Succeeding and Growing Your Business in Challenging Times

good morning everyone my name is nick frye manager of business development with torres nova scotia and thank you for joining us for succeeding and growing your business in challenging times today is thursday april 15th i am so glad you were able to join us for those of you joining for the first time tourism nova scotia is the provincial marketing organization for the province of nova scotia we market nova scotia as a vacation destination and lead initiatives to grow the tourism industry this webinar series was set up to help during the covid pandemic it's had devastating impacts on the industry and we want to offer practical advice and solutions as we move through and welcome visitors when the time is right now we really want you guys to be interactive today post your q a at the bottom any links we talk about throughout the presentation we'll send out in an email we'll also have a recording sent out and available online so if uh and also we may go over an hour and that's okay if you have to leave at 11 for another appointment or you have another meeting it's all right you can catch it in the recording and if you can stay the whole time that is great so i'm so excited to have matt sims ceo of simplicity designs here with us today over the last 10 years matt has helped over 400 businesses and organizations improve innovate and grow internally at simplicity with a portfolio companies he is responsible for the same growth journey matt has lived the trials and tribulations of being responsible for multiple organizations in multiple sectors so matt you know has a really a breath of information so i'm so excited to hear about it today matt is a serial entrepreneur with equity positions in manufacturing biotech experiential retail and wholesale so i'm really excited to have matt here i invite him to share a screen i want everyone on the webinar today to be really engaged to ask any questions thanks matt again and i look forward to your presentation but there's one more thing people that are joining us today will have the chance to have a 30-minute coaching session with matt sims from simplicity and after watching or listening to this webinar you are going to want that 30 minutes so you're going to cover a specific challenge you're having with your business or you can look at your business holistically so to take part in that 30-minute coaching session which is included uh in the webinar if you are selected you have to be a tourism business operating in nova scotia attend or watch this simplicity design webinar and uh just email us at tns business at nova scotia and answer this question how would your tourism business benefit from this coaching session so pretty simple great opportunity to send us an email and tell us how you benefit from it so uh now i will welcome matt to the screen and really uh thanks again for joining us thank you nick uh appreciate uh you having me um just trying to see if my video is being shared no there it is let's try it now how do we there you go matt you're great good nick we're going to get you to stop sharing your screen and then we'll get going so you would share yours now there you go there we go should be good to go right now as long as you're in spotlight view perfect okay thanks folks um really appreciate those who made the effort here this morning to get here um it has been anything but a normal year and you know coming out of this pandemic i don't exactly have great news for you the next 12 to 24 months will be as hard if not harder than the last 12. so we will emerge from this pandemic we will have an understanding of a little more safety and security but we are going to do it without government subsidy we are going to do it with a customer that has dramatically changed the way in which they interact with you and your brand and that really means that a whole bunch of things that were going on sort of incremental changes that were happening at one two three percent a year happened all in about 10 years of time in a year and i don't say that lightly there's a number of organizations that uh have put out a lot of documents mckinsey's put out a lot of documents there's just there's mckinsey if you look at any of the major accounting firms you look at any of the major uh consulting firms all of them have said that we're not going back we're not going back so if anybody's holding on for a needle in the arm and headed back we're not going there things have changed things have changed forever and i want and there's no sector that's been hit harder no sector that's been hit harder than yours and so you now have to navigate those times and whenever i talk to a group like yours i'm always reminded of teddy roosevelt's famous quote the man in the arena uh if you get a chance please google brene brown's version brene brown's version of this is is is even more powerful the reality is i admire all of you who are on here today trying to run businesses through here you're in the arena doing something and too many people will lob shots and offer advice from outside the arena and so this is what i say pretty regularly when you're going to go find advice when you're going to go find help and we all need it on this journey folks we all need it when you're going to go find it please find it from those who have been in the arena or those who are in the arena there are too many white paper bag consultants who are all too happy to give you a report and say you should do this and blame you when it doesn't work don't fall into that trap uh you saw a little bit of my bio the only thing that i'll add to that bio uh is that we have skin in the game so we have ownership in nine organizations majority or minority and ideal in a sector a deal in having got a coffee shop okay so i i understand i also have a real estate portfolio that has cottages in it that might have got hit last year so those those this is a hard sector i don't know how to do anything else other than say this is very very difficult very difficult but there are those that are thriving in this so let's get to this okay the next normal here's what we're going to look at today we're going to the virus we're going to look at the world we're going to look at the future of business i'm going to bring up epic chemistry as a case study because i think there's some important lessons the coffee shop i think there's some important lessons in here and where the world's changing and how quickly and then i'm going to talk about your turn so hang on we're going to do about 30 40 minutes this anything that you want to chuck in the chat i've got the chat open on the right here i can see it please put it in there i will try to incorporate it in as we go this is for you this is not for me so anything you want to put in there put in there okay this could also be titled what the heck do i do with this mess um let's get going we are emerging from the great lockdown we are emerging slower than the u.s and in fact in parts of ontario quebec and alberta they are now facing more hospitalizations and more deaths per million than the us did at the worst time of the pandemic so we are not out of this folks just just to be perfectly clear we're not out of this the atlantic bubble just got delayed um you know i know that we're not supposed to time fence this wonderful presentation but you have a summer coming up and so you need to start to contend with what does it look like what does it look like for me and what does it look like under three different conditions