Focus on what it takes to create raving fans of your business. The disciplines that come from building a business or a creative practice that has thousands of committed fans will power your growth.
Origins
I first heard of the idea of a focus on a thousand fans from David Hieatt. David Hieatt speaks compellingly on how this has underpinned his success with Howies, Do Lectures and Hiut jeans. I have been repeating the advice for years crediting David.
I failed to appreciate at the time that the idea was actually Kevin Kelly’s. Kelly’s original post reflected that in a network world you can fund a life if your creative endeavours attract just enough fans. I won’t replicate the business logic that Kevin outlines but I do want to highlight the disciplines that come with this focus.
The Discipline of A Thousand Fans
Here are some of the key disciplines that come with a focus on building a connection with fans:
Fans are people: Shifting your attention from measuring sales into focusing on actual integers of people sounds like a small focus but it is powerful. Sales can be measured and analysed. People can be heard, understood and questioned. A focus on people will bring greater humanity to your thinking about your product and a much richer understanding.
Fans aren’t just customers: Fans are hardcore. Customers can be accidental or just trying you out. Fans are the people who are passionate about your product. Something you do makes their life way better, not just a little better than the competition. Understand this clearly and treasure it. Don’t ever lose it.
Fans go deep: Lots of people talk about selling a lot of product to customers. Fans actually buy it. Knowing why might help drive all of your business.
Looking for fans: Looking for fans will teach you a lot about all the signals in your customer base. Read every complaint lately? There’s a good chance some of those complaints are disappointed fans. If not, you will learn a lot looking.
Lots of Fans: Both Kelly, Hieatt and others have suggested the number might actually be as low as 100 by making more from each fan. However, my challenge is make it a number to show that there is a deep market of passionate customers. I have seen too many businesses that experienced passion in a handful of MVP customers and then couldn’t scale. The MVP was all of the market prepared to pay for the product. Pushing yourself to look for lots of fans is a reassuring indicator of growth ahead.
Service Everyone: Fans don’t come with their psychographic profile listed and may not fit an economic segmentation. Segmentation on economic criteria often can have the outcome that the most passionate fans miss out on being valued. Do you want to disregard a key customer group by not serving everyone well enough?
The challenge of focusing on creating a thousand fans is one that will improve any business. Put yourself to the test.
And I suffer through all the accidents Of change as though I were settling a score, As if to disinvent what death invents. I once built a castle, now I do chores.
In a world that revolves around work, I yet again have the problem of describing what I do. In September last year I finished my role as CEO of HICAPS, Australia’s leading electronic health claiming business. I did so to take up the role as Chair of Bank First, an exciting challenging new part time position. Suddenly people want to know what I was doing. Surely a part-time role is not enough. I love growth businesses: Was I secretly working on a new business in stealth mode? Board positions in many people’s mind follow an executive career: was I semi-retired? People who were concerned told me not to give up on an executive career: Was I looking for a new job? Growing frustrated with the pattern of questions, I had to reiterate myself what I was doing to have a satisfactory answer.
A Sabbatical to Learn
I have already referred to this period as one of reinvention. Reinvention takes reflection and learning and focusing on that need led to my insight. On reflection, I sharpened my understanding. I am on sabbatical. A sabbatical is an opportunity to learn something new usually granted after an extended period of work. Beginning in an Old Testament agricultural imperative , people have long understood the value of a break after long work. Interestingly, seven years is a common milestone. I spent seven years across LanternPay and HICAPS working hard on creating and growing the business opportunities. I felt badly the need to change my focus and do something new.
Like Heraclitus’s river, time has moved on over seven years. I can’t step back into the old world that was before. I need to learn new things again. In the time I have been working on the evolution of digital health a lot has changed. Social collaboration and flexible work have come and gone under the pressure of the pandemic. Many of the old issues are now passé (adoption of video conferencing anyone?) Yet some, like leadership of remote teams, are more vexed than ever. New ways of working like agile are now much more common place. However, organisations struggle with collaboration, how to manage fast paced adaptive change and deliver value from innovation. Transformation is hard in any age.
