Episode 27- Thinking Big for Small Businesses with Jim Stevenson

In this episode of "Small Business, Big Moves,". Thomas Bennett is joined by guest Jim Stevenson  to explore creative strategies and innovative approaches that have propelled small businesses to new heights. Discover the steps to Thinking Big for business.

Connect with us on social media:
- Facebook: Thomas Bennett
- Instagram: @Thomas.mbennett
-YouTube:@SmallBusinessMoneyConnector
- LinkedIn: Thomas Bennett

Subscribe to "Small Business, Big Moves" on Your Favorite Podcast Platform for more inspiring episodes on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Small Business Big Moves is a podcast where innovation meets entrepreneurship. Join Tom Bennett as he explores all things  business growth! From business funding and business tax credits to conversations with leaders who have grown successful and innovative businesses! 

Transcript

0:03

Welcome to Small Business Big Moves, the podcast where innovation meets entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Tom Bennett, and we'll explore all things business growth from business funding and business tax credits to conversations with leaders who have grown successful and innovative businesses. Welcome to the show. Today's guest will be Jim Stevenson. Jim, I'll let you introduce yourself. Hi, everyone. I'm James Stevenson. I'm the founder and CEO for, want of a better term, of Bletchley Group. I'm also a partner of Spark International, which is an M& A house. I've spent 20, 25 years, I'm getting old, 25 years helping companies to find opportunities to grow, to structure them, to do strategies for them, to do go to market plans across all sizes of businesses, small and big. Including fundraising, M& A, so pretty much if it's going to help you grow, I've probably been there and done that. Absolutely, I love it. Yeah, and I know I know there's a lot that we can, we can cover today, right, throwing throwing some value at some of these businesses. I know mainly I wanted to really talk about like thinking bigger and having businesses see the bigger picture, but also kind of talking about a few things that you and I both cover from really all things, financing, M& A and pretty much everything in between, right? But before we jump into that, I know you just introduced yourself but wanted you to give us a little more background on kind of where you started and what got you to where you are today. Sure, I'll give you the short version because I think the long version takes a couple of weeks to be honest and the short version is if anyone wants to go and look at my, my LinkedIn profile, you'll see why I've, I've done lots of different things, which I love, and it gives me a different perspective on most, most businesses now. But I started out life in Scotland, you can tell with my accent in construction of all things. And I, I was a very specific type of person in that, that company. It was called a quantity surveyor. It's unique to the UK. It's essentially a bit law, bit finance, and a bit construction. And when you're working in a company that is turning over 60 million, but its profit margin is 0. 4%, you become very commercial. And that's where I got my commercial grounding from. And everything for me is, I believe in the Jerry Maguire quote, show me the money. If you're in business and you're not seeing the money, then you need to change things. But went from construction, was in there for nine or ten years, changed and started learning how to write code back in the day, way beyond 2000, and worked in software development for a couple of companies, moved into what was called front end technologies at the time, worked with a couple of companies there and grew to become Sorry, I should say I've been, I've been self employed for 25 years. So all of this is as a freelancer, a consultant. Moved to being Bacardi's global digital director for a couple of years, which was very fun. Had to go to Miami one week every month. Miami's a great city. Moved from there into working with Marks and Spencer's, a big retailer in the UK and grew their online presence. By 116 million in six months by restructuring the team and the company moved to there to company in Switzerland, which had just been bought into by KKR. KKR bought 49 percent of the business and got frustrated. It wasn't growing quickly enough. So through a friend of a friend, I was asked about getting help. And 18 months later, KKR sold their stake and made 550 million in the middle, which was pretty awesome. Did. life insurance with Bupa work with lots of small companies did the turnaround for a small company for a private equity firm and seven or eight years ago started working to help companies find fundraising in M& A. So I now have very many different bows to my, my arrow, if you like. Or my bull. Threads to my bull. Not quite sure what that saying is. But I, I do consultancy, I do strategic advisory, I help companies to turn around, I help them find financing, I help them expand through M& A, and I have one company at the moment that I'm working with that I'm doing a complete financial restructuring on because they took on a little bit too much debt and we're, we're trying to readdress that balance for them now. Absolutely. No, good stuff. Exciting for sure. And I, I know we're, like I said, similar, similar backgrounds as far as some of the things that we're able to help clients with. And I like when you mentioned that restructuring some of that debt, because I think that's one of the one of the common issues we see with the small to mid sized business owner taking on a lot of debt and loans that may not necessarily help the business. And then they, they kind of fall down that rabbit hole. And, you know, Need someone like you or I to get him out of there. So I like hearing that you're, you're helping people with that for