very unlikely you're going to face the lockdown but my guess is we're going to continue to face the dance and we are going to face opening up a restrictions and you've got a business to run through that with a wage subsidy that's running at the end of june okay we had the hammer we're now in this place called the dance and the dance is oscillating threats reopening closing reopening closing means no one shows up as we move forward in new brunswick there are 1477 cases 43 active cases 30 fatalities going on right now if you go a little bit further in nova scotia the number is even smaller we are dealing with it well which is nice but if there's one thing for certain that we know about this pandemic is that we know nothing for certain except we do now we know two things we know border crossings are going to be more difficult and it's going to be interesting to see how people handle vaccines etc we know that large gatherings are not going to be a thing until we have enough people vaccinated we also know we also know what's dangerous and what's not dangerous especially with these new variants especially with these new variants the uk variant the brazil variant etc we know that they are more contagious and they are more dangerous to the youth we know that we also know that indoors is more dangerous okay i'm not probably telling you anything you don't know we also know occupations that are more at risk the reason why i bring both of these up if you look at both of these sites they're incredible ways of seeing information and i highly advise you go take a look at the visual capitalist and you go look at information is beautiful both of those are wonderful places to consume information we also know that masks are going to be with us for a while and if you look at the flu pandemic in the last year maybe we ought to consider them because the flu didn't actually happen last year in any meaningful way during flu season and to give you a little idea of that uh normally per week in january there were somewhere between 14 and 23 000 transmissions of the flu last year the number was literally 50 and below because we're all wearing masks so folks we know the scientific impact on it and this is a point i want to bring up it takes a lot of grit and resilience to run a business it also takes some brains to change your mind when things aren't working and if i can guarantee one thing for you is that the world is going to continuously change and i need to stay one step ahead of it in terms of what my customers are asking for and how i can deliver that value so in order to be a very very effective and profitable and sustainable long-term business i need to be able to change being able to change requires you to be able to take your most highly guarded sacred sacrosanct thoughts and challenge them on a regular basis one of the things i came out with very early on in the pandemic was i said listen masks are useless because that's what the world health organization said then a month later they came out with a good scientific piece of research that said masks are very useful if we both wear them so here's why i want to bring this up if you're going to be a very good business owner you're going to have to learn to change your mind and change your mind often i like to say firm opinions held lightly with a growth mindset folks if there's a better way to do stuff let's look for it okay this was the fun graph around influenza and the flu way down isn't that amazing how many we actually had and folks some other fun stuff about this pandemic gum sales are way down turns out people don't care about their breath if they're not around people or if it's underneath a mask folks as we get moving here we have we are continuing to roll out the vaccine but it's going slow in canada very slow in canada what's the economic outlook the next 12 to 36 months you're going to face three phases and the first phase is almost over but dangerously close to over and yet still so far away we don't know when it's going to be completely over but this is about surviving the worst of the pandemics this is about surviving the lockdown and then we have the low touch economy and then we have the next normal now the next normal is going to be folks it takes 66 days to create a habit we have been in some form of lockdown for a variation of 12 months touch and go customer habits the way they enjoy the world the way they interact with the world has changed forever there will be fast movers or first movers rather and there will be fast followers and there will be those that will get left behind i'm very concerned for business over the next 24 to 36 months and here's why most have taken on a lot of debt most are not staring at where their customers have gone most are hanging on by a thread and most have no concerted plan for number two and number three there they have no idea how they'll survive in the low touch economy without a subsidy and they really don't understand the customer habit changes that have happened and as a result they're not terribly sure how they're going to survive in the next normal either and they're kind of just hoping it might go back to some version of what they had and they can go back to some form of surviving or thriving this will have a very real impact on the economy we know that there was a six percent decline in gdp and advanced economies one percent in emerging economies we know that the stock market is doing crazy things and we're not quite sure how that keeps going up while the results don't support it so we're all a little concerned about what's going on there we know that people are finding new ways to translate value so things like bitcoin which has been along for a while but nfts non-fungible tokens um fascinating that a jpeg can be sold for 69 million dollars not sure what's going on there um we know that the reserve currency being the u.s currency is a little bit at risk

right now as people find new ways to deliver and understand value so this is the world we live in this the world we live in the relative stability where the u.s dollar anchored a an economy is not as prevalent as it was 30 years ago so this is the world you operate a business in now folks if you look over the long arc of human history and and one of the parts in my bio that doesn't often get put out is i'm a recovering academic um and by that i mean i'm a recovering historian and so if you look over the long arc of human history this is not surprising that we're going through a period of change it just kind of sucks to be in the dead middle of it um so what kind of recovery are we going to face out of this is it going to be v-shaped u-shaped l-shaped um we learned all kinds of letters in this i had no idea that these were economic theories before the pandemic v-shape was canada after o8 u-shape was the u.s after o-8 and l-shape was greece never really recover and so we looked at this and said which one is it going to be and the debate was on for ferociously for a while and then we realized it's actually going to be this and yes this is a horrific orange slide and it's an orange slide quite on purpose because we are dealing with a k-shaped recovery right now we are dealing with a recovery where professionals and those who can do what i'm doing today create value in some way on a screen and do it virtually okay they could still survive and even thrive in this but the service economy the tourist economy is really struggling some are predicting a 10-year recovery on that folks it is really important you understand where