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, me too. So would you mind just giving a brief summary of what you do, dan, and then we can dig straight into it, if that works for you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, for some context, I'm a strategic advisor to uh manufacturers, particularly working with the executive leadership teams on how do we craft the sort of forward leaning, long-term strategic direction of the business. So our program really is a hybrid of a consultant advisor kind of catalyst to try and take some new perspectives on where do we think the world's going, how we're going to skate to the puck and how do we create long-term value creation and what's our capacity advantage, you know, etc. Etc. Um, and I can kind of give you some history as to how I, you know, got to this place.

Speaker 1:

I think you know there's a, there's a journey there yeah, I like to know that because, um, if we go straight back into it, well, right from the start I start. I guess I'm always interested to. You've done what you do now for quite some time, sort of 11, 12 years. But take us back. How did this start? Where did you first start off your career?

Speaker 2:

So I've always had a passion for the STEM subjects, particularly physics Still a bit of a physicist and hobbyist almost at the weekend and so I leant into engineering as a discipline, you know, through school, through university, and kind of took a route, one career, into engineering and after about four or five years working with some of the big aerospace companies, I looked forward and I thought is this where I want to stay in sort of this track? So I could see that, you know, in this type of companies you really get niched into a platform or a particular specialism and that's where you can build your career typically. And I've got quite an entrepreneurial mindset. So you know, from the ages of 15 and 16, starting businesses happy to take risk. For example, we bought a plot of land with no plan of mission and built a house on it. So in my, you know, quite happy to take some risks.

Speaker 2:

And I thought at this stage I'd like to try something different. I'd like to try, if I can succeed, in the kind of wider business context and I made a switch sort of early 20s into transformation and change, to something totally different from the engineering world and I had an opportunity to work on a large transformation of a FTSE 100 retail company. So it was, you know, totally different and that lasted around 18 months and that really kind of shaped the rest of my career to date, because I got to work with external consulting groups and independents and I just treated the 18 months like I was a sponge, just took as much information in as possible and what I quickly found was that, coming from an engineering background and discipline, I had almost a toolkit that I could plug into consulting because, you know, you think from first principles solve novel problems, um, and yeah, it just was a very natural fit. So from that forward in the moment forward, yeah, it was just really strategy, transformation and change. And so I'm starting working my way up from being on a project basis program to, more recently, leading transformations, um, some inside engineering, some outside.

Speaker 2:

And I've got to the point now where probably a new season in my career where I'd like to really focus in on the kind of the strategy and innovation element of it, because, looking back and reflecting, that's the thing that I felt like I've given my best work to, you know, and that's the thing that inspires me. So that's the kind of arc really of the story as to where we've got to today, and I'm just very passionate about the industry. I think we need a big pump on um, you know, for the economy and everything in terms of manufacturing engineering. So you know if I could be of any service to that going forwards.

Speaker 1:

There's a bit of a purpose around it as well yeah, excellent, and I think this definitely episode where, well, seeing people in manufacturing to get some value to strategy is one of those words which is, you know, many connotations to it and it means different things to different people. I would say In your opinion, why is strategy in a manufacturing or engineering business important, would you say.

Speaker 2:

I think it's incredibly important in any business, particularly in manufacturing and engineering. We're great problem solvers, so that's kind of innate in it. And if we don't have, so that's kind of innate in it. And if we don't have, so there's plenty of people in the business that can solve problems. Less so people to check are they the right problems to solve?