Concepts of a Plan
The art of a Sabbatical is the focus on learning and regeneration. I don’t have a specific plan. I intend to discover one as I go, following my nose into new opportunities.
I have started work on improving my health and wellbeing. I have fitness to regain and some weight to lose to be healthier. That’s well in hand. I’m also taking better control of my cortisol stress cycle now that I have had time to work to my own goals. I suspect I will live longer and happier as a result.
This change was triggered by an opportunity to return to Bank First. I intend to spend time with the board and management of Bank First on its mission to be a bank for its members in healthcare and education. This will be a critical experience of learning and discovery. Financial services needs innovation that is driving better outcomes for customers. We need to listen to our members and partners more deeply, learn from them and test and experiment our way to new solutions. There’s a lot of people in financial services racing to do the same things as the biggest banks. Mutual members deserve compelling solutions that reflect their unique needs and delivered in ways that suit them better.
I have a five year-old idea for a book that seems more urgent than ever. The good news is that the research and writing has begun. Like the years the book has evolved around a central concept and become stronger for time, thought and learning. More to come on this front.
Discovery
Most of all I want to learn a lot more about people, culture & organisations, innovation, growth and leadership. Nothing about the future is ruled in or out yet. I needed a break and I am taking the first six months for my new role at Bank First and to reset myself. After that I will explore all the options that are available led by purpose and with curiosity as my guide. As always, my curiosity will lead me through networks of old and new friends. So if you have been feeling we need to catch up then it’s almost certain we do.
Let’s hope that curiosity leads our paths to cross. I’d love to learn what’s up in your world.
There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background; from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom. Li-Young Lee, From Blossoms
An article in a newspaper had me riled yesterday. The piece was innocuous, an executive engaging in ‘thought leadership‘. The arguments were weak to the point of flimsy, which is often to be expected. There was literally no surprise in the views expressed. The executive argued for the prevailing consensus. Another voice in the throng of agreement. So where’s the issue?
Voice matters. We have the right to express an opinion to express something meaningful and significant. Saying the safe thing is just adding more clutter to a world struggling to process information. Platitudes aren’t thought leadership. The consensus is craven unthinking subservience to popularity.
In recent weeks, we have seen a range of business leaders say what they think is the new most popular thing. Social moods shift and change with animal spirits. Values, logic, and facts don’t. Chasing popularity is fine for social media influencers and politicians. However, that doesn’t make it a sign of leadership or influence.
Now more than ever, we need cogent well-reasoned arguments that people are prepared to stand behind. A valuable opinion is often a different and risky one. Don’t fall into the business book problem: if it has already been said with the same examples and the same logic, why are you saying it again unthinkingly? The vast majority of business literature is unreadable for simply regurgitating past arguments without reflection.
Importantly, there are lots of common arguments that are simple, intuitive, reassuring and fundamentally wrong. Despite the errors they are repeated over and over again because they ‘feel’ right. We do real danger repeating these views.
I know how hard it can be to say what you believe, to argue against the majority view, and to assess arguments made to you for yourself. These simple acts can cost jobs, rewards, and careers, if they go wrong. They often go wrong in unpredictable ways. As an old Japanese proverbs says, the nail that stands out gets hammered down. Talking truth to power and to the bullying mob is often dangerous for one’s health, wealth and wellbeing.
We still must use our voice with integrity. We can’t always leave or change situations. Sometimes the only path to better is to speak up. Vaclav Havel’s famous essay, Power to the Powerless, revolves around the danger of cultures of conformance, exploring the many layers of damaging signals that a greengrocer engaging in the simple act of displaying an innocuous propaganda poster can send. Saying the usual thing makes it harder for you and for others to say anything else at all. Havel argues forcefully against the moral corruption of unthinking compliance.
When popular opinion is weaponised for control, conformity, and power, we are confronted with a loudhailer of blah. Our attempts to think independently are drowned by the overwhelming weight of nonsense. In these moments, we must speak with care, thought, and compassion, even if only in a whisper.
we all have a right to speak, and an obligation to pay attention to the slightest whisper.