you sit and this lovely graph from the board of innovation i think is one of the most important things to put a circle on where you are and to understand where you're starting from and folks to be an entrepreneur to get out of bed every day requires a certain amount of hope but i don't let that hope infiltrate the brutal reality of where i am if you study anything like jim collins or any of the any of the greats who talk about proper strategic execution there are two things that remain sacrosanct i believe firmly we're going to get to a better tomorrow and i understand the world the way it is not the way i wished it was so can you get there as a team the way that i help people get there take a look at this circle where you are how long of an impact is it going to have on your industry how big of an impact has it been right now where are you on this once you circle one of them we can start to get to work and so this these slides will be available to you afterwards um i if if you do nothing else start from where you are don't and start from where you are and let's start working back out from there okay you're gonna have to prepare for multiple scenarios of recovery we talked about this briefly just wanted to bring up this mckinsey uh mckinsey quick presentation um links down there in the bottom it just talks about what the likely recovery is the thing that i want you to see is the squiggly lines squiggly lines every organization is going to go through some form of a hockey stick even those organizations who benefit from the uptick in work dealt with high variance on their supply chain on their ability to deliver for the customer it was it was very very difficult now for those who had no customers you didn't really want to hear about people who had too many customers but here's the thing about business all variants to what you think is going to happen and what you're prepared for creates chaos in that chaos it's hard to profit from so whether it's less or more it's very difficult in fact the vast majority of organizations that fail that go bankrupt are actually highly profitable 84 of organizations that go bankrupt are actually profitable think about that for a second so it's variance to plan and our inability to deal with that chaos that normally shuts us down this recovery as we've seen looks a lot more like the rocky mountains i mean we're talking about an atlantic bubble and that atlantic bubble just moved from supposed to open here in a couple days it's now may 3rd they got a slit we're going to deal with health regulations with customers all kinds of stuff yes it's a big setup to say folks are you ready for three or four different realities let me say that again are you ready for three or four different realities for this next season you in in the tourist world you have a distinct season in nova scotia right we all know when people come and we all know where they come from are you ready for three or four different variables are you ready for nova scotians alone are you ready for atlantic canadians are you ready for a partial re-opening are you ready for a full reopening in the fall are you ready for this right there is a thirst of disposable income now we're sitting on a bit of a bubble of that too there's a desire to travel coupled with the most amount that canadians have had in their savings account coupled with a small drop-off afterwards and so there's a you know you have to follow these trends to figure out how they affect you and then within it within it you have to figure out what it means for you and your business you don't need to be the average you don't need to be the average so let's talk about how i get past just being a victim of the market um and and i've said this to a number of groups the market can make an idiot look like a genius you can make a genius look like an idiot so i need to understand it because it has more power than any one thing i do because i play within it okay so what has really changed and what's the next move let's talk about this digital transformation has occurred 10 years of e-commerce adoption has occurred in the last 12 months that's the growth it was limping along 10 years it's been pushed into the future global retail declined three percent e-commerce is up 32 inch was up 32 in 2020 projected to be up on an additional 14.3 in 2021. people are comfortable buying online and folks for those of you who don't know um we are the sister company of community hall the subscription box in atlanta canada and i can tell you that over 70 of our clients are over the age of 60 and they have all bought online i want you to think about that for a moment the generation that we would have assumed wouldn't buy online and want it to show up in person is buying online and they have learned how to and do it okay 75 percent of buyers and sellers now prefer digital options folks there's a lot that i've learned in this pandemic that i'm not going back to i used to travel a tremendous amount i used to miss out on a lot of my daughter's evenings i'd be home guaranteed for two of them a week tried to get to three now i'm home every night i don't i don't want to give that up i'm not going to give that up so think about the major shifts that have happened with your clientele and what that means for you think about also what it means in terms of capability getting things done folks one of the things that i'm shocked about is the relative few people are taking advantage of the educational opportunities they're overwhelming i get that there's so many of them now and everybody's moved to this format so it's hard to figure it out but once you figure out where you're headed and what help you need folks it's at your fingertips now it's never been more readily accessible that last or the second last point on this screen i want to bring up major canadian banks are requiring an intelligent digital strategy as part of their lending considerations now this shocked me listening to the head of rbc and then i listened to the head of td um two separate webinars and they basically said if a small and micro company can't talk intelligently about their digital strategy we are not interested in lending to them they understand where the world's gone and that final one folks remote work is here to stay figuring how to make it work is going to be very complex fully remote hybrid what are we doing it also opens up a world of opportunities you now have access to incredible talent around the world but you gotta go find it right we've also become a more desirable area to move into so you know atlantic canada is only going to benefit from you know both the way we've handled this pandemic and the beauty of our landscape given where the world's had it what's that mean for you again what's that mean for you okay folks traditional b2b are now pushing direct to customer traditional b2b are pushing direct to customer look look at these these are not small shifts folks these are major brands that are that used to rely wholly on b2b now they're going direct to consumer right and these they may look like small shifts they're not this one i think is probably one of the most important slides for tourism nova scotia the future of retail will be experiential it will not simply be a gift shop where i buy trinkets people will only go to locations when there is an experience to be had do you understand the experience that you're providing to your customer what experience is that and i i love listening to gary vee because he is gen he's not afraid to put himself out there in terms