Blogging For Coffee - Part 1: The Birth of Grey Cells
This next installment is from Coffee Consultant Chris Inge
Begin at the beginning, Alice in Wonderland was advised.
Sounds sensible, obvious even, but actually more easily said than done when the subject is the formation of a new and very different business consultancy.
One of the most important drivers was the joining by some of the eventual partnership of a business networking organisation called BNI. From early in 2004 we would meet every Thursday morning in a Wells hotel, at a time when respectable sparrows were still asleep, grapple with overly baked beans and guess-the-content sausages, and regale each other with stories of our business prowess.
Speaking purely personally, the breakfasts were a therapy, a stepping-stone on a slow, painful road back to some kind of normality after a heart operation which went badly wrong and almost killed me with MRSA. Having lost all my clients simply by not being around to service their needs, I was desperate to meet those who had some and might perhaps help me to re-stock my cupboard.
I should explain that BNI is fundamentally non-competitive. Each “chapter” recruits only one of a kind so there was no other advertising copywriter to queer my pitch or trump a rare announcement of business gained. I could therefore concentrate on the job definition and business ambitions of my fellow members and aim selflessly to fulfil the BNI mantra (a variant on Dumas’ “all for one and one for all” philosophy) that invited speakers to say what business they wanted and listeners to refer them to likely prospects from their personal database or opportunities randomly encountered on the road.
The key part of the BNI format was a round-robin of one-minute presentations during which a member presented his or her business, explained its key benefit to mankind and asked for contacts or ideas in a particular area of potential – plumbers, estate agents, sex therapists, whatever. The climax of the meeting was a 10-minute presentation which allowed each of us in turn to explain in grater depth the approach and irresistible sales appeal of what we did.
But the procedure we followed at these breakfasts was less important than the synergies we discovered and the trust we built up with people we might not otherwise have met. As a copywriter, I had become used to occupying just one niche within the marketing spectrum and not concerning myself over-much with what happened over the metaphorical wall either side – in sales, say, or finance.
For a year, I listened with regret as well as mounting interest to a management consultant called Martin Lambden and a sales trainer called Trevor Lever. Marketing I understood and courted as a copywriter, but the thought that these other disciplines could be complementary and presented as such to clients who typically purchased them separately was a Eureka moment.
I would like to claim it as my own but the truth is that all of us had been thinking along similar or parallel lines. We bolted a marketing guru, Nick Webbe, on to our nascent group, which we called Grey Cells – grey for the knowledge and reliability that comes with age, and cells because they are a metaphor for intelligence.
We refined the raw concept of “consultancy without walls” in a series of evening discussions, which served to flush out obvious problems like availability and the need for seedcorn capital to develop and market what could easily be damned as a loose cooperative. Additionally and serendipitously, they had the effect of bonding us as a group and driving us to look beneath the surface and answer the key question: could we work together and convince a corporate client to buy our combined services in a departure from the culture of inefficient, separate purchase?
The a priori case was strong because the personalities had convincing CVs. I was an award-winning copywriter who had worked successfully outside the agency honeypot in London for a spectrum of well-known clients from accountancy to wine, and from bedlinen to the rarefied business insurance products of a Lloyds underwriter. Nick was a natural fit – a former account director at Young & Rubicam who had managed the budgets of blue-chips like Heinz and Bass. Trevor Lever was a doctor of analytical chemistry, no less, but also an IT guru, ACT consultant and sales trainer who could sort out an under-performing department or help its managers with issues of personal development and presentation. Martin Lambden, meanwhile, had taken his business development training into BT and seen it through privatisation and beyond. With his partner, he had developed an elastic version of the balanced score-card which he could deploy in SMEs as well as mega-clients like Yorkshire Water.
You could almost reach out and touch the synergy as we talked but there was an underlying frustration that grew as the months passed. We got out there; we networked; we articulated our message; everybody said “good idea” but nobody actually bought it...