Speaker 2:

So, with strategy, it's not planning for the long-term future, it's about strategic thinking of you know what is the next challenge that we want to solve? And, in particular, asking making a really integrated set of choices about where we're going to play in the market, how we're going to win. You know what are the capabilities we need, can sometimes shy away from because we live in the context of we know what works and we just kind of double down and almost over index on today. So I think manufacturing is a particular example where we need to start thinking about what are the big macro trends that are coming and how do we start seeding some of that innovation that's going to pay off in five, 10 years of that innovation that's going to pay off in five, 10 years.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. I think manufacturing is probably like any other business, in the sense that you start a business, you get your head down your graph, you try and get some clients, you try and make some sales, you try and make profit. Then there comes a time where you have to bring staff in. Then there comes a time where you either have a great strategy, which you've had from day one. Then they come to a time where you either have a great strategy, which you've had from day one, or, in most cases, business people go I better have a strategy now, because I've got responsibilities, I've got people, I've got um budgets. What's the first thing, or maybe the first bit of advice you'd give? Or perhaps, when you are starting to work with a company, how do they start to create that strategy? Because, I would argue, a lot of companies probably don't have one. They might have tactics, they might have KPIs, but not necessarily a strategy. So what do you think is the main thing that you would look for when you go into a company? Would you say?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So let me just take a half step back. I think, particularly if you're accredited, you need some form of strategy management processing for BSI. So people default typically to what we call strategic planning, and this is one of those overused phrases where there's actually very little strategy in it. It's more functional objectives. So what does the people team want to do this year? What does the operations team want to do this year? And the combination of all of that does not make a strategy. It's just almost the. The kpi is required to service people's personal development views.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so normally that's the first thing we look at and just see what is the current strategy and if there is one or if it's just this kind of amorphous strategic planning exercise. And if that's the case, then we need to kind of um unwind some of the thinking and start actually using a you know some good frameworks to help try and people expand their mindset a little bit around what strategy is. So I default to um really play to win with roger martin. It's almost the simplest mechanism for it and there are some things that are missing and have kind of distilled I guess 50 years of management thinking into the framework that I use, which is called the simple strategy, but it is centered around largely on the play to win framework, which is constantly pushing this message around we've got to make some choices. We've got to make some choices about where we're going to play and how we're going to win, and that often means not doing certain things it's almost the, the choice of what we're not going to do, are just as important.

Speaker 2:

So that can be quite new to people and can feel uncomfortable, you know, because um a lot of the strategic planning. If everybody comes out of those exercises once a year and they're happy, it means you haven't gone deep enough, you haven't made some strict choices. So there's lots of red flags to be looking for in the current way of doing things. But yeah, once you get that sort of crystal clear vision of where the business is trying to go, you know, then you can start to architect. Well, how does that roll down into the business units within the business? They will need a strategy to support that. How do the functions then support the overall strategy? So it's really important you get that kind of tip of the spear right first and then everything can nest underneath that.

Speaker 1:

Is it too easy to overcomplicate the strategy? Do you know what I mean? In your opinion, is it easier to have one goal, let's say, because I think I'd argue some businesses have got 10 goals and it can confuse things.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's also a problem. You don't really want more than kind of three or four priorities, chunky buckets that you're going to work on.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And that means excluding certain things. You know certain things which might just be kind of more hygiene factors in the business. There's still good KPIs and you can still put those into the business planning of the year. But when we talk about strategy, it should be really about the things that are going to give us sustainable value creation, how we're going to win. So it's kind of separating out maybe some of the day-to-day. Yes, there are good things to do and we need to keep an eye on certain metrics, but they're not really strategic and they're going to move the dial.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, With that in mind, are there any questions that perhaps someone, perhaps if a senior operations manager or an MD, is driving now and thinks they perhaps have loosely a strategy? Are there any questions they should be asking themselves? And something I should ask myself, would you say, to almost test if they really truly do have a strategy or not? Would you say?

Speaker 2:

Yeah there's a couple of things to do when kind of analysing the current strategy of business. One of them I like to focus on is how well is that understood in the business?

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

That's really important. So, yeah, there's a little exercise you can do with your kind of leadership team and maybe people want to try this in the next meeting is that give everybody a piece of paper and say, in two or three sentences, write down the strategy of the organisation. And when you do that, it's amazing the difference in people's perception of it. So I always say, well, if the people in that room which are the leaders of the business haven't got a coherent view of the strategy, how then is the rest of the organisation going to know? So that's one kind of assessment on just, I guess, the coherence in the organisation of the strategy.