At the AusPayNet Summit this week in Sydney, a panel discussed the great work of Australian regulators, law enforcement, and industry to reduce consumer scams Members of the panel were Hon. Stephen Jones, Assistant Treaurer and Minister for Financial Services, Gina Cass-Gottlieb, Chair of the ACCC, Katie O’Rourke, ASIC Commisioner and Andy White from AusPayNet. This discussion was a valuable one on the power of well managed collaboration as Australia has reduced scam losses by over 40% in the last year which is a unique achievement globally as other markets experience growth in scam losses.
The panel in action
Australia’s approach to scam reduction has been coordinated by the ACCC through its management of the National Anti-scam Centre. The goal of the NASC is to bring together regulators and industry in collaboration to reduce scams. Given scams use telephony, internet and social platforms, investments and financial payment rails there are a wide number of parties to coordinate.
The approach of the NASC was familiar to me:
Connect to the parties across government, law enforcers and multiple industries who can help measure and influence scam effectiveness to ensure that they share goals and can learn together
Share data, experiences and ideas across the participants in real time so that new scams can be identified quickly and progress tracked continuously
Solve for major priorities one at a time using the capabilities of all the participants. The NASC is tackling scams in waves eg investment scams, job scams, etc. This focus to the coordination helps people organise around the work, bring the required capabilities together and clarify goals in each stream of work.
Implement new innovations, changes to systems, processes, and regulations based on the learnings through the innovation phase.
The Minister in particular called out the power of this approach to enable early wins through collaboration and to accelerate learning vs a traditional model where government regulates first and works out the plan later.
Obviously the participants in the NASC are not using the Collaboration Maturity Model in any way. However it was very powerful to hear the echoes of that model in this work and particularly where results have been so startlingly effective.
Next time you are tackling a complicated systemic challenge demanding innovation don’t forget the power of Connect> Share> Solve> Innovate.
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same
We aren’t defined by titles and status. All of us are capable of reinvention at any age. Follow the purpose that calls you and you will find a new way to define yourself.
Towards the end of West Wing, CJ Cregg, Chief of Staff to the President tells Charlie Young ‘You know I’m living the first line of my obituary’. It’s understandable that a person at the heights of political world might think that there’s nothing more to be done. It’s always tempting to see a fancy role and title as a definition of our potential. Instead, CJ actually goes on to lead a foundation that aims to change world health and poverty.
We aren’t our jobs. They most definitely do not limit us. We are creative and capable people making our way in the world, collaborating and creating with others. It is those other people who draw us out of our own limitations and show us the way to reinvent ourselves. Working towards purpose with others will help you find the opportunity that is your next phase and might well be your next crowning achievement.
Surround yourself with great purposeful people. Trust in the quality of the people around you to help you to new problems and opportunities. Be prepared to walk away from all the trappings of success to start again. Recognise any path of reinvention is a long difficult and winding one. You may not end up where you expect or get there how you thought but you will be richer for the efforts.
Yesterday I was announced as Chair Elect of the Board of Bank First. That’s an opportunity I thought I had lost two and a half years ago. The acquisition of LanternPay had led to my return to the CEO role at HICAPS and I resigned from the board with a sense of loss.
If you’ve ever felt your legacy would be defined by a role, consider returning to one after a decade. After a great two and a half years leading HICAPS again, I left having learned so much more from customers and my people than I ever expected. Much of this experience is relevant to the challenges ahead for Bank First.
HICAPS was very successful. When I pulled up stumps in September, it was hard to walk away from a great business and team to create something new and uncertain. However because I was prepared to walk away from success and others were willing to support a transition, I have a chance of contributing in a different way with an energetic, highly capable and enthusiastic group of people at Bank First.
Life is full of surprises and twists and turns. They say luck is opportunity and preparation. Surrounding yourself with great people helps with both. So never lose hope that more is possible. Make yourself lucky. Start work on the next version of you today. Start with the people who will help make it possible.
