The Need for Speed: Using Technology to Increase the Velocity of Success in Your Business

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the JMark Business Innovation Technology Experience.

Christina:

In today’s episode, we’ll talk about using technology to increase the Velocity of success in your business. Some key points that we’ll hit are Momentum. Momentum builds momentum. You have to start moving right now. Those that are rising above their competition are moving quickly. Partnerships. You need to work together with people and vendors where you can pull different strengths and knowledge for the different problems that you’re having right now. Competition. It’s not about looking at what your competition is doing in your own industry. It’s about looking at what all industries are doing and taking those ideas and modifying them to solve the problems in your business. Waste. Speeding up basically comes from removing all the waste. All right, let’s get started.

Todd:

Welcome, everybody. We are getting things set up, pull up a seat, get your popcorn out. Get ready for a fun discussion.

Dax:

Get your notepad out.

Todd:

Get your notepad out. That’s right.

Dax:

Yeah.

Todd:

Notepad. That’s 19… That’s just old, man. [crosstalk 00:00:01:19]. Okay. Welcome everybody. We have a great discussion today. I’m excited to talk about something that Christina and Dax razz me on a little bit. Whenever we mentioned the word Velocity and Speed, it gets me excited. And so, we decided to have an episode that just related to that. And its so applicable to what’s going on right now. There’s so much digital transformation happening. There are businesses that are just having to adapt and speed is the key right now to overcome. I was reading this morning that… And I’m sure this is across the nation, but I was reading a story about Arizona that 10% of the restaurants in Arizona have closed down since COVID started or last couple of months.

Todd:

And that’s an example of where the speed of adapting is so vital and important in order to not just survive, but to thrive and overcome the challenges that are holding us back. And we talked about this last week and many other times, but you know, technology is almost always the first answer to innovation and to speed and to making decisions quicker. And so, that’s what we’re going to talk about today to help understand what some of the strategies that companies are employing, what are some of the technologies that we can use, what are some of the ideas and things we have to be thinking about. So, Dax you were mentioning a few examples earlier. What are some of the things you’ve been seeing in terms of speed and innovation from some companies?

Dax:

Well, a big thing that I saw… you were mentioning the restaurant in Arizona and how they were scrambling and its not just in Arizona, but throughout the nation and probably worldwide, scrambling to adapt and make changes all of a sudden, just like everybody did. I also saw an article about a grocery store chain. And this one happened to be one that was in Asia, but the grocery business and large grocery markets are fairly the same throughout the world. And they were talking about the fact that they had made changes in order for delivery services, changing the logistics of deliveries, downsizing some of their in store shopping in order to use that real estate as a fulfillment centers. These were changes that they had already planned out over the next five years or so. And they were talking about how they have made the majority of them over the last eight months.

Dax:

And simply because they were forced to, and that’s what they talked about. The first aspect of that was using technology to tap into the data to figure out what products do we need to have in store on hand for people that are coming in?, What products are people are ordering online? So, that’s what we need to have more of in the distribution centers and get those things set up so that… I mean the first step is to know what your customers want and how you’re going to deliver those things to them and what you need to be able to deliver to your customers.

Todd:

Yeah. And I think that we don’t know how much longer this is going to last. It could be awhile who knows, but the companies who… I mean, let me back up a little bit. The companies who haven’t yet even started to adapt are the ones that are really going to struggle because competitors are changing and the landscape is changing and the customer’s behaviors are changing. And that’s why speed is so important right now because it’s not just about beating your competition, it’s about adapting to thrive. It’s about adapting your organization and whether it comes to the security of the organization and with the risks associated with what’s happening, whether it comes with your need to reduce costs and reduce expenses in light of the changes in your customer behavior or increasing profit, it’s all about speed, speed, speed.