of what's going to happen in the future and he's been right more than he's been wrong so i love listening to him because i think he's just fantastic but one of the things that he said that really stuck with me is that you're going to see a ton of new concepts at stores and it's going to be fun it's going to be fun to go to a store now so how are you creating the right experience for the different type of clients that you have so that they become raving fans do you know the percent of your clientele that is local within a proximity of 100 kilometers that is outside of that hundred kilometers that is outside the region do you understand how you're creating the right environment for them do you understand the different types of customers that are coming in and why they're coming in are you catering that experience to two or three or four different profiles have you mapped that out my my favorite exercise to do with an organization is to map the customer journey okay when you think about a restaurant and i ask this question often i say how many touch points between when i make the reservation and when i leave and get in my car and drive away from a restaurant does that restaurant happen how many touch points do they have and most people will say between five six seven that's what most people will say the true answer is they have somewhere between 40 and 80 touch points and how many of those touch points have to go wrong to get a negative review on trip advisor one do you know all the touch points along the customer journey i'm going to give you two examples of this that really made it hit home for me in the denver airport they had a significant number of complaints about the speed at which the bags were coming from the airplane to the carousel okay and they went and immediately you would think okay we've got to speed that up but they happen to be in the top one percent of getting bags off of planes in the cares couldn't figure out why are we getting all these complaints we're in the top and they kept grinding out improvements finally they went to the customer journey map and when they went to the customer journey map they realized that people like forward momentum they like to move and so when people get off a plane they go as fast as they can and they end up at the baggage carrier well here's what they also realized the denver airport also had in the top two percent of speed from when you get off the plane to the castle and so the relative experience for the customer in the denver airport compared to another one was that they were waiting longer waiting longer for their luggage the reality is they weren't waiting longer but they felt like they were and so seeing that the denver airport mapped out a brand new way to get to your luggage and they weaved you through and they put up beautiful stores and welcomed you and put up small pieces from the area and really welcomed you to the to the region with wonderful representations of it both in commercial ways and in museum ways and and really welcomed you into denver the result was it took twice as long to get to the beginning people were happier people spent more money getting to know the place in the different they stopped for snacks they stopped for souvenirs and they got to the baggage carousel a little bit later and their luggage was there from and they loved it now folks that's a counter intuitive solution it is not where people would have looked first and foremost when i get complaints about the baggage carousel and the amount of time i'm waiting when you map the customer journey you're going to find all kinds of those same buffalo sabres hockey team did the exact same thing map the customer journey and one of the things you'll know about an experience is that you generally remember the last part of the experience far more viscerally than any part along the journey and the last bit if you've ever been to a professional sporting event is that you go out and you wait forever and you wait and you sit there and you sit in your car and you try and get out of the parking lot and it takes forever and it is brutal you see people leaving with six minutes left seven minutes left ten minutes left in the game because they just don't want to sit in their car the sabres realized that that was the number one problem with most of their with their experience so they said okay how are we gonna fix that and it turned out the solution was very very easy all they did was create a kid zone then they created restaurants that stayed open then they created a few bars that stayed open and then they made sure the gift shop stayed open and what they did is they turned that two-hour hockey game into a three-hour experience for those who wanted it not everybody those who wanted those who wanted to keep the memory going a little bit longer what it did was dramatically decrease the number of people rushing to the cars what it allowed is for staggered x that staggered x it allowed for a dramatically different experience okay folks i bring this up because if you map the customer journey how they interact from your with your brand online to when they show up to when they leave and how you interact after you're going to find a whole host of opportunities that are really easy to do now when i said they created things in buffalo did they really create things no they just took what they already had and kept it open a little bit longer okay most of the solutions that you will find on the customer journey map don't cost you very much but they add a tremendous amount of value and bring a tremendous amount of profit to the organization it's time that we go from defense to offense and when i was giving a variation of this presentation in south africa they had no idea who i was talking about when i talked about wayne gretzky but i like to skate to where the puck is going not where it has been okay folks this is not the time to invest in ppe this is the time to invest in customer journey mapping and understanding your customer i'm going to talk about the story of epic chemistry so this is the coffee shop that i talked about this is our building it's a building in moncton new brunswick you can tell that i've been affected by the bubble a little bit going back and forth between new brunswick and nova scotia um we originally wanted to start and open a cafe we had done all the work for a year previously going around the world quite literally to the top cafes in the world visiting roasters etc and as we were about to open the pandemic okay can't do that let me talk about coffee for one second we all love it very few of us know much about it i've come to learn coffee is simple but good coffee relies on you so there's a farm and then it goes to a roaster and then you brew it most important thing is to get really good beans then get somebody who knows how to roast and then it's all up to you and for about half a decade i was turning exceptional coffee into sludge and i know that this is also a problem because that sludge was normal for me to drink and it was normal for me to drink at other people's places as well and so we understood that there's a gap in that final bit i mean this isn't like wine wine you uncork it unless you sit in the sun or freeze it you really can't screw wine up you can make a mess of coffee and so we realized that that people could make great coffee at home relatively simple if they understood four things grind size water temperature ratio and brew method but most people don't understand that and they don't understand how to get at it