My key takeaways from October’s face-to-face networking session

Every month the Yorkshire Mafia Independent Consultants and Freelancers Group holds a face-to-face networking session. This is followed by a meeting of a spin-off group called Consult Yorkshire, which is for members of the YMIC&F group who choose to collaborate on activities to promote our consultancy specialisms and business activities.

October’s networking session was held in Hull, which meant an earlier than usual start to my day and a 75 minute drive along the dreaded M62 at rush hour. Fortunately for me, the traffic jam was on the opposite side of the carriageway! As the chair of this month’s meeting I had been thinking about the session for some time, making sure I had circulated the notes, agenda and promoted our guest speaker in our Skills Session segment to ensure as many bums on seats as possible!

We were fortunate to have secured a speaker of the very highest calibre – Dr Calie Pistorius – thanks to our Hull ambassador, Ian Shepherd who works in the C4DI building that also houses Dr Pistorius’ consultancy, DeltaHedron. After years spent as vice-chancellor of various universities, Dr Pistorius described his latest role as “a proper job” and clearly one he enjoys!

His was a fascinating Skills Session about the risks posed by emerging technologies for businesses and how DeltaHedron helps its clients to manage these risks. Huge thanks to Dr Pistorius for his time – especially given his busy schedule.

I was reminded of my early days in PR spent trawling the Sunday papers on a Monday morning for anything that might be of relevance to our clients’ businesses and producing cuttings books to share with the team. DeltaHedron’s proprietary software takes that process to a whole new level.

As a PR professional, I recognise the importance of the SWOT analysis process that informs the advice and recommendations we make to business leaders. DeltaHedron’s information gathering process is phenomenal, trawling online for trends and smaller signals that may be of relevance to its clients. Their findings are then shared with the client using Flipboard to create private collections of information delivered at timely intervals, or personalised DeltaHedron reports which include analysis and recommendations for action.

Dr Pistorius cited examples of how his technology has helped clients spot opportunities to develop their business in directions that were not obvious. 

My key takeaways from the presentation:

·         Be clear about what your company does. In his presentation, Dr Pistorius used the example of a petrol lawn mower manufacturer which was truly illuminating. While the manufacturer obsesses about being the best in the marketplace, the ‘competition’ steal market share by developing new products which solve the same problem but with different technology. Sound familiar? Dr Pistorius’ advice in this case: don’t say the problem you solve is to cut the grass. The problem you solve is how to keep the grass short – and even if you manufacture the best petrol lawn mower in the world, you can lose market share to competitors including electric lawn mower manufacturers, and even chemical companies making compounds that stop the grass from growing. Keeping an eye on emerging technologies can help you stay ahead of the game!

·         Keep an eye on what others are doing that could have a massive impact on your market share! It’s relatively easy these days to set up Google Alerts to deliver information on a range of search terms – so there’s no excuse for businesses not to spend some time keeping an eye on trends and other signals which could help them avoid losing ground and perhaps lead to fantastic opportunities (and stay ahead of the competition). 

Sounds obvious – but I wonder how many of you have processes in place like those provided by DeltaHedron? Do you use Flipboard or something similar to share news articles that may be of interest with your team?

It would be great to hear about it at a future meeting if you’d like to join us? Our sessions are free to attend (small charge for refreshments if you have them) and you can find out when the next one is here.

Photo by AbsolutVision