Todd:

And speed is also related to this idea of waste. And when you look at innovation… Dax, you were mentioning this earlier. Sometimes it’s not these big, old, massive steps and leaps that we have to take in order to innovate, but it’s these small things that are wasting time, wasting energy and frustrating employees and customers. I was at a restaurant a couple of months ago and they brought out, it was a piece of paper sitting on a table and you scan the code with your phone. And that pulls up the menu. Well, the menu came up in a PDF format on my phone. So, I’m enlarging and moving things around and telling my kids, giving them the options. And the frustrating thing about it, is they got my order wrong in multiple levels, and it was just so wasteful of time to sit there and try to understand everything. And then there was a miscommunication. I don’t know if the miscommunication was between me and the server or them and the kitchen.

Todd:

How do we skip all of those problems? How can we increase the reliability of the food? Or whatever the service is. How can we increase the speed and get rid of those miscommunications? And that’s an example where… You can’t just write an App overnight, but they have an App. They just need to update the App so that I could have just ordered right on the App in the restaurant. I wouldn’t have got my order wrong. I know what I want. And I could’ve gone straight to the kitchen, bypassed everybody and sped up the organization, cut costs. It would have reduced risk because I’m not going back to that restaurant because there was such a bad experience. And so, we have to look at things as waste and make sure that there is nothing that is preventing us from having just a fantastic experience for our customers and for our clients, because things are changing so much.

Dax:

Yeah. One thing that I was talking to you about earlier, smaller business here that I know here in Utah, a record store and they have two locations and that’s company, a business that could have been in dire straits this year. I mean, it’s a business they’ve had to adapt a lot over the past two decades, just as their industry has changed time and time again, but one of the things they’ve done to speed up is again coming back to this idea of “the thing we want to do always is get our customers what they want and our clients as quickly and seamlessly as possible,” Because that’s what builds appreciation. It turns your clients and customers into fans who are loyal to you when you’re solving their problems as quickly as possible.

Dax:

So, what this record store has done is they’ve looked and they… In order to pivot a little bit this year, they started doing deliveries within a certain area of their store. And not just shipments, you can definitely order through the mail. You Todd, in Texas could order something from them if you want and they’d ship it to you through the mail. But for those of us who live close enough they’ve turned their employees into delivery people. And where the speed here is helping them is they’re also beating out the competition because I’m the type of person who there are certain bands that I like, I will buy at this point. I’m still buying like a Vinyl album, got a record player right here behind me that I use. And so, I could buy that from Amazon because we know that Amazon is one of the first companies you think of when you think of speed but these guys, at least here in the local market, they’ve beaten that because I can get what I want from them that afternoon. And that were brought to my door.

Dax:

And it’s taken some logistics. I was talking to the guy that manages one of the stores. Since taken logistics they’ve had to figure out real-time inventory, but as they’ve done this, they’ve been able to beat out at least in their small area, the bigger competition by adapting and figuring out exactly what you’re talking about Todd, which is speed.

Christina:

Yeah. I wanted to talk about an example when I was doing my research in a whole industry, which is manufacturing. So, they’re one of the hardest hit throughout all of this. And then I read that success stories though, in the industry, come from those who are able to adapt quickly to the changing needs of customers and suppliers. This includes those that were able to produce personal protection, equipment, hand, sanitizer, cleaning supplies, plexiglass and other supplies related to COVID-19. So, that’s an example of entire industry where some of them failed. And then some of them instead of waiting for things to go back to “normal”, whenever that may be. They rose to the occasion and adapted to what needed to happen during this time.

Todd:

Yeah. I think that’s a great example. And I don’t profess to be an expert on manufacturing, but Daniel Burrus, in one of his recent emails, he was talking about this idea of changing your target customer profile. That’s part of innovation. And I mean, we saw this in COVID. I mean, we saw Beer companies and liquor companies that were manufacturing hand sanitizer. We saw companies that were doing all sorts of different manufacturing start to develop personal protective equipment for people. Face masks and things like that. We saw Tesla, re-engineered one of their factories to throw out ventilators for hospitals and that’s an example where there’s so much automation in a lot of factories where they can quickly retool, but that’s an example of innovation where they have used technology ahead of time to make their manufacturing plant run a certain way and adaptable and then be able to switch on a dime as needed and maybe not on a dime, but switch as needed in order to fill various needs.