(to be continued)
Begin at the beginning, Alice in Wonderland was advised.
Sounds sensible, obvious even, but actually more easily said than done when the subject is the formation of a new and very different business consultancy.
One of the most important drivers was the joining by some of the eventual partnership of a business networking organisation called BNI. From early in 2004 we would meet every Thursday morning in a Wells hotel, at a time when respectable sparrows were still asleep, grapple with overly baked beans and guess-the-content sausages, and regale each other with stories of our business prowess.
Speaking purely personally, the breakfasts were a therapy, a stepping-stone on a slow, painful road back to some kind of normality after a heart operation which went badly wrong and almost killed me with MRSA. Having lost all my clients simply by not being around to service their needs, I was desperate to meet those who had some and might perhaps help me to re-stock my cupboard.
I should explain that BNI is fundamentally non-competitive. Each “chapter” recruits only one of a kind so there was no other advertising copywriter to queer my pitch or trump a rare announcement of business gained. I could therefore concentrate on the job definition and business ambitions of my fellow members and aim selflessly to fulfil the BNI mantra (a variant on Dumas’ “all for one and one for all” philosophy) that invited speakers to say what business they wanted and listeners to refer them to likely prospects from their personal database or opportunities randomly encountered on the road.
The key part of the BNI format was a round-robin of one-minute presentations during which a member presented his or her business, explained its key benefit to mankind and asked for contacts or ideas in a particular area of potential – plumbers, estate agents, sex therapists, whatever. The climax of the meeting was a 10-minute presentation which allowed each of us in turn to explain in grater depth the approach and irresistible sales appeal of what we did.
But the procedure we followed at these breakfasts was less important than the synergies we discovered and the trust we built up with people we might not otherwise have met. As a copywriter, I had become used to occupying just one niche within the marketing spectrum and not concerning myself over-much with what happened over the metaphorical wall either side – in sales, say, or finance.
For a year, I listened with regret as well as mounting interest to a management consultant called Martin Lambden and a sales trainer called Trevor Lever. Marketing I understood and courted as a copywriter, but the thought that these other disciplines could be complementary and presented as such to clients who typically purchased them separately was a Eureka moment.
I would like to claim it as my own but the truth is that all of us had been thinking along similar or parallel lines. We bolted a marketing guru, Nick Webbe, on to our nascent group, which we called Grey Cells – grey for the knowledge and reliability that comes with age, and cells because they are a metaphor for intelligence.
We refined the raw concept of “consultancy without walls” in a series of evening discussions, which served to flush out obvious problems like availability and the need for seedcorn capital to develop and market what could easily be damned as a loose cooperative. Additionally and serendipitously, they had the effect of bonding us as a group and driving us to look beneath the surface and answer the key question: could we work together and convince a corporate client to buy our combined services in a departure from the culture of inefficient, separate purchase?
The a priori case was strong because the personalities had convincing CVs. I was an award-winning copywriter who had worked successfully outside the agency honeypot in London for a spectrum of well-known clients from accountancy to wine, and from bedlinen to the rarefied business insurance products of a Lloyds underwriter. Nick was a natural fit – a former account director at Young & Rubicam who had managed the budgets of blue-chips like Heinz and Bass. Trevor Lever was a doctor of analytical chemistry, no less, but also an IT guru, ACT consultant and sales trainer who could sort out an under-performing department or help its managers with issues of personal development and presentation. Martin Lambden, meanwhile, had taken his business development training into BT and seen it through privatisation and beyond. With his partner, he had developed an elastic version of the balanced score-card which he could deploy in SMEs as well as mega-clients like Yorkshire Water.
You could almost reach out and touch the synergy as we talked but there was an underlying frustration that grew as the months passed. We got out there; we networked; we articulated our message; everybody said “good idea” but nobody actually bought it...
(to be continued)
posted by Trevor Lever @ 11:52 AM
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