Speaker 1:

And how. I'm sorry, but how widespread should that be? Should that be down from senior operations professionals right down to shop floor apprentices, in your opinion, or not?

Speaker 2:

I think, yeah, my whole thing is around transparency and it should be just clarity in the business all the way down.

Speaker 2:

I don't want to use the overused kind of example of the cleaner at NASA that says we're going to the moon, but it's that sort of thing.

Speaker 2:

It should just be really clear, and one of the reasons why it's not often is a lot of fluffy language. So the example is when you start to do a session around the mission statement, you start off with something super clear, super crisp. You know this is what we do and this is why we do it and who we do it for. But by the time you get to that end of the session, everyone's putting so much fluff and woolly words that it's distilled down to something that's totally meaningless and therefore, yeah, by the time it gets and it just looks like every other mission statement from every other company. So then people don't really feel connected to a purpose in the organization and that should go all the way down. So that's trend is always to be super clear on language, cut the fluff, you know, and then make sure it's cascaded and fully understood without the organization. And one of the reasons you need to do that and it's the same with what kind of principles and valuables you have as an organization is decision making so day-to-day decision making.

Speaker 2:

If you don't have a clear long-term direction for the business, you don't have a clear set of principles about how you go about doing things. The decision-making almost always flows to the top because people need decisions all the time made by these, whereas actually, if you put those guardrails in place, people can very quickly rule that up against. Well, is this really in line with our strategy or not? So it has all these second order benefits of just getting super clear on the strategy, other than just winning in the market.

Speaker 1:

Would you involve the? I guess what team members would you involve in setting that strategy? Should it come? It might be different to size of business, but should it always come from the CEO and that CEO trickles that down, or should it actually be a workshop or something they do together to create that, do you think?

Speaker 2:

It is different for every organization. Sometimes the strategy is born in the mind of the CEO and it's very clear to him. You know, and then we can run with that.

Speaker 2:

Amazon I guess probably been the other one Found a amazing kind of strategy kind of the elons of this world, yeah, yeah, other times it is good to have you know if that's not clear and maybe the business has been going for a long time and we're just perhaps a little bit in decline.

Speaker 2:

You know, there's some market pressures and whatever and we do need a new strategy. It is good to try this kind of open strategy approach, which is a bit involved at the moment, which is where we do get lots of input from the organization, but we use that more as inputs into the session. You can't have 50 people in a strategy process, so there's what I call context is the first part of it is what's our macro environment? Do we really understand the situation we're in in terms of our customers, our stakeholders, the trends coming down the line? And this is the point where you would get some feedback and some input from the wider organisation. And then you can use that with a smaller group to then start forming the strategy and kind of running hypotheses and scenarios and then ultimately you loop that around to the organisation, kind of test it with them how does this land? So that's more an iterative approach, which actually is a good thing because it brings people into. They feel like they've made a contribution and they're connected to it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, 100%. I want to ask you about the explore versus exploit principle. If you could tell me a little bit about that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so this is again other than the pay-to-win framework, which I use heavily. This is probably the other framework that I use the most, which is and I alluded to it before is that a lot of businesses over-index on their current business model and they kind of innovate on the products, let's say, in there, but they don't really innovate outside of that. And so there's a good framework to use, which is the 70-20-30-3 Horizons model, which says spend about 70% of your resources innovating and optimizing the core business, the core business Spend another 20 trying to build into adjacent markets and then spend a 10 as a kind of a layer of innovation, radical innovation, over the top of that. So it's a good way of thinking about, okay, how do we spend our time and our resources to get a good, balanced portfolio? And the exploit and explore is a common principle that we see in nature as well. So it's kind of exploring your current resources but also explore the new. So this is where the two things line up, and we see this analogy in bees as well, in nature.

Speaker 2:

So bees within a hive obviously go out and collect nectar and resin and they bring it back, but when they find a location for a resource, so they'll find a patch of flowers.