Todd:

Because if you are tooled as a manufacturer to only be able to produce one item or set of items and you all of a sudden need to do something completely different, it may be a business closing event.

Dax:

Yeah. I think Todd, in that same email from Daniel Burrus, one of the things he talked about, which I think goes hand in hand this, is having a forward-thinking mindset. And I think that is so important when we’re talking about innovation and speed, is having that mindset that I am going to be at the forefront of my market, of my industry, of whatever. And I’m always going to stay there. I’m not worrying about competing. I’m worried about leaving. And it’s definitely a different mindset but that’s the place that you need to be where you look at those things and someone like Elon Musk with Tesla is a perfect example of someone who does not look at things and say, “can I do this?” He looks better. And he says, “I can do this, now, how do I do it?”

Dax:

And it’s an entire perception of the way that you look at things. And those are the business leaders who are able to make those pivots because they’re not throwing up roadblocks for themselves, which is so important when you want to continually innovate and you want to move ahead with speed and you want to have velocity in your businesses that you are constantly looking to make those changes.

Christina:

Yeah. I saw another example of a small business in an industry, very hard hit, which is Hospitality. And it was in Pennsylvania. And apparently during COVID liquor stores shut down there. And so at that time, this hospitality place had a little wine shop. And at that point they had opened up crib side to go. And it says that “with the help from point of sale technology already in use, they were able to create an e-commerce site with an hours of hearing that the liquor stores closed to not just sell the wine, but also branded sheets, candles, and soaps, figuring people may want a piece of the vacation that they can no longer take.” So, anyone can do it in any industry.

Todd:

I think that shows a big thing that holds people back. And when when you’re trying to make changes in an organization or you’re trying to make changes to products or whatever you’re doing. Sometimes you just don’t know what to do.

Todd:

And there’s an example where you just have to start moving. You have to step forward, you have to pull people in. Ask companies. You need to make the decision and move forward. Sometimes you don’t know the full process, but you know, “okay, we need someone that’s an expert in e-commerce and that can build us this thing. Oh, we need somebody that knows about secure payment processing. Okay, we need somebody else there.” And then you start learning things. You start moving but the companies who just wait and go, “okay, well, let’s do some research. Let’s figure out…” That’s all fine and dandy during a great economy but during a down economy, when companies are struggling, you got to go fast and you got to start moving and you got to start progressing. You start by getting things done.

Todd:

And that’s one of the things that’s so exciting for me and working at JMark is because we can pivot so quickly and the tools that we have in place at our company, the communication tools and the collaboration tools and the systems we use and just how everything’s set up, we can just quickly pivot and start moving towards a future that’s different. And that’s what organizations have to do. They have to be able to just quickly adapt, quickly make decisions, eliminate waste and move forward.

Dax:

Yeah. I think that’s the thing, it’s that the companies… And I would change a little one thing of what you said, Todd. You mentioned that it might be okay to go slowly and do research and that kind of stuff in a different economy. But I would say that the companies that are moving at the highest velocity, even in a normal economy they’re acting quickly. They’re taking this, what you’re talking about, I have this giant of an idea, maybe I could do something with e-commerce and they’re going to an e-commerce expert and seeing how that idea grows. And sometimes it grows into something amazing and sometimes you might find out that there’s a dead end there, but the companies that are moving more quickly are always questioning and always wondering what they can do next and pursuing it to see what happens rather than trying to… And finding partners that can help them pursue it rather than trying to figure out the whole plan themselves.

Todd:

I hadn’t even thought about this because it’s almost second nature at J Mark sometimes but this morning I got an email, read a report. I had an idea that hit me from that email. I sent a message to our CEO. He said, “I love that.” I messaged Michelle and Andy and a couple other people in the organization to get it on our planning for this Friday. And we are going to go, potentially, in a whole new direction. I have no idea exactly how to do it. I just know I have a general idea of what I want it to look like at the end, but there’s an example where we went from no idea to a whole new idea that isn’t a marketing strategy. It’s more of a sales strategy of essence. And that’s what I’m talking about.

