We’ve got a good office now which reflects the company, we’ve got TV screens up which pour in the news from different outlets… and a few other screens which have some of the software and analytics running… so everyone knows what’s going on.
We have a strong leaning towards integrity and discretion. We don’t typically like to publish who our clients are and with all of them we’ll happily sign confidentiality agreements and non-disclosure agreements.
A lot of the content that we find is publicly available, but once we start to collate it and paint a picture for the client, that’s when you see the power of what you find and you’re researching. And appreciate how much of a concern it would be. The material that we find and the reports we write is the property of the client once it’s done.
Trust is a huge component of the work that we do.
You read everywhere that payment terms, when they’re stretched out, hits small business the hardest. I completely agree with that. So you need to make sure you have that relationship with the client and you can be upfront and say to the client, look I need to make sure the payment terms are kept to.
It all comes down to good forward planning and having a good strong pipeline of clients. You can never really stop selling, because that’s one of the things we noticed, the sales cycle can go anything down from four-to-six months in the early days now down to a matter of weeks to a month to get to a sale.
In one instance we had to arrange for a discount of our fees to expedite payment of the invoice, which is a pretty tough one to swallow. You want to win the business so you don’t want to turn them away, and you want to get paid.
In dealing with big companies going forward we need to either stand our ground when it comes to invoices, or we would factor that in when we were doing this type of work, or how we would approach this type of projects. It was a really good learning experience.
What we’ve found works really well is alliance partnerships. The two that we have, are with AON and with KPMG. From a small business perspective they’ve been immensely helpful, in that we can provide our expertise to their staff and client base, in return for them acting as a pipeline of work for us and them assisting with some of their resourcing.
I really think entrepreneurship is a force for positive change in society. There’s obviously the number one goal of profit, companies have to be profitable, but the concept of enterprise for good so the triple bottom line of people, planet, profit is a force for good.