Speaker 2:

Around 80% of the bees will just follow that path and they use this interesting little waggle dance to show the other bees where the location of that resource is. So they've evolved this process to kind of follow that. But about 20% of the bees will just go off at random. They'll ignore that signal and they will just go exploring and most of the time they'll come back with nothing Every now and again. And they will just go exploring and most of the time they'll come back with nothing.

Speaker 2:

Every now and again they will find a new resource and then they will do this work and some of these will follow that and I guess what that's showing is is nature has um given as an example there why you can't over index on one resource, because they've scientists have studied this and if they stood it as a complex system, the hive would die out if they just exploited that one resource. So you need, you know, innovators and people to go off exploring, to test things, to, you know, to experiment, to find these new sources of value so that's another example that I kind of give people just to take out the business context for a minute yes, it's interesting.

Speaker 1:

I think this is really really topical as well, because I think a lot of companies now we've seen a shift towards the amount of business development managers suddenly wanting to get high, because I think companies are now going we need to get some sales in. We need to, we need to pivot, we need to sort of adapt our, our offering, we need to adapt our product, whether it is I'm seeing an awful lot of that have you, are you, have you seen a shift towards that new business model? Would you say?

Speaker 2:

yeah, this is, um, this is an interesting one because when we talk about, you know, innovation and changing the you know business model and things, people sometimes get quite nervous, particularly in legacy businesses that we're going to. All of a sudden, we're making this machine today and somebody wants to talk about innovation. Oh, we can't focus on that because you know we're going to focus on the day-to-day and also this is our core business. It's been going well for 30 years, but it's not always about new product innovation and it's certainly not going to be that you make one thing today and almost you're going to open a theme park.

Speaker 2:

Still, generally, this is so different the way they deliver to the customer is entertainment on the television screen, but the way that they deliver is fundamentally different.

Speaker 2:

So they moved from posting DVDs to then streaming. So if you can think about that in your own terms, you know, perhaps you sell an expensive piece of machinery today but what the customer really wants is parts made to a specification. So how could you work with the customer to deliver that to them in a more convenient way? Maybe it's through a kind of a servitization model where you lease the equipment to them, or there's all sorts of things within the business model you can play with that just makes it much more convenient for the customer. So that's you know, just to kind of set some, some parameters around innovation. It's not just we're going to make this totally radical new thing, it's that how can you innovate in and around what you're doing today with a heavy, intense focus on the customer and giving them more value?

Speaker 1:

yeah, and would you say that comes from? I'm just thinking. I guess it links back to strategy. If you're looking at manufacturing company, is that upskilling your current sales staff, let's say to, to be asking more open-ended questions, or is that hiring into it and be more proactive? Jimmy, what, what, what would you say? Is the the first sort of step the manufacturers will take then to go right, okay, we're going to use that strategy?

Speaker 2:

I think the first one is better yeah just try and build a culture where we're having real conversations with the customer about what their needs are, what their frustrations are with our process, and one of the things we do is kind of map the customer journey fully end to end yeah, you know, and just walk that through and work with some key customers that are open to us and actually willing to have conversations and really have a under the bonnet look at the business of how they interact with us apologies for interrupting this podcast with a very quick 30 second description of my business.

Speaker 1:

Theo Theo James are an engineering and manufacturing recruitment search firm based in Durham. We specialize in contracts and permanent opportunities, from blue collar semi-skilled roles right the way up to C-suite level exec positions. If you're looking for any new, additional staff or new opportunity for yourself in the industry, please contact me or the team. There'll be a specialist in your area waiting to help. I'm incredibly proud of this business and what we've built since our inception in 2015. And I would love to extend that service out to you. So thank you very much. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Speaker 2:

And that is so rich in terms of information and insight, but you know not many businesses do it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, what are the common issues you come across? I imagine you see patterns a lot of the time. What are the common issues you see and potentially, things that perhaps they're wanging through, or what companies are leaving on the table, would you say?