Todd:

You need to enable your employees. Speed comes down to culture too. If you have an organization where leaders in the organization are not in touch with the frontline employees and everybody else that’s meeting with customers and handling things, you’re not going to be able to move quickly. If you have a culture in which new ideas are frowned upon, you’re not going to be able to move quickly. And while technology played a part in what happened this morning, and we’ll play a part in the future of getting this live, it’s still our culture that is free to allow any person to submit ideas and to move things forward. And I think that’s a critical aspect. And, almost a little bit of a… I don’t know, we tend to think of speed and technology and innovation as blinking lights and cool fancy things and automation and robotics and whatever but it’s sometimes as simple as the culture in the company, how you communicate with people, how you collaborate with people. So, I think that’s pretty cool.

Dax:

Enabling people. Enabling people to do the things that they’re [inaudible 00:21:28].

Christina:

And that scenario, like you mentioned, is so common at JMark. It’s just how we do things. And I think it’s the pretty much exact opposite of what some people do, which is just death to a company, especially in this time, which is, “this is the way we’ve always done it.” And I know we’ve mentioned that before, but I think it’s pretty relevant to this talk about speed because the way we’ve always done it is pretty much never going to be the fastest way to do it with things changing like they are.

Todd:

I think that right there is a great question or a great phrase to ask about when you’re trying to create innovation. It’s not always about the way you’ve always done it. You got to get outside of the boundaries and figure things out. I’m reminded of what’s going on in the restaurant industry. I mean, a couple of months ago, or six months ago, I had never even heard the term of a ghost kitchen. Maybe they were around, I don’t know, but now they’re people are adapting restaurants to be these ghost kitchens where they have a kitchen in a cheap rental property somewhere. And all they do is delivery. I also read about… I thought it was extremely innovative. There’re these companies that are doing almost the shared kitchens of sorts. I don’t remember what the term was but essentially they get employees or cooks from PF chains and from all these different restaurants, they put 10 of them back in the kitchen and people call in an order from a single place for all these restaurants and you’re getting your food cooked by a Chef from that company.

Todd:

And that’s almost like the model of Amazon, where you’re just go there to get whatever you need, except this is for food. You go to this one place and you can just get whatever you want. So, there’s so many ways to innovate.

Dax:

You want to talk about speed? I mean, that right there, how much time does that save every company in the world, when you’re sitting in a meeting and trying to decide what to eat for lunch? And then everybody’s disagreeing. I mean, that’s speeding up other businesses as well. And I say that a little bit jokingly, but also seriously that I agree with you. I saw that same article Todd an it’s solving a big problem and it’s looking at a problem in a different way. And the thing that jumped out to me about that is, again, the partnerships that you can find these partners to help you and working together, pool your strengths and pull your knowledge of different pieces of problems in order to overcome problems better. One of the things, again, going back to this example, I gave earlier of the record store. One of the things they mentioned is as they’ve had to pivot a few times over the past, again, over the past 20 years and change what they were selling. 20 years ago, all they had in their store were CDs.

Dax:

And over the years they’ve changed and added video games and Collectibles and books and that kind of thing. And at each point they’ve had to figure out how to value those things, how to sell those things. And they didn’t have an expert within the company to do that. And they had to reach out to other people. And talking to that manager, he said, one of the things technology has helped them do that and get answers to those questions quicker, using a technology like groups on Facebook, which it’s hard to even think these days of Facebook as a technology, but it is. And it allows you immediate access to other people with answers that you don’t have.