and they don't understand how to make good coffee so we said okay well how do we become that gateway then because what we were having trouble doing is when the pandemic hit what did we do oh let's go to curbside let's do all that kind of fun stuff okay none of that worked because people didn't really realize the difference between you know what the coffee world's done a wonderful job of selling you dark roast to something you like even though dark roast is essentially burnt beans from different farms so they can all make it taste the same it's soot um and so we didn't know how to help people taste good coffee and so we've got to figure this out well potassium room was born as a result which in hindsight makes complete sense because people go to wine tastings all the time why wouldn't we also and wine tastings generally you can't have one at 9am it's still not socially acceptable so why not do a coffee tasting so we knew the cafe wasn't going to work we knew that wholesale wasn't going to buy because they didn't really understand the difference between really really really good coffee and not so good coffee everyone drinks coffee few understood how to make it how do we get people to taste the difference and that's where the tasting room came out we invited two in to try it we wanted to impress them so we sat them at the bar we went through the different ways different extraction methods you can make coffee so i went through a beautiful little pour over and then we went to a wonderful immersion coffee and then we went to an espresso and then we went to a milk drink of latte to finish it off make it nice and smooth and you just got to follow the progression of same bean different type of experience in the mouth completely you take the same bean grinded at a different size different brew method it was unbelievable and they were blown away but the same being could taste so dramatically different but huh wait a minute you didn't know this nope we didn't you enjoyed what just happened yep and we stumbled backwards into what i'll call experiential retail um and what this is basically a form of edutainment bringing you along a journey helping you connect with the being helping you connect with the way to brew it and it's been amazing so instead of opening a cafe and schlepping three dollar drinks we opened a tasting room that tasting room now is i mean it's for all through organic growth it is basically sold out friday saturday and sunday when we have our tastings and we have three tastings on saturday two on sunday one on friday and i'm i'm telling you this because we had a cafe that got decimated and nobody wanted to buy anything nobody could come to a tasting room that is thriving by the way we can also gear that down so as new brunswick this is in new brunswick we're looking to expand into nova scotia but as new brunswick goes from their different colors with different restrictions we can also oscillate with it we can go down to 10 people in safely we can go up to 22 when we're in in open we can go to 16 when we're in yellow and it's just understanding how to oscillate back and forth and you know the one thing this pandemic has done is create it a i think a more honest conversation between customer and supplier and i think it's been really great for brands to connect authentically and honestly and go oh we're just all in this together we're just you know we're a small local business we rely on you thank you for your for you showing up but also thank you for understanding what we need to move back and forth and still supporting us through this so a tasting room was born where we take people on a journey folks i can tell you that this is going to do you know this will be recorded here so i probably shouldn't say this top line but i'll say it's going to do about a million dollars annualized a year in the tasting room and we have three main value streams we have wholesale we have the tasting room experience and then we have retail subscription afterwards so a form of arr and mrr you know annual recurring revenue monthly recurring revenue with the people who buy the beans we have the tasting room experience where people learn what they like and don't like and then can buy the equipment etc and we have the wholesale where we are not a cafe so we don't compete with anybody else who's selling coffee for drinks so we supply a number of the high-end cafes and restaurants now okay i'm telling you this because i think that a lot of you had businesses that would have worked in the pre-pandemic world and we need to completely rethink them by the way if you were running a business that was barely surviving before don't rebuild that business rebuild something better rebuild something better okay you'll have this we iterated our way to success we brought the wholesale customers in we brought the we brought regular people in to experience it the one great thing about coffee is the vast majority of the world drinks it and it was fun it was a lot of fun a lot of fun to engage with them it's a lot of fun to engage with with with their experience so let's applying this let's start applying this to your business how do we do that okay we're going to run quickly through this uh but remember there are coaching sessions available afterwards if you reach out and that's why we decided to offer coaching sessions with us because we want to make this relevant for you it's all well and good for me to talk about nike and epic chemistry and other businesses but how do we make it relevant for you this is the start of it okay what problem do you solve for who and what is the value of solving that problem normally i would run right through this not going to just think about that question for a second i didn't notice i didn't say what service do you provide notice i didn't say what widget do you sell i don't care about that yet what problem do you solve for who what is the value of solving that problem i always stop people here and i say what problem is the milkshake solving a lot of times i ask hey i want to run a milkshake shop help me sell more of them and everybody in the audience because people like to participate it's hard to get that same feeling on zoom but they generally go you know make it thicker make it thinner add more flavors add more colors uh add more sugar on top in some way either whipped cream or candy or you know that ridiculous stuff there's a great one in downtown halifax that has the most ridiculous milkshake i've ever had in my life um but help me sell more milkshakes and they give you all kinds of answers but they don't ask the question what problem is the milkshake solving the milkshake solves two problems in pre-pandemic north america over 65 percent of milkshakes were sold to people commuting to work between seven and nine in the morning what problem did that solve boredom on the way to work turns out i didn't need more flavors all i needed to know was the average time of the commute and i need to make the thing thick enough to get you there who's my core competition coffee the bagel and for anybody looks at me and goes that's ridiculous i want you to realize that starbucks looked at that data and went wow that makes a lot of sense where do you think the frappuccino came from it's a coffee milkshake they started offering those as soon as they figured this out folks the best in the world asked themselves this question what problem do i solve for who and the most important bit is that last one what's the value of solving that problem because the value of solving that problem