Speaker 2:

I think it's just friction in the process normally, you know. So we're not making it easy for the customer to engage with us and so, again, just having that intense focus on the customer and what their needs are and what their needs are going to be in the future as well, you can only really get that insight through talking to them. There's an interesting story around the CEO of P&G. So the big conglomerate and they've been kind of successful in almost every sector that they've gone into and they have this mindset.

Speaker 2:

So the CEO, whenever he travels to a new country, will make sure his team book two days for him to go out to the end customers, to people who buy products effectively, because he wants to hear directly from them the insight. Because if it goes through the organisation it will get lost. You know the noise and also there might be some bias around people not wanting to shed bad light on their. So I think, yeah, if you can shortcut that and make sure the leadership team, the CEO, are talking directly to the customer, you know that is another area where you're going to get lots of inspiration for how to make the business better.

Speaker 1:

So these are kind of simple things really, but yeah, again, heavily avoided. Yeah they are, and that might be a realization for a lot of owners. Um, because I guess you start off doing that, don't you? But if it's your business, you start off. All you're doing all day is speaking to customers and speak to clients, and then you know, as your job gets busier and busier, you start being in more meetings and this and that and travel, and you probably lose that and you get good at delegating, which obviously it was a positive. But have you seen advantage benefits of almost going back to basics, would you say, then, in terms of actually just just just get in front of your customer again, you know, see the whites of their eyes. Have you ever seen examples where that's worked then?

Speaker 2:

yeah, yeah, that's just a fundamental part of the process that we would go through in order to identify the opportunities that are worth pursuing. So you need then to just loop the customer back into this process. So the part of the context setting and understanding who your key stakeholders are not just your key stakeholders, also your, maybe your investors and all these other, you know outside influences that have perception of your organisation. You need to gather that insight in order to create the new kind of strategy and just make sure that it covers all the angles.

Speaker 1:

Is there a risk of you know, innovation's always had this positive connotation because you know you innovate a product but is there a risk of a company failing and is that essentially what's maybe held them back, that sort of risk of that innovation not working out? What do you say, and is there any lessons they could learn from that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's a big mindset shift and you actually need to not worry about failing. And the way to offset that is obviously to start small and test and iterate. So you don't just think about this big trend. We're going to go in this direction and pump, you know, millions and millions into this thing. You start with an MVP and go as quickly as you can and iterate from there and get customer feedback. So you know good examples Amazon are almost a masterclass in this. They measure their success not on the success of the experiments they run, but the number of. So they just want to see velocity and how many experiments are we running? And then they will just try stuff. So there's a.

Speaker 2:

There's a phrase that good old jeffrey bezos uses which is is this a, a two-way door decision or a one-way door decision? So if this is something which we can go and try and we can very quickly turn it off again being a two-way door, then we should just go and try it. If this is a big decision which is going to fundamentally change x, y and z, then yeah, we need to think about it a bit more. But it just again opens up the door for people to take a bit more, um, to be a bit more empowered to go and try things.

Speaker 2:

It's the same with facebook, and obviously we're using big names because people will recognize the names, but in the early days of Facebook which is why they grew so quickly it was like you just ship the engineers. If you think this is a good feature to have you ship it, don't come to me. Now. What that does is it puts the onus on the engineer to actually check his work and make sure that he's comfortable behind it, but it empowers everybody and empowerment is a big thing that people just want in their roles today, isn't it? They want agency, they want empowerment. If you can build that kind of culture, internal culture of innovation, where people feel empowered to come up with good ideas and get a group of people together and explore it and there's some frameworks we could talk about how to do that it's just a big boost on so many levels in terms of your own capability in the business, but also empowering the workforce to feel like yes, you know, I've got some agency here yeah, could you, because I think I'll be interesting.

Speaker 1:

I think I love what you're talking about there because you bang on particularly this new generation coming through. They want to be empowered, they want to be or they want to make decisions. You know that dictatorship model is is vanishing now, so I think any models you can discuss which can start to change that could be people listening going we haven't got that culture, gentlemen. We were just. We just haven't, and there'll be too many people and again you start small.