sure. Yeah, absolutely. It's very common, actually, and people think it's an easy solution. But the reality is, if you don't think about it properly, then you can get very lost very quickly. And just to kind of expand on that, that slightly I think, I think people when they're trying to grow their business. Funding is always good. I believe in go big or go home in business, that there's a, there's a real kind of ethos there. There's no point kind of building a small lifestyle business unless that's genuinely what you're trying to do. So you've got to have big thoughts, you've got to have big strategies, and then you've got to fund it. But people very often go straight to, I want VC funding if they're a startup, or I want debt funding if they're an established business. And very often those are not the right, they're not the right place to start. You may end up in that, that position where that is the right funding for you, but it's not the right place to start with your thought process. Definitely. No, I agree with that for sure. And then kind of piggybacking on that. I'm, I'm right there with you. If you're, You're starting the business and really when you grow in a business or starting a small business, you're really given everything that you have. And then some to, to grow that up and get it to where you need to be. Right. It's one of the, one of the hardest things to do. And I like what you said with you really got to go big or go home or otherwise. What's the, what's the point of building this out, right. If you're just gonna, gonna fail like most other small businesses out there, but really piggybacking off that and kind of digging into the next point. I know. You mentioned a lot about the big picture and seeing that bigger picture. So I wanted you to kind of walk us through how you're seeing that's a problem with businesses today and then how how you might be able to help them overcome that. Sure. There's lots of, there's lots of challenges around about seeing the big picture. What one is having a small strategy and that's fine. You'll have a small business if you have a small strategy. I like the seeing shoot for the stars and you'll land on the moon or whichever it is. You've got to have a big plan and you won't succeed in your big plan and that's fine. And but you've got to have a big plan because a big plan will change how you think, it'll change how you approach your day to day, it'll change how your employees are working for you. And to be honest, bigger plans tend to get people more excited. So just from a cultural part in your business, it will change how you operate and what you do. But going beyond that, looking at the bigger picture. I find far too many people think I sell my, whatever it is, widget, my service to a customer. But actually looking at the big picture, what will help you significantly isn't looking at you selling your widget or your service to a customer. It's looking at what the customer does with it. What is the customer's end goal? We, we often talk about B2B and B2B is great, but at some point there's a customer in there. So you either, you are either in a B2B business, which is really B two, B2C,'cause the person you're selling your widget to is selling to a customer, or you're in B two, B two, B2B two C. But at some point there's a customer in there. So look at the big picture, look at the end user. and how your product or your service is adding into someone else's product or service and is adding into something that then adds value to the customer. Because having that bigger picture will fundamentally change how you're developing your product, your service, how your service and marketing it, your business model even. Maybe your pricing model is wrong. Maybe, maybe you're selling it to a customer for a hundred bucks each, but the reality is they're adding some very little onto it and selling it for a thousand. Why didn't you change your model to being a subscription service or something else? Looking at that bigger picture helps you fundamentally change where you're coming from from the business. And then just going back to the fundraising part the number of pitch decks I see in a daily basis where companies are looking to raise one or 2 million, they want to grow their business and they think they can get to 50 million in two or three years time. VCs just, that's just not the world they're in. They want to be changing the world fundamentally. And if your business isn't big enough. VCs aren't the people you go to. Or, you make your business big enough. You make it ambitious enough. The simple math of VCs is 1 in 20 of them will be successful. I think that's still accurate, but it's probably more challenging today to be honest, but let's say 1 in 20. But they're looking for the 20 that they think could possibly be that one. You going to a VC saying, we'll be 50 million in two years time, five years time. They're thinking, that doesn't cover my losses in the other 19. So thinking big just as a business concept. It will help you fundamentally your culture, how you're understanding your customers and what you're doing with your business model and you're growing. And if you do need to go there for either debt funding or VC funding or private equity funding, it will fundamentally help how you think about all of those concepts as well. I agree for sure. No, it really is that mindset and way of thinking where you really have to, it's really the only option is to think big picture, right? And then, especially with. The way the landscape is going in direction, you never know where business is going to go. So you may be thinking big picture today. It could be next month. It could be six months. It could be five years down the road. That completely changes and it's not, okay. I'm thinking big picture. Now you got to keep that. Mindset and really always, always adapt if you want to keep in