tells you whether it's financially sustainable whether you want to be in that game or not folks what is the job to be done what is the problem that v8 solves well i often also ask does anybody here drink v8 i think it's horrific tasting but why did people drink v8 they drank it to take care of their vegetable quotient for the day okay their vegetable quotient for the day then v8 decided that they didn't solve the problem of vegetable quotient or the two servings rather not the day i hope you get more than two servings the vegetable quotient they actually decided that they made juice and they started making all these other juices okay given this presentation in calgary once and as i went through this v8 example there was a guy that was cringing noticeably and he said matt i was in the room when we made this decision and it was the single worst strategic decision we had ever made as soon as they said they made juice and they created more versions of juice they got removed from the vegetable aisle which they used to sit on an end cap on and they got put into the juice aisle and in the juice aisle there's a whole bunch of different versions of it and you don't know which one's good and which one's not good for you and so people just sort of moved away from v8 the net result of that is that v8 has over 50 skus now and they sell less revenue total revenue than when they just had the one sku in the three different versions of it they sell less today in total revenue and way less in profit because of all the different brands that they're trying to support or the sub brands that they're trying to support folks when you get this wrong it gets really wrong don't look inside out what widget or service do you provide look outside in what problem do you solve for who the great organizations start there and if they can't answer that question they don't move to the next bit they don't just work harder try harder do more it's a mistake to do that folks the exercise that i hope that you go through what problem were you solving pre covid19 who was your customer what was the value of solving that problem how has that changed you've got to ask yourself these questions and what will happen is this slight shift in perspective will dramatically alter how you go to work it will also make you a lot more profitable and focused on the right things instead of all the things the most difficult thing to change is something that we do very well that no longer has value and yes folks i put blackberry and blockbuster and kodak on the right there blockbuster laughed at netflix had a chance to buy them for relatively little blackberry taught the world how to type with their thumbs and mocked the idea that a screen would be the way that we would go they said everybody would want a cute cordy keyboard and and value security they don't kodak invented the digital camera buried it in the basement okay what has changed in your world do you still have a market how has covid 19 change the way customers engage with you ask yourself these questions okay only nine percent of businesses came out of the last recession thriving you don't have to be one of the 81 percent that didn't you can be part of the nine percent to do still time still loads of time all of these organizations understood the customer and invested in improvement in innovation and rebuilt stronger every single one of those nine percent that came out where will you be where will you be folks i'm going to rip through a couple of business principles and i do this because i think and i hope that you interact with these resources that are readily available to you what problem do you solve for who what is the value how are you going to position yourself in the marketing what profit model will you use what's your moat what's your competitive advantage what are you leveraging labor code capital media what capabilities must you have people process and technology and folks this last one is really really important why are you doing this why are you getting out of bed because i got to tell you there's a lot of you're going to have to go through in the next 24 months and you better have a reason for getting out of bed why and folks in the handout here are all the resources for you what problem do you solve for who what is the value that's clay christensen competing against luck how you going to position it that's uncommon service which asks you what are you terrible at the service of great and obviously awesome by april dunford that gives you a playbook on how to properly position that in the market once you figure that out then you got to figure out what profit model the art of profitability will give you 23 different potential profit models that you'll have and naval ravicant who is you know came from absolutely nothing and is has has succeeded in multiple businesses will challenge you on mindset and how you're going to leverage what you're doing so that you can profit properly and then we'll get to the capabilities that you must have which we get into procter gamble's core book on strategy and michael hammer's core book on process how to do things faster better with less resources and finally start with why why are you doing this good to great is the classic book that talks about having a purpose and getting everybody getting the right people in the right seat and going and start with why is you know really a good book to engage in to make sure that you're connected to why you're doing this in the first place folks business principles haven't really changed how to succeed hasn't really changed but the customer buying habits have changed significantly changed significantly and the way we execute and connect has changed as well how will you recalibrate how will you reload for those of you who watch who watch junior hockey i have it in a long time but when i was in the building in peterborough there's a wonderful thing on the back and it just says we don't rebuild we reload folks i hope that you're going to reload and recalibrate at the end of this you're going to look back 10 years from now and you're going to put a nice little period and dot on a few sentences in here you're going to have a few smiles you're going to talk about this pandemic in some way and you're going to make sense of it life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards for those of you in the arena for those of you making decisions for your business right now you can only live this forward there's a hundred alternative narratives you're in the process of creating one it starts with your customer and what problem you're solving for them and what is the value of solving that problem from there it's about rebuilding your business it's about recalibration folks i hope we get the chance to interact i hope we get the chance to have a conversation about how you're going to rebuild because the success of the smaller micro businesses in this province will drive the success of the local economy and you're in charge of your little own your little domain to do so we're moving over to questions now um and uh hope that we get a few aside from the ones on why it's taking us so long to learn from asia nick you're coming back on with me i am here uh so anybody on the call that has any questions uh i would love to to get them now um so i mean we do have those two questions so uh the two questions we have so far why did it take us in the west so long to learn from north asia and an asian countries i can buy a sim card for my cell phone at the airport why is this not available or