I want to believe in the power of rosemary knuckled along the fence even as the stars order themselves to an unalterable and essential law.
Celebration of culture carriers often ignores their motivations.
Meet and understand your change agents
Organisations looking to strengthen culture often do so by finding and celebrating culture carriers. Culture carriers are those people who live the values that an organisation wants to foster and inspire the practice of those values in others. Highlighting and celebrating the work of these change agents can strengthen the practice of key values in teams.
Often, this celebration goes awry for a simple reason. The culture carrier doesn’t see themselves as a change agent. They are just doing what they do. They don’t see their work as differentiated or exceptional. They will resist the celebrations.
Worse still, the organisations motivation for influencing people can be wildly divergent to the individuals practising the target values. Many organisations decide on the values they want without consulting their people, let alone those who demonstrate the desired culture.
Celebrating culture carriers whose actions and motivations are not aligned runs two risks:
highlighting to these individuals their disconnect to others leading to exit or changes to conform to the prevailing values
presenting these individuals to the organisations as isolated superheroes without connection to other’s work and goals.
Before you start to celebrate the exemplars of your target culture, take the time to understand their experience, motivations and goals. What you learn may be far more useful to any changes you want to foster and will enable them to present their efforts as human and realistic to others.
Sometimes I tremble like a storm-swept flower, And seek to hide my tortured soul from thee, Bowing my head in deep humility Before the silent thunder of thy power.
Working for purpose teaches us lessons we cannot find in any other domain. The challenges of adding value in problems of purpose teach us humility, managing change with deep compassion, and how to stretch collaborative creation to its limits.
Purpose is the sense that your work delivers value for others. That may be traditional benefits for customers, but for many importantly extends to others such as the disadvantaged or community as a whole.
Start a small commercial business to solve a customer’s problem and you are shareholder, director and executive. You are the agent of your own path. The work is by no means easy and success is not guaranteed but you are your own boss. Success criteria are relatively clear and in your control. Rewards also accrue directly to your efforts.
Problems of social purpose can be tougher to understand, measure and solve. The systems at play, complex interactions and stakeholder dynamics can be far more complicated. The decision making criteria involve far more than profit and loss. Some even may be wicked problems that government and society have been struggling to solve for years, like the Indigenous Expectations Gap in Australia. These problems aren’t addressed by the clever decision making of a single talented individual. These problems have already humbled too many enthusiastic and heroic change agents.
Throw all your smarts, energy, talent and enthusiasm at a problem of purpose and it will teach you humility. From outright failure to ongoing rejection of work by the stakeholders you are seeking to benefit, the paths to learn your limits keep expanding before you.
For example, trying to reduce incidence of diabetes in indigenous communities involves more than a knee jerk idea of better diet. The issue is woven into wider indigenous health challenges, household structures, social interactions, community expectations of shared property, income cycles, and many more issues. This is not a problem solved by tackling education or food preparation.
These are no problems of purpose solved by an individual acting alone no matter how great their characteristics. Purpose only occurs in and works for a wider community and demands solutions that engage teams and the wider community working together. Work on purpose because of its collaborative, compassionate and community-focused nature pushes us to go beyond the patterns of our past successes, to seek new insights from others, and to reflect on the limits of the traditional heroic mode of work.
Creating greater value in purposeful work involves having the humility to accept that progress will be hard, solutions will be newly created with many authors, and that many more stakeholders should be involved in designing and measuring success to capture all the elements of the systems at work.
Don’t be daunted by the prospect that purposeful work might set you back. See it as an opportunity to learn beyond the limits of your own ego. What you learn in that work will have impacts on many other domains of your life. Despite the many frustrations, purposeful work is incredibly rewarding.
loving-others-to-death— as Chekhov put it, "compassion down to your fingertips"— looking on them as into the sun
Effective strategy is the outcome of little decisions. As tempting as it may be to focus on the enthralling big picture, effective execution of strategy depends on the details and the decisions teams make early in the process. Get the right debate running across your team around these little questions and you are a long way to success.