Speaker 2:

It's not like all of a sudden you're going to go from a fully hierarchical command and control organization to, you know, totally left field self-organized teams that are, you know, based on products, product lines. You know that's a big leap. There are kind of incremental degradation. You know the creations you can get from a to b. So the first thing is maybe to experiment something like um. So I use an example that I had recently from 3m, which is they have this kind of 15% principle. So what they say when people walk through the door on day one of their job is you've got 15% of your time to work on any project you like that you think is going to benefit the organisation.

Speaker 2:

It doesn't have to be tied to your role, you know. You can just get a group of people together and you can make a case for it and you can go and pursue that project. Now they don't actually actually manage. They don't measure people's time to make sure it's 15. It's more of a principle to say get together with people from across the you know the business and try and put something together which you think is going to, you know, benefit the business.

Speaker 2:

So I think people could start to try with that. It's just to build a culture, you know. And then you could start to try with that. It's just to build a culture you know. And then you can start to move towards more kind of modern management, which is this self-organized teams where you try and put people together across different disciplines, instead of sales marketing operations where it's a very siloed. View today is you start to put people together based on you know product lines or markets or something, so they're just all together through the whole process and then you've got a direct line between the customer and the engineering team. So you know, that's kind of the extreme version of it, but again, there's lots of businesses that have seen success with that as well.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I love that and you know, if I think about my business, all the best ideas have come from the staff. And it's funny't it. Yeah, you as the owner, you can give someone an idea and they might run with it, but if it's, if it's the same idea and they happen to come with themselves, they'll run with it so much faster and it just it hits home. Like you say, it gets back to that, that empowerment figure, I would say um, I guess a part of what you do will be building that culture piece and also building strategy, but also almost that sort of resilience piece, I imagine. And because companies need to be resilient and need to be everyone moving in the right direction, is that one of the most difficult things to navigate for you initially when you start working in the business, to sort of change that mentality?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean resilient organization is tough again because you're talking about potential change. You know people don't like change. So yeah, overcoming that, you know I tend to call it the kind of the corporate immune system. So it will reject, you know, things that are new and novel. And overcoming that, I tend to call it the corporate immune system. So it will reject things that are new and novel because it's potentially a threat to somebody or perceived threat to somebody's job or it's not done in the right way.

Speaker 2:

So sometimes, when we are talking about really radical innovation, you do have to push that to the fringes of the organisation because the internal bureaucracy and red tape will just any new novel idea would just never make the stage-making process because the body isn't a robust market analysis for you. Almost these things you need to just test in the market really. So if it's really radical innovation, you know, put a separate team together, push them to the fringe of the organisation and kind of just let them do the scum works of testing and iterating. And you can still do this in a small business. This isn't just allocated just for larger corporations. Even if you're a mid-sized company, you can identify certain people that have more entrepreneurial mindsets, like the entrepreneurs, and just put them together and say you know, go and explore X, y and Z, or, you know, come back with some ideas. So you know that's one way of doing it.

Speaker 2:

And then, in terms of, yeah, resilience, I think the critical point is having a clear um why this? Why now? So, if you're in an organization where you know there are some challenges at the minute and you're just trying to keep the lights on, for example, trying to think about innovation or something that's, you know, three years away, it's just not, it's just going to be met with. We haven't got time for this. We need to do this at CoinZ. So it's about having the soft skills to put a persuasive argument together, of answering that key question is why this, why now? And then, if you can get that and you can get everybody on board, then you can start to make some progress in the area and people can see then the direction you're trying to go and get on board. So, yeah, those are probably the two things I would focus on.

Speaker 1:

Out of all the work you've done with manufacturing I guess just business in general. If you think about patterns, what are the main mistakes you see companies making and the first things you fix? Would you say yeah?