so difficult to find in canada well those are those are interesting questions to contend with i mean the the reality is people don't learn lessons easily they most people have firm opinions held firmly built in on belief systems and those belief systems give them pillars by which they navigate this world sometimes they serve them sometimes they hurt them and we're learning when it comes to masks etc and the transmission of of influenza or other illnesses that mass are pretty damn effective um so i take that to a broader question of you know what truths do you hold sacrosanct that aren't serving you anymore in your business okay nice i know i have a few questions and uh if people on the call are um gonna soak up the information a lot of great great ideas how did you guys when you first started you invited those customers in um one why why did you invite them in and what were you what was the plan or what were you hoping to happen is it is pronounced epic yeah pronounced epic yep okay so when we invited the customers into epic we wanted them to taste the difference and wanted them to experience what coffee could be and our journey through the coffee world from the farms to the cafes to the different roasters uh taught us a tremendous amount about what we liked in coffee and we realized that that people hadn't been on that journey for most for for most coffee was medicinal caffeine in the morning um a shot at one o'clock when you're when you're getting a little bit tired and for those brave enough after 5 pm and want to risk no sleep another shot if you will and so we said no this is a this is a totally different experience when you when you get into uh when you get into tasting it in a different way and we wanted to share that uh so that we could open up a market but we thought we were just sharing how good the beans were what we didn't realize is that it's actually the experience of learning about how good the beans could be that had more value than how good the beans were yeah sure and how do people is it online booking like what kind of what kind of process do you do so you know that we we backed our way into this right i mean like every good design it's iterative and you so at first it was a whole bunch of dms and and booking in a google calendar that quickly became a disorganized mess and we had to get a piece we we you know again improved to a piece of software um that we directed people to book uh that cleaned up the back end a lot um created a lot less confusion which was good um and uh and then it it grew through the experiences and the instagram moments and i think you know right now we're living in a world that is thirsting for different experiences because we've been locked up in our house so if you sit on a business that could offer an experience in some way and bring the world to a group of people who are decidedly a little bit nervous about traveling and are going to be for quite some time how would you do that right so that's great uh this is a just just for interest actually this is something that could be relevant to our audience what what kind of software do you guys use for your booking uh i don't even know that answer okay i can i can definitely get it to you nick that's not a problem but i have no idea okay um again i'd encourage anyone on the call to sorry on the webinar to ask any questions i just i'm gonna ask two more uh and then we'll let you go uh what advice i guess would you have for an accommodation in this current situation i mean you've given us a lot of great advice but that was an accommodation what would be the first thing i'd want to do accommodation help me what you mean like like hotel yep yeah so uh one of the two things that i've done so i i think one of the things that i i learn better from people's experiences than i do from sort of uh unsolicited advice on that people don't understand um but one of the things that i've done uh is is ensured that the welcome and how i bring people in right how i bring people in is so good that they're bragging about it so how do you create the how do you create those moments and every business needs to learn and so i'll just nick if you if you'll let me hear for a second there's a great book called the power of moments and it's by chip and dan heath and i would engage there's actually also a 20-minute talk on it that at the new york uh customer experience um ux conference so how are you creating that moment and you've got two distinct opportunities to kill it here when they come in how are they coming into and you can do small things like how do you make it easy for them to go to two or three activities because you know them so well right i a hotel in ottawa did this and i don't know how they knew but my god when i showed up they took me to my room okay they took me to my room and in my room i walked in and here was a bunch of stuff around running now i guess if you look up my social media you will see that i run fairly regularly but they had gone through the effort to help me with trails and they had gone through the effort of making sure that i knew the gyms in case it was raining and where i could get that where i could get a pair of shoes that they would get to me if i forgot my shoes do you think that organization knew me they knew me inside and out they knew i was traveling for business because the questions that they had asked before and they made it really easy for me to get my run in okay in the tourism experience here you are creating moments and memories there's a great example uh in the power of moments that talks about a phone a a hotel in uh in los angeles that actually has a hotline for popsicles this hotel is outdated by all stretch of you know it's got a pool but it's not it's not cutting edge in any way shape or form but it gets raving reviews because as you take your kids to the pool they can just call a line and it'll go what kind of popsicle would you like it's just a hotline for a popsicle so there's alway all kinds of ways to do this after you understand your customer that's cool uh and obviously it's stuck with the other trip to ottawa uh i got two questions here um matt you're making my head spin i have a bed breakfast and a missing key on your keyboard uh i started out with two bedroom and a sheer bath now i have two room suite i'm working on my experiences and family friendly i have a million questions yes you sound like a perfect candidate for the 30 minute session can't narrow them down i feel it less like a b now because i have such a little contact and the opportunity to adapt is difficult because you're not getting any government support i lost about 99 revenue last year so it's hard to adapt with no funds yeah so this is terry this is how do i make my place you know there's i that's you've written a paragraph there and it starts with how do i become the place that people want to stay when they come to my region and who's staying there are you you know you're talking about family friendly how are we ensuring that families go when you go to x location you've got to stay there you've got to stay there and by the way you can raise your price once you do this because you're creating more value so the real key is how are you catering to the family experience yes you used to do it in person so if you can't do it in person now maybe you can meet them outside we've got distance where we we know the parameters by which we can still have a very good human experience there's also little touches notes folks hand written notes how often do you get one of those