business. Absolutely. That's a really good point. I didn't touch on it, but big picture for where your market is going. And a lot of what I do, I kind of, I've become a quasi kind of geopolitical, geoeconomic person, because I'm constantly looking at where the world is going, the supply chain issues, the technology changes. AI is fundamentally going to change your business. And if you think that your business is going to be the same today as it will be in two years time, you're missing, you're missing something. And to be honest, you're going to really struggle to grow or even exist because AI is going to be such a fundamental change. But then on the flip side of that, we know that chip manufacturers are struggling to keep up with demand for AI and the energy consumption for AI is going to put the whole infrastructure at risk. So you've got lots of things in there in the big picture. But every one of them, whether you're, whether you're a small business turning over a few hundred thousand or you're a small to medium sized business turning over twenty, fifty, a hundred million, all of these things will impact on you and you need to have that bigger picture. I, I, I don't generally subscribe to newspapers. I, I, I dislike, I'm Scottish, I dislike paying for newspapers. But I do, I do pay for the Financial Times. in, out of London. And it's only because that tells me what's happening in the world. And if I'm advising my clients, I need to know that. I need to help my clients understand what that bigger picture is. And sometimes I'll have a call with a client and it's an hour. But that hour is me telling them what's happening in the world, it's what's the future is going to have an impact on their business. So suddenly that instigates that one hour call instigates a whole different mindset and in their future strategy, what they're trying to achieve and where they're going, and that's invaluable, absolutely invaluable. It really is. No, that's spot on too, like you mentioned with the AI, right? I think it's one of those interesting times where AI has been around for so long and people are obviously hearing about it more and more now you get people that are scared of it and fear AI, you have people that are leveraging it and you get people that are building businesses with that as the backbone. But I think at the end of the day, like you mentioned, you really have to Be able to leverage it as a resource, right? Obviously you can't ever get rid of that human aspect, right? Like you said, it's one of those other ways you have to keep thinking bigger and maybe start thinking how can I implement this into my business or at least have it as an option because we don't know how big it's gonna get I, I mean, my company, Bletchley Group, was named after Bletchley Park, which is where Alan Turing worked during the Second World War. And essentially, it is credited with creating the world's first programmable computer in the same technology we have today. And I named my company after Bletchley Park because of that. It was using technology for a purpose. And it is fantastic. But if you don't understand where technology is going, your business isn't going to get somewhere. I just, if you're listening to this, go away and spend 20 bucks, get a chat GDP account, pay for it and use it every day, just on anything and figure out what it's doing. It's going to fundamentally change your business. Whether it's as simple as Microsoft. Co pilot when you're writing a letter or doing a pitch deck, or whether you're using it as part of your sales funnel or part of your organization structure and supply chain, it's coming and it's coming quickly. Absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more on that. And then I know we touched on the big picture, and then I know you touched on some of the other issues that. And come out of that, right. If you're not thinking big picture. And then I know some of those other areas where like lacking strategic alignment and effective communication between teams and departments and probably a million other things. Right. So that's all obviously ties into that as well, but then you get so now you get a business that's thinking big picture there, they're ready to really scale things Obviously, that next step is really increasing the business's effectiveness and profitability, right? It's you, you get the right mindset, you're thinking bigger. What would you say would be some of the options that a company can work on building that business effectiveness and becoming more profitable? I, I love this because I, I very seldom Focus on efficiency and profitability. I always focus on the customer. And going back to our fundraising conversation at the start most companies focus on date. If you're of a certain size and you've got some profitability or venture capital, if you're a startup, but the best money you can get is a customer paying you for your product or service. They're not asking for equity. They're not asking for an industry payment in three months time. It's a customer paying for your service. So focus on your customers. Always focus on your customers. I think it was 1980 or 1998 or something like that. I can't remember which. But Jeff Bezos sent one of his famous letters to the shareholders of Amazon. And I have a copy of it and it's highlighted. And it says we're going to continue to relentlessly focus on our customers. And I love that relentless focus on your customers. That's where your money comes from, that's where your profitability, that's why you're in business. So I, I love that. I always focus on customers and then the, the company efficiency tends to take care of itself. If you structure the business, if you're just looking at a product or a service, you can be inefficient. But if you're looking at how that customer moves through your organization, you'll become more efficient. So