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Scott Anthony, Innosight
Go Back to Your Roots
In times like these, it's smart to think about de-featuring: dialing back the performance of products or services to make them cheaper and simpler. As a management consulting company, we focus on full-scale projects that cost clients hundreds of thousands of dollars. The costs to us are mostly people: A typical project requires three to five consultants working for several months. But when we started out, our core business was workshops. They were far less resource intensive than our current offerings, lasting just one or two days and requiring one or two people to stage. Now, we are looking at bringing back those workshops. We already know how to do them, and we can hit an attractive price point of less than $100,000.
I look back at our history, at companies we have had long relationships with, like Procter & Gamble. That relationship started with a two-day workshop. Many clients started with that modest first step. The workshops allow us to do again what made this company what it is. And we can reach smaller companies and companies that just don't like spending money on consultants. Our workshops will be better in 2009 than they were in 2003, because we can add case studies of companies that have used our ideas. We will bring to bear our accumulated knowledge from the past five years. If you go back to your roots with all the things you have learned, then you can make those roots even stronger.
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Paul Orfalea, Kinko's
Pay for Leads
Reward co-workers who deliver leads that turn into clients. Now is the time to reinforce the notion that everyone is in sales and marketing, regardless of his or her job title.
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Robert Stephens, Geek Squad
Get Crazy
Urge your people to think big. That's what we are doing right now. We just launched a program called Action Figures, in which we encourage our employees to pursue crazy-ass ideas. We posted a message on our company wiki saying something like, "Hey, we have this idea for a new software app, but we're not pursuing it because the cheapest quote we could get is $50,000. Anyone think they can build it for $1,000?" We received several dozen responses in a couple of days.
Think about it: You are this full-time retail employee, or you spend most of your time setting up wireless networks, and you get this message from someone asking you to come up with this prototype. It's not just about cutting costs, which this does, or producing better products, which this also does; it's about encouraging people to aspire to things beyond their current timecard. So these 9-to-5 workers now know that they have a chance to work on something potentially big and get paid for it. It's a huge morale booster, and it's going to cost very little. Now, 95 percent of what they work on is going to be crap, but we already know that. We are banking on the fact that 5 percent of the ideas will be worth our modest investment. You find a lot of companies that chase only billion-dollar ideas. That's the quickest way not to get billion-dollar ideas. This, on the other hand, is how you innovate on the cheap.
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John Chambers, Cisco Systems
Plan for the Upturn
Even in the midst of a downturn, make sure you prepare for the rebound. Start planning as soon as possible for how you are going to gain share and differentiate yourself from your peers. And while you are at it, use the slowdown to build even stronger relationships and differentiation with your customers.
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Perry Klebahn, Timbuk2
Get Serious About Service
In August, things had been in the doldrums for a while. So we did what we call a Service Strike. Our service team booked time with a local retailer that sells our bags. The team left one person in the office to cover the phones, and the other four climbed into the car of our customer service director, and they drove over there. They ordered some pizzas in advance and had them delivered to the store. They cleaned up the bag section of the floor -- retailers don't have time to arrange every bag or straighten every tag. Then they sat down with eight or 10 employees and did a clinic on our products. They told the folks a dozen things they didn't know, like that they could custom-order bags for their customers on our site and place their own orders online through our third-party B2B vendor. We plan to continue the strikes in 2009: There's a bunch of stores we can hit in the Bay Area. It's virtually free.