Dax:

At JMark, we use Workplace from Facebook and you can have multi-company groups. And there are people on here that are asking questions to experts from throughout the world and we’re part of a multi-company marketing group. And then people ask them questions about how to use certain products, how to do certain things and getting immediate answers, whereas before, you might have a peer group, but you would have to wait, maybe until the next meeting, you have an idea, you’ve got to wait a month till the next meeting where you’re getting together in person to answer these questions. And now those questions are coming immediately. And that again, we’re talking about speed, that’s increasing the velocity of what you can do.

Todd:

The other thing that just occurred to me too, when you’re thinking about speed, you need to think about the bumps, the speed bumps that you could hit. And those speed bumps could be a security issue. We’ve talked about this over and over again. The security landscape has changed dramatically over the last six months. I saw an email this morning, a report this morning that talked about how it is getting to be really hard to feel security positions at our organizations. There’s not enough talent out there to fill all the security needs, that companies need. And when you think about these speed bumps, it’s all not always about going fast, but also about avoiding those speed bumps so you can keep the momentum going because when you hit one of those things, if you have a ransom attack and your company is down for four weeks, three weeks, whatever it is, then that’s not a little speed bump, that’s going to hurt you. It’s it’s massive.

Todd:

And so, we got to think about all the different things. And it’s a little bit of a morbid sort of a discussion, but it’s part of your backup and disaster recovery planning and risk mitigation in the sense of, “okay, we know where we are, we know what are the problems that could affect us. What are the things that could really hurt us?” And start delegating, start creating plans and scenarios. And oftentimes they don’t have to be these massive drawn out plans but what are the partners we need to pull in to help us? What are the scenarios that we need to employ? What training do we need to roll out to our employees to make sure that this doesn’t happen. There’s so many different areas and ways to increase speed. You don’t want to have a speed bump that just totally derails that momentum.

Christina:

Yeah. That made me think of something that we say a JMark sometimes as well, which is, “sometimes you do need to slow down in order to speed up.” There are some things that you do not want to go too quickly over because that’s going to slow you down in the long run when something happens.

Dax:

Yeah. I always think of speed as not just going fast immediately, but knowing your destination and getting there in the most quick, efficient way possible, which requires planning and which requires doing exactly what you’re talking about, Todd. Which is, either removing the speed bumps or having a plan to make sure that you’re avoiding them. And that really does increase speed. I mean, that’s vital, especially when it comes to technology.

Todd:

Yeah. I’m reminded of the story of the Hare and the turtle. The turtle is moving slowly, but they are moving. And thats how I equate speed because speed in business, isn’t about moving fast, necessarily. I mean, it’s not like physical movement. And while that it may feel like that sometimes, the truth is just keeping the momentum moving forward, not getting into zone of status quo, not getting into a place of feeling like you’re safe or maybe ignoring the changes that are happening. And so, we just have to get out of that comfort zone and go, “Okay, what could happen, where are our customers? How do we meet them?” And so, just a lot that we need to think about.

Dax:

Yeah, Momentum builds momentum. I think that’s the thing, is that the faster you go, the more you adapt technology, the more you become comfortable with adapting technology and with innovating and with innovative thinking within your company, the easier these changes are going to be. So, speaking of that, we know that there might be people out there listening that haven’t really… They see the value in adapting this mindset of innovation and then adapting this forward thinking mindset that we’re talking about, but they haven’t really done that. They don’t have that culture yet in their company. What do you think? What can they do? What are some steps that they can begin taking to begin turning their mindset and their company into that type of a culture?

Todd:

Well, it’s hard to answer that question without more information, I suppose, but, every company is in a different place. I think the first part is just to be transparent. Employees… We talked about this months ago, they want to work hard. They want to be an asset to the company. They may be working at home and that doesn’t matter. They want to be productive. They want to feel accomplished for the most part. And uncertainty and fear is killing people. And that, I mean, that is what I think is the biggest loss of productivity right now, is people just worrying about the future. People worrying about their family, worrying about what’s going to happen. And I think it begins with transparency and everybody understanding where the organization is at and what the organization needs to do.