Peter Drucker, 40 years ago now explained the fact that companies are actually organizing silos. You've got your marketing team and they pass leads onto your sales team and the sales team sell it. And then you're on unloading of your customer. And then you've got your operations and then you've got customer service, whatever it is. And we organize customers vertically. That accompanies vertically, but your customer works horizontally. Your customer doesn't care that I'm talking to a salesperson or a marketing person or a customer service person. I'm talking to you as a company. So focus on your customers, what you sell them, why they're buying it, what their need is for buying your product and service. And if it's a B2B world, focus on their customers so that you can understand what's driving their decision making, their motives, their pricing structures. But focus on your customer, whoever that is, and then make sure that you're structuring your organization. along that line of that customer. One of the most successful transformations I did for a customer, a customer in Switzerland the, the start of the whole thing. And to be honest, I could have gone home after doing this was literally just moving people's desks. It was a marketplace company, similar to eBay, but significantly smaller. It was in the Swiss market. And you had user experience designers, with software engineers, with customer agents. And they were all on a different floor in this building. So whenever they wanted to collaborate and chat, They didn't even go downstairs or upstairs. They had to organize a meeting. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're all in this kind of one thing together. So I put teams together that included all of these different people. So when I wanted to collaborate, I literally went what do you think of? Suddenly the barrier to the blockers within the company structure had gone. Suddenly everyone was more efficient, everyone was more effective. And because they were a team focused on this one customer segment, this one customer product, they were actually getting the domain knowledge of customers like it when we do this, they don't like it when we do that, they work this way, they don't work that way. And they could then go away in a matter of days. Not even weeks or months. They could fix those problems that the customers were having. So when you, when you get focused on, on growing a business and you're focusing on your customers, don't just think about we're priced too low. I'll pretty much guaranteed name to people listening to this. You're already priced too low. You want to increase your prices, just do that tomorrow. It's the best thing you can do. It's the easiest thing you can do. And the vast majority of companies are priced way too low. But don't just focus on pricing. Don't just focus on the product. Don't just focus on how your team is structured. Don't just focus on who you're selling to, but focus on their motives and why they're selling it. Focus on all of that as a chain. Look at it as a customer journey through the purchase journey, all the way through to you supplying it and then buying it again next time. Ton of value right there. And I, I love it because I think that's truly the best way that you can build a business, right? That to me, that's the foundation of a successful business is just really focusing and tying down that, that ideal customer, and then pretty much making the entire business about how you're going to help them out, bring them value, support them, and then grow with them, right? Because then. Now you're now referrals are just automatically going to start coming because you're helping this customer and all their connections or other businesses in their industry, or that they're connected to typically are very similar, right? So I think that's just, I think the. easiest way to grow a business is just putting the customer first. Unfortunately, I think a lot of businesses don't do it. No, completely. It's one of those things that when you start a business, you think on what am I going to do? What am I going to offer to the market? How am I going to structure my company? What am I going to call my company? How am I going to brand myself? What, what do I stand for? And at the end of the day, none of that matters to the customer. The customer is sitting there thinking, I've got a problem. Who can help me fix my problem? I need to buy a widget. I need to have this service from you. They're not thinking about, oh man, you, your blue, the blue color in your logo's a bit darker. It'd be nicer with a lighter color. That's not where they're coming from. They're, they're coming from, I have a need. Clay Christensen, the, the Harvard business professor wrote a book and said, created a very successful company where he, he spoke about the job to be done. And the job to be done was what your customer is trying to achieve. What job are they trying to do? And they've got multiple options and lots of options that don't involve buying your product or service. But that's who you're competing with. How can I achieve it? I need to, I need to travel from LA to New York. And while some of these will be stupid, they are still options that a customer will think about. I could drive, It'll be a long drive, but I could drive. I could jump in a plane. That's probably the easiest one. But it's a bit expensive. I could probably find a train that I could do. That would be much cheaper, but it's kind of halfway between the two. So if you're, if you're in the market of selling people cars, you're not always competing against the, the garage that's selling cars a mile down the road from you. Occasionally you're, you're competing against the trainer an airplane, it may be a boat. I mean, there's lots of ways of going someplace. And just because you're selling cars doesn't mean you see that's the