Eight Little Things – 8 questions to answer as a team
There are so many elements to get right in strategy. If you want a valuable strategy framework for every day use and that I have seen work across a wide range of scenarios, then I recommend Playing to Win by Lafley and Martin. The following simple questions are key ones that come from my experience taking organisations through execution of strategy, The tighter the answers to these questions, the better the performance.
Importantly, these are questions that every member of the team should know and understand. Strategy execution is not the domain of an MBA-qualified strategy lead or some fancy executive. Organisations that leverage every person to deliver strategic outcomes drive superior performance.
What does success look like?
Being able to communicate a clear goal for the work makes life easier. Teams can use that goal to track their alignment and also to monitor progress. Clarity of the goal also helps people understand why things need to change and the business needs to do different things to the past. Engaging people in energy around a shared goal will see teams through the challenges. Success needs to be more than customer numbers, financial metrics or some exit event. Ideally it is a rich vision of the future with value for all stakeholders.
Who is your customer? (Segmentation)
The concept of Total addressable market has done many entrepreneurs a disservice. A number you need to raise capital leads people to think they should have every customer on the planet. Delivering a bland mass market proposition without focus on customers is the surest way to fail. Unless your product or service is a pure commodity then you need to be far more specific. Be incredibly focused. Small target segments are better to understand, target and convert. The whole world is comprised of many of these segments.
What are you doing that nobody else can do?
People copy success. Get over it. It will happen. What makes your success impossible to replicate (for a while). What do you do that nobody else can or would do? Long term strategic success demands you continuously assess and enhance this difference.
Why does a customer choose you (over everyone else and nothing at all)?
If you can’t describe in detail why your specific target customer would choose you over a competitor and over doing nothing, you aren’t ready to go to market. It’s that simple. Your sales and marketing teams can’t make this up in market. These reasons need to be built into the heart of your product and be driving your execution. Ideally, this explanation comes from the customers you worked with to develop the product. The reasons to buy need to be so compelling customers are complaining how slow you are in getting to market. Lukewarm interest won’t cut it in a busy world.
What proof points underpin your marketing?
Hype is great. Hype gets attention. Success comes from consistent conversion. Being able to prove your points of difference and hinge the go to market strategy around them is essential. If a marketing director ever asks to change the brand without describing how the proof points have changed ask them to go back to basics. So much effort is wasted on window dressing an absence of fundamentals.
What capabilities do you need to succeed?
When you have a specific target customer and a unique proposition, you need to have the capabilities to deliver. Some might be generic but many will end up being a key part of the differentiation of the business. Understand these capabilities and make sure your work on strategy flows all the way down to people, process, data and systems to make sure you will succeed. You can learn a lot and change a lot as you go, but a strategy helps make sure you have the fundamental capabilities in place when you need them.
What employee experience do you need to drive your customer experience?
Great customer experiences are built on great employee experiences. Design the two together. Make sure that they support each other and you are not asking your employees to pick up the gaps in your customer experience. That’s not sustainable and creates unattractive variation in service. Don’t ever trade off to the detriment of your employees because your customers will feel it immediately.
What won’t you do?
The point of strategy is to make decisions. The most important decision is where to focus your few resources for greatest success. You should not do everything. The most successful business I know can describe clearly all the things they won’t ever do. They have the deals that they have turned down to prove it. Don’t get lured off course or distracted by the quick buck or the moment of hype.
Keeping these questions alive and debated at every level of your business will help your whole team learn and evolve the strategy towards success. It’s very likely the first answer you have to each will be wildly wrong, especially if you are a founder sure of themselves. Over time these questions will be resolved in practice and drive success in execution of your strategy.
If you are interested in discussing further, reach out through the comments or online to discuss.
Of all the questions you might want to ask about angels, the only one you ever hear is how many can dance on the head of a pin.