Speaker 2:

It's an interesting one because it's different for every time. You've really got to understand what the challenge of the business is at the minute. So, you know, just leaping back to the kind of the strategy piece around what you know, what are the challenges at the minute? It's like, do you have a strategy problem, do you have a revenue problem or do you have a cost problem? You know they're kind of the three buckets and nested under that is some other things. Which is, you know, is it part of the vision or is it a cost issue for X, y and Z? So you do have to, you know, really dig in. I think you can't just say it off the bat that all companies have, you know, this particular type of problem. It's just doing the work first of all to really get to the root of the first challenge to solve.

Speaker 1:

You know, challenge to solve, you know, and that's the process that I'll go through really with this.

Speaker 2:

The simple strategy is we we want to get some quick wins in the business first and we want to get some momentum. So we focus on the core business. What is the kind of value creation we can get into the business? Make some bottom line improvement first and then perhaps we've got some more latitude to think about innovation in horizon one, horizon two, horizon three, because also that takes capital. So if you're a constrained business, thinking about something investing in a new technology is just not practical until you've got some momentum and some wins. So I think doing it in that order is the right way to go Identify the key challenge to solve, what ideas can we do to that, and execute on them quickly and get some momentum and then go from there.

Speaker 1:

And where do you see, where do you see manufacturing going? I mean, you'll see changes in the business. Now, what do you think of the, you know, if we have an optimistic head on. What do you think of the, of the positives, of the next sort of, you know, five, 10, 15 years, that you say I think we need way more government investment in this, you know.

Speaker 2:

So we um, depending on what which figure I'm reporting to be, but it becomes quite significant to the gdp.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think gdp is running well over 100 percent of um. Our debt is over 100 of the gdp at the minute, which means that interest rates are one of the biggest line items on the balance sheet. So we need to innovate ourselves out of this. Innovation has been the way that we've created global prosperity over time. You know, one chart I might show you if you want to be able to flash it up on the screen to people, is if you look back over all of human history, innovation and inventions are just flatlined all the way up until about 200 years ago, and then it's just parabolic flatlined all the way up until about 200 years ago, and then it's just parabolic. You know. So you know, 100 years ago most people were impoverished, you know, and starving to death, unless you know. And almost all metrics on human, human health, infant mortality rate, um are just being massively improved through the innovations that are coming. The last 20 years have been phenomenal. Now, if you took you, think about everything that's off the back of web and mobile. We just live in a totally new world. You've now got a supercomputer in your pocket that the president of America couldn't have had 20 years ago. So the rate of innovation is going to just keep going up and up in terms of an exponential curve.

Speaker 2:

I don't know what the future looks like, particularly within the world of AI. I don't think anybody does, but I'm really excited about it. I'm really bullish about it because whenever we've had these big step changes in technology you know, from agriculture to the various industrial revolutions there's just been more prosperity, more jobs. So that's counter to the doomsday thing you hear about AI's going to take in and punish jobs. So I'll just look at the trends Every time we've had a step change in technology, the world has got more prosperous. Yeah, so you know I'm an eternal optimist.

Speaker 2:

No, I share the thoughts I'm really excited about it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I agree, I share the thoughts. It'll just be different, it'll just be change, and I think it links into everything you've been saying today. I think that everyone's just got to. You've got to embrace that change, otherwise you get left behind and you become pessimistic about the future. But you know, I imagine everything you do now is trying to create that open mind change within a business to move forward now. It's huge. What's the one thing you'd like to leave listeners with in terms of thinking about if they're driving to work wherever now, in terms of whether that be themselves or a strategy for the business or the team, what's the one thing you want to leave them with that they should be thinking about?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I guess if it's kind of one thing that I could upload into everybody's neural nets as. Another takeaway here is to start asking the question what would need to be true so you can imagine a future of the business and it being successful? What sort of assumptions have you made about the world in that environment? So, project your business five years ahead and it's successful. Ask what would need to be true for that. What would need to be true about our customers, about the market, about the technology, the trends, the needs of the customer? So it kind of flips. If you just keep that one question in your head what would need to be true Then it starts to form the hypothesis of your strategy. So, yeah, that's probably the one takeaway.