only option your customer is thinking about. So what you're trying to do is secondary focus relentlessly on your customer and what they're trying to achieve, help them achieve it. And by definition, you'll be successful. It may not be a week or a month, but you'll be successful. Absolutely. No, it's spot on. And I actually I recently collaborated on a book about a lot of small businesses and. A lot of entrepreneurs and owners that really collaborated and put everything together and that was really my My focus point was selling with a servant heart right putting the customer first becoming obsessed with the customer and then just really Building a business around that and like you said it just naturally will take care of itself It just does. It's one of those. I'm finding as I get older, there's lots of counterintuitive things. And when you're running a business, your brain says, I've got to think of this. I've got to think of that. I've got to think of the finances. I've got to think of the team. I've got to think. And the reality is all of those will take care of themselves if you have the right culture and you're focusing on the customer. And it just, it's kind of counterintuitive, but it works every time. It's amazing. It's, it's genuinely amazing. And it, it, it, it always kind of confuses me because I've, I do this as well. I'm not criticizing anyone for it. But it's amazing how many blockers we can create in our own mind to stopping us doing what we know we need to be doing to be successful. But it's like, that can't work. I truly, truly, I need to think about all those other, that can't, that can't be that easy. And it's like, focus on the customer. Just go away, focus on the customer. It'll help. The recipe right there. Absolutely. And I know we threw a lot of value at him today. Anything else that we didn't cover that you wanted to leave the listeners with today? Absolutely. Actually, there was something that I didn't talk about when I was talking about the customer journeys. Once you kind of figure out the journey that your customer is going through, through each of your teams, your departments and things data, data will be your friend. I remember working with a client and they hadn't any customer journeys. So I, I encourage them to do customer journeys to the point that I did the first half dozen for them to kind of give them the example and show them how to do it. And their, their brain, their brain just exploded by that, that customer journey of understanding where things were, but then just to, to double down. I actually put some data around about that journey. And one of the things that they, they offered customers a discount at one part in the journey. And they thought, well, all the customers want a discount. Everyone wants a discount. No one wants to pay for it. What they didn't realize was they were offering the discount at the wrong part of the journey. So the discount they were offering was actually blocking people. They'd already gone down the process. They'd made the decision to buy, and then suddenly they were being offered this discount, and it was putting a question mark in their head of whether they wanted to proceed or not, because it was the wrong part of the journey. So data will tell you that. How many people are you getting into the start of your process, to how many people are coming out, and where are they falling off? So get your journey. understand your journey, add data onto it, and then that will tell you where you've got a problem. And if you don't have a problem, well done you. I've never seen that before, but well done. Even if you don't have a problem, it will show you where opportunities to grow are. If I could change this one part of my process, rather than converting 80 percent or 20 percent or 1%, I can convert 1. 1%. How fundamentally different would that be to your business? So yeah, I'm all for customers, I'm all for understanding the customers, culture, make sure your organization is set up to address That, that customer journey and to serve as a customer in the best way possible. It's kind of that, well, I shouldn't say it's that simple. Everyone, give me a call. I'll help you do it. They'll all be fine. As, as will Tom. But it's kind of, it's that simple. There's a few basics you get right. You put them in place and then it's, it's hang on to the exciting journey. Oh, and of course, think big. Don't, don't do this small. Absolutely. I love that. And on that data point, right, it's I think it's now becoming the the most powerful resource out there. I think even probably even above oil at this point. So, I mean, data is everything. So that's another very important piece right there. Completely. Data is everything. I do think we'll saturate the market with data. At the end of the day, there's only like 7 or 8 billion people in the world, so you can only have so much data in the world. But at this point, and especially for small businesses looking to grow, data's your friend. You need to know, you need to understand, you need to have the insight. It was, I think it was Albert Einstein said, if I have an hour to solve a problem, I'll spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem. That's where your data comes in. It's that 55 minutes understanding, knowing what the problem is, knowing how it's impacting on you, knowing all the things around about it. And once you get that insight, once you've got that data, the solution becomes very easy. Absolutely. No, it's spot on. Yeah. And that's going to be that's going to be a wrap for this episode of small business big moves. If you go value out of this or know someone that could, what we do is ask that you share that with them and like, and review the podcast. And in the meantime, you can hit us up, hit me up on all social media at Thomas Bennett. And I look forward to seeing you all in the next episode.