One of the illusions of management is that there is a room where the big decisions get made. We have lots of expressions that make reference to this:
Seat at the table
In the room where it happened
Backroom deals
Big table
People in organisations can become unduly focused on getting into that imaginary room to have power and influence. I’ve seen functions and people expend extraordinary amounts of effort trying to get into that room. People are usually disappointed when they get to see the meeting where they think all power resides for a number of pretty obvious reasons:
Disillusionment: If all the decisions are made somewhere, it is a long way from the work and probably making decisions slowly and badly
Irrelevance: Power is influence over people. You can’t name the room, but you can name the people who have influence. They do so wherever they are. The room, the table or the meeting don’t mean much without the power brokers. Too many people join the meeting who have no influence and they will leave
Compromise: Absolute power is a dream. Most people have stakeholders, relationships and constraints to manage. This all powerful conversation can end up looking a lot like compromise, or worse carefully managed theatre, as the real influencers act elsewhere.
Inanity: Get far enough away from what’s going on and the discussion inevitably turns into a fact-free debate over policies, abstractions and metaphors. Rarely the cutting-edge decision making that people desire.
Real power happens when people influence others, preferably close to the work in action. Make change there with those doing the work. If you are stopped and obstructed, you will find the real sources of power. You can then work with or against them.
Stop looking for distant rooms and secret tables. Don’t worry if you don’t have a seat at the table. Far too many people there would rather be out where the real power resides, making the day-to-day decisions in the work.
Overturn the idea of the magical table. You will get more done and have far much more power.
For more than five years I have worked with an experienced and extraordinary team of engineers at both LanternPay and now HICAPS. A common moment of surprise in those relationships was when the engineers notice that the business guy was a Microsoft MVP. With my coding expertise limited to some very dodgy html, the surprise that I might have been part of a group of only 4000 professionals recognised by Microsoft was to be expected. I was as surprised as they were.
My time as a Microsoft MVP has now come to an end. However, I have learned one fundamental thing from over 7 years of involvement with the program: It’s the people. As an MVP you are exposed to a vast array of technical knowledge and expertise. Far too much for any one person to handle. You are constantly challenged by people in Microsoft and without who know more or know better than you. As intimidating as that may sounds, none of that matters compared to wonder of people’s care, generosity and sense of community.
The Community
The sense of community in the Microsoft MVP program is exceptional. Everyone is aware they are part of something shared and special. That community extends to the deep relationships with Microsoft employees whether managing the program or in the many product groups to which MVPs gain access. I have been lucky to meet wonderful people around the world and to have made a community of friends for life. (Hey, yamfam, I am talking about you and you know who you are!) My one regret is that the one MVP Summit I arranged to attend in person was scheduled for February 2020. Sadly, I never got another chance to spend more time in person with this crew.
From everything, I experienced and learned, it is these people that I will treasure and those relationships will carrying on. We have been bemused, puzzled, fought, learned and laughed together. Critically, we have supported each other though job changes and all kinds of success and adversity. These are relationships that stick and go far beyond any one vendor or any technology.
The Customers and Users
My first MVP award was a surprise to me and no doubt to many of the experienced IT professionals in the community. I’m proud to have represented one of a passionate group of experts in change and adoption who made the MVP ranks. Change and adoption is just fancy language for the people-focused crew. As we move into an age of more social and more cloud technology tools, having deep expertise on change and adoption remains essential to the success of any solution. I’m glad Microsoft recognised this years ago and has continued to prioritise the investment of smart change and adoption professionals, even extending learning on these skills to all MVPs. After all, tech changes but the customers and users remain the future.
My professional path has changed (at least for now) so I part the Microsoft MVP program with no regrets. A wonderful learning experience and a great opportunity to contribute has come to an end but neither of those things stop now. My friendships too will continue, even without the inside scuttlebutt. Thankfully my Outlook and Calendar will be a little quieter too.
This blog has always been devoted to the principle that everything begins and ends with people. Technology is just a vehicle to help people to better ends. That’s my one takeaway from my journey as a Microsoft MVP. Let’s continue to celebrate people.