today not very often so in a in a world that's decidedly digital how do you go analog and create a memory for them how do you know that family how do you collect the data up front about that family so that you can recommend where they should go you can tailor a little basket there's just a tremendous number of small things that require almost no cash that you can totally change the way people perceive their experience with you and you can give them what they want because folks at the end of the day it's all memories and moments as it is when you think back on your life so how does a stay with you become one of those moments i never forget and there are tons of examples online of people who do this it's not like i'm not saying you need to you need to wave a magic wand and invent something okay so there's there's a you can borrow best practices we'll get into that i'm sure in the session i hope that i get to see you there uh i've got the q a up as well nick and i'm seeing a few other ones like you know can you give some examples of digital tourism experience there's a whole bunch of virtual tours that are killing it you look at uh you look at um the african canadian um experience that is being put up so virtual tours that are that are uh relevant and engage which by the way that's becoming increasingly difficult as our expectation rises um and just how do you combine the two so subscription boxes how do you create a small part of the region um and and then open that with them in a digital way while they go through some sort of tour like you know how are you connecting all these there's there's lots of fun once we get into these discrete problems there's a there's a lot of fun okay how to know when to invest in potential growth or to protect cash flow for the next bad times coming yeah um so i like to have a year of cash flow available to me um because you never know when you're going to run into a bump for some reason i think supply chains are going to be the next major problem i don't think i know i'm dealing with them in a couple of businesses the price to ship something across the in a container has gone up three times in the last uh three months which is ridiculous uh but they're just trying to sort out the world's logistics um you're asking how to know when to invest for potential growth here's my rule of thumb when it comes to investment every potential change starts with a pilot that you invest big enough to learn but small enough that you don't lose the whole business okay big enough to learn just big enough to learn did it work so if i was sitting in that in that bed and breakfast that we just talked about i would pilot my new way with four or five guests yeah four or five guests get the immediate understanding i get it up to hopefully 20 25 guests and find out if my reviews go up and that kind of stuff pilot the small stuff tinker so how do you know when to invest folks you got to stay one step ahead of the curve consistently reinvesting but this is the rule small enough that you don't risk too much of the core but big enough that you learn so i won't take us too much past 11 there nick but again i am more than happy um to interact with any one of you the info at simplicity.ca

um goes straight to me nick i know you have a direct email you want them to reach out to for a direct consultation um we'll make sure i'll give it over to you nick that's awesome matt thank you so much i'm just going to um here we go so i'm just going to start my screen thanks again matt i really appreciate that oh right so that was a great um so much great information thank you matt again uh as we just talked about the opportunity there for that 30 minute coaching session is such a great benefit so send us an email tns business at nova scotia.ca we'll share this out as well and just answer how you benefit your tourism business will benefit from this and i think that's probably an easy question to answer so our next webinar was next thursday april 22nd 10 to 11 and it's packaged up with tourism nova scotia delivered by michelle sears a marketing advisor and judy lynch tourism development advisor uh with tourism nova scotia so they're going to cover a lot of different opportunities available with tourism nova scotia a lot of us items that matt talked about um being a place that you you know that people want to stay at a lot of that is maximizing what's available to you online as well uh and a lot of it is free so um we'll talk about that next week and uh our whole spring tune-up series every thursday in april into may uh six will feature a new webinar every week 10 to 11 upcoming topics our packaging and promotion health and safety and smartphone photography so again thank you so much for taking part in this series we do have three new programs that are open for application they launched yesterday we have a digital content marketing program the radiate tourism program and the tourism digital assistance program and i'm just going to give you a little overview here the digital uh sorry the digital content marketing program provides an opportunity to create high quality videos and photos for use in your marketing tourism marketing minimum partner investment is 7 500 plus a 15 media buy so it's around 8 600 um minimum buy you can uh develop and execute tailored digital marketing campaigns to raise awareness of your business or community minimum partner investment ten thousand dollars uh dns matches partner investments uh applications are open until april 28th we encourage you to check out that program and the link is there as well we have the radiate tourism program to develop and promote compelling travel packages to raise interest and awareness with local and maritime travelers so this is creating those programs i started creating those travel packages they're going to really have travelers want to come stay at your business participants in the program will be supported with development and marketing activities such as market research insights about travelers from the maritime provinces coaches coaching on experience and package development positioning your package to appeal to the target market tips to create digital ads and support for digital marketing activities valued up to five thousand dollars and managed through tourism nova scotia also open until april 28th we also have the tourism digital assistance program where you can receive up to five thousand dollars in services from qualified digital consultants to help improve your online presence eligible activities include e-commerce digital marketing strategy search engine optimization online bookings social media strategy website creation content creation copywriting and content creation social media posts this is an awesome program that we have had uh up and running since last year you receive five thousand dollars to have a consultant not only tell you what needs to be done but actually do the work uh it is open until may 5th and the links are of course you can link off of the website we'll also share it out after the fact and i really would uh encourage you to send us any questions after the fact at tns business at nova scotia dot ca sign up for you touch follow us at tourism ns on twitter linkedin follow tourism nova scotia our website is tourism.ca and our coven 19 resource section has such um has a lot of great information tourism ca slash coronavirus thanks again for joining us today hope you have a wonderful day and i hope to see you next week

2021-11-05 14:21

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