Todd:

And sometimes it comes down to a brainstorming session, but sometimes it comes down to who can help me. If you know technology, if you accept that technology can be the answer, reach out to other peer groups, reach out to potential partners and vendors, reach out to your own vendors that you use and see what other companies in your industry are doing. Don’t just look at your competition, look at what other companies are doing.

Todd:

We see banking and some of the other companies that a lot of them aren’t looking at what other bankers are doing. They’re looking at what other people are doing in other industries. And then they’re adopting those principles because sometimes the best ideas, aren’t the ideas that out of the box will work in your industry. You have to adapt them and modify them and integrate them in your organization. But I think it starts with transparency. It starts with an attitude of “we’re going to get through this. We’re going to adapt,” and starting the momentum, making a decision to just start moving.

Dax:

I think one thing I would add to that is inquisitiveness. Ask other people… And yet we’ve talked about these peer groups and you mentioned partners and vendors. Ask these people what they did because if their company is at the next level that you’re trying to get to or maybe even a little bit beyond that. They very likely went through the same transitions you did. Most companies go through these various speeds and various changes but there is a pattern as companies grow. And so, find out what those people did when they encounter these problems. And again, like you said, Todd, it might not be in your same industry, but there are certainly going to be solutions and processes and ways of thinking that are applicable from industry to industry with maybe some slight modifications and adaptations.

Todd:

The other thing I’d add too is… We’ve talked about this a lot and this idea of meeting customers, where they are. I mean, we started talking about that phrase back in March. And where are your customers? What are they doing? That is the biggest source of knowledge, I think. Looking at the waste in the organization, looking at what your customers are doing so that you can adapt and merge to meet them. And the other thing too is to look at waste in every aspect. Pretend you’re a customer and you’re buying your own services and look at the process. Look at how you purchase. How you buy. Look at how the delivery or how it’s fulfilled and look at just the little wastes that happen.

Todd:

I ordered something recently and it didn’t have all the parts and so I contacted the company and they were kind enough to send me the replacement parts that were missing, but they something weird. And they took a picture of the shipping label and put that in an email. And it’s just like, “Okay, I got to type this like 16 character number into Google or into FedEx or USPS” or whatever it was.

Todd:

And it’s little things like that. You look at the waste and you look at the thoughts or the things that are, that are changing and what you need to do to change. Okay. So, Christina, you have some thoughts on the wrap-up of what we’ve covered today?

Christina:

I do. I did my best to encompass everything we talked about and I got it down to three words but then with Todd’s little last addition there, I added a fourth. So, we have Momentum. So, Dax mentioned that momentum builds momentum. So, basically you have to start making moves, there is no more waiting around for everything to go back to normal. Those that are rising above their competition are moving and moving quickly. Then we have Partnerships. So, you need to work together with people and vendors that you can pull strengths and knowledge from for all of these different problems that you’re having to overcome them. Now, especially as a time where you probably can’t fix everything on your own and that’s where your partnerships are key.

Christina:

And then we have Competition. So, we talked a lot about, it’s not looking at what your competition is doing. It’s about seeking the advantage by reinventing the way you do things and a lot of times that comes from looking at all industries not what your industry is doing and seeing what other people are doing and then seeing how you can modify those ideas for your own business. And then the honorable mention, I guess, would be Waste, which Todd just talked about. So, a lot of times speeding up comes from just looking at all the areas where you can basically remove waste. And that’s a wrap.

Todd:

Thanks so much. I think it’s a great topic and something that people need to definitely keep in mind. And lastly, just to add on technology, as I said in the beginning is the number one thing to improve speed, reduce waste, increase profitability, decrease risks. And if you’d like to know more about how we do that for organizations, visit our website at JMark.com and give us a call, shoot us an email and we’ll be happy to engage. Take care.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for attending this Podcast. We hope it has been informative and help convey that at JMark, we are people first and technology second, to learn more and discover additional content, relevant to your business, please visit us online at jmark.com or at LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. You may also call us at 84444 Jmark. Thank you for your time. And we look forward to seeing you again.