Speaker 1:

And would you, if they do that, how granular would you go with that detail in terms of, let's say, they write that down? Would you then reverse, engineer that and create goals?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, this is part of the kind of the Plato and Pramon which I should have said actually is that you create these possible scenarios of the future and what would need to be true in each of those scenarios. So this is almost a backwards way of doing. The normal strategic planning is where you get lots of data up front and you let the data decide. Data is normally historic data, even if you look at trends. It's like let's imagine a future in which we're successful, what would need to be true about that future? And then we pick a likely scenario which we think is the most probable and we reverse engineer that Okay.

Speaker 2:

So we go out and then we get the data to see if that supports that scenario. So it sort of closes off. Just getting huge amounts of data and trying to analyze this and take months and months, which most mid-sized small organizations just haven't got the resources, the time to do that. Well, is a shortcut effectively to saying, right, this is the direction we want to go in, how confident are we about the assumptions we're making for that future? And then you know, find the evidence to support or not that and obviously iterate from there.

Speaker 1:

Like it, like it and and now, as you're talking now, just thinking about mine so and so, which is great.

Speaker 1:

This is why I like this type of stuff, because it it does and it should get people thinking about that and and thank you for this episode, because exactly that I wanted.

Speaker 1:

It was an episode where people just really stop and think about stuff, because I'm guilty of it. You just come in sometimes and you're just straight away in the day-to-day and fighting fires and I think, ultimately, if you haven't got that overall strategy and the team and I love that example, which I will do with the team I love that idea of getting everyone together and saying, writing down what's our strategy, because I'd be really interested, because I think we'll be in a much better place now than we were a few years ago, but I still know now thinking about it, we have a variety of and there'll be some people going I don't know when I'm nervous that I should not do. You know what I mean. So and that taught me for not being able to not being clear enough. So I think if there's one thing people do out of this, it is that, because I also imagine that's also. We talk about innovation, where you get loads of your ideas and talk about it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, exactly, I think if you do that exercise and obviously hopefully lands in what you feel is a good strategy for the business, then just write that down in a real simple strategy statement, no more than a paragraph that talks about you know why you think you're going to win. You know that's really the takeaway. You know who is our customer, what do we do and why do we think this is going to win. That's kind of the nutshell of it and just cascade that throughout the business so that everybody has got a really clear view on it and that's kind of step one really.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, excellent, perfect. And Dan, where can people find you if, ultimately, hopefully, they do want to sort of dig a little bit deeper with you and ideally get you to dig into their team's minds as well? Yeah, so I mean, linkedin is the place.

Speaker 2:

Really that's where I hang out. So yeah, just find me on LinkedIn, drop me a message, you know, just to say that I've got time for anybody. You know, if you want to just have an hour and just throw some challenges at me and see if we can come up with some ideas, then I'm more than happy to do that yeah, perfect.

Speaker 1:

Well, thank you very much, mate, it's been great brilliant thank you, mark see you soon thank you so much for listening to.

Speaker 1:

this Absolutely means the world to me. Please let me know if you need any assistance. As a business, we look at providing partnerships with manufacturing engineering companies to really help their recruitment and retention. On the recruitment piece anywhere from blue collar semi-skilled staff right the way up to C-suite level executive appointments, but also much more than that we run events. So please let me know if you're interested in any of those. If you are interested in becoming a podcast guest, we're very, very keen to speak to you as well More than happy to do so. But as a business, as I say, we look at key partnerships to really help your recruitment, your retention, your marketing, your training. We really believe in the partnership piece and being extension of your business. We're very proud to work in this sector. I love manufacturing engineering and my staff are just as passionate about it as I am. So thank you once again for listening. Please get in touch to talk about anything we can do to help. Look forward to speaking to you very soon. Thank you.