How to Scale a Business When the World Keeps Changing with Ben Ramsdale and Martin Cross #90

After all, all art is experience. Hello and welcome to The Company Doctor. We're joined by not one but two terrific guests, both from global systems integrator and digital transformation partner Connect. Chief Strategy Officer Martin Cross and Group Chief Commercial Officer Ben Ramsdale joined Gary and I to discuss the intricacies of scaling a business amid increasingly adverse global conditions. It really is a fantastic and lively episode, so buckle up and get ready for how to scale a business when the world keeps changing.

Hello, Ben and Martin, and welcome to the Company Doctor podcast. Great to have you on.

Great to be on.

Great to be on, Gary and George. Thanks for having us.

We're really excited about having you on because the topic today is how to scale a business when the world keeps changing. And who better than having these industry titans on from Connect? And I thought maybe, yeah, Bigged you up already. I thought maybe a good way to start is to get you, Ben and Martin, just quickly introducing yourself. Maybe we start with Ben. Tell the listeners who you are and what you do.

Yeah, so my name is Ben Ramsdale. I'm Group Chief Commercial Officer at Connect. So my remit covers commercial, legal and compliance, all of our supply chain management. We've just built a continuous improvement team that is shaping Connect into the next generation of the Connect business. And also I lead a portfolio team which was built last year to take our strategy and turn it into market-leading propositions. I am what I would call the yin to Martin's yang.

That's what we're hoping to see. It all sounds very impressive so far. And what about yourself, Martin? A quick intro from yourself.

Well, yeah, well, so I'm the thinker and Ben is the doer in, in this double act. I'm the Chief Strategy Officer here at Connect, so My role is to make sure that we understand what's happening in the marketplace, what's happening with our customers, that we have the right capabilities, services, technology partnerships to address those needs. And as part of that, obviously I create a strategy which then Ben puts into action. But I'm also responsible for the M&A activity. So any acquisitions that we feel is more appropriate than building ourselves, and I run that piece too.

Wow, look at you guys, a powerhouse. I told you your title, that's what we're going to get into. And, and I love the fact that, yeah, we're talking about strategy and operations because, you know, because hopefully there's, there's a lot to learn for people listening. So maybe I thought where I would start because of that, um, because the title is When the World Keeps Changing, the world does seem to be a bit all over the place and a bit random at the moment. And so the first question is about that really. How do you scale when There's economic downturns, there's wars, there's instability, there's loads of technology disruption. Yeah, maybe I'll start with you, Martin.

Well, I think actually the change is the important piece, right? Which is there's always opportunity when there's change. And we've seen that. I've seen that. I've been in this business since 2003, so a bloody long time. And change is always an opportunity. So even if the change is negative, customers then need to react to that change. So in a downturn, you may need to reduce staff, which means for us, then there's an opportunity to provide automation capability sets to do that. So for me, the change is not a problem, it's actually the catalyst that helps you grow. The problem is understanding what the change impact will be on your business, on your customers, and making sure that you're then putting the right services together to address that change or to assist in that change.

Okay, so it sounds like you like drama then. Drama's good for you, good for business. What about you, Ben? How does that affect you?

I like her. So this is how you're going to see how Martin is the thinker and I'm the doer. So Martin's strategy that he's pulled together, which we launched formally last year, is, I think, absolutely spot on. And the market has responded to it in that way. I look at it as a fundamental shift in how we do business. So there is a lot of opportunity there, but we also have to adapt to how we as a business go to market. And I was searching for some answers around this myself some time ago, and I revisited something I'd stumbled across a couple of years ago around company lifecycle theory. So I don't want to get academic and technical because I think a lot of it's nonsense. This, I think, is really quite applicable. And it talks about how the different stages in a company lifecycle— and you start with startup, assuming that the market wants what you are peddling. You get into a growth mode, then you hit a maturity mode and you can sail through that maturity mode for some time. And I think that's where Connect was when I joined. The contact centre market was very stable. We knew what we were doing, the market knew what we were about, and we just sold, sold, sold, sold, sold. Then you hit a phase which is, which is called either renewal or decline, right? Something changes, the market shifted either because your competition has caught up with you or what's happened in our case, the technology landscape has completely evolved. And it's about how you react to that change. Now, I, I have a very strong view around the fact that we need to build a culture of innovation to respond to that shift. And that is about giving people the freedom to go and create, the freedom to go and fail, creating a safe space in order to do that so that they can quickly test ideas and either evolve them, move them forward, or discard them if they're not working., and you need to give them the tools, the training, and the data at their fingertips to enable them to do that, which is an exceptionally easy thing to say. There's a lot that goes into it.

Well, it's conjuring up a question I've got for Martin based on what you just said, because you're talking about culture and not wanting to be controversial. Doesn't culture eat strategy for breakfast, Martin?

Yeah, well, it depends what that culture is. That's a good, that's a good question. I don't believe so if you've got the right culture to start off with. Right. So Obviously, people talk about the growth mindset. Our business is all about change. And so part of the culture is embracing that change rather than fighting that change. I think there's obviously a lot of people find it hard to change and it's easy to say, well, no, we've never done that like this before. If you do that, though, obviously the market's going to move, move beyond you and we're all out of a job. So I think it's important that you foster a culture which embraces change and the change is the opportunity, right? As I said at the start, change is not a negative, change is an opportunity and those that can embrace change will succeed.

Okay, that's good. And Ben, kind of spinning off that really, 'cause you are the people man, how do leadership teams ensure the culture scales with that business?

So specifically related to the leadership team, I think you need to, there are a couple of fundamentals you need in a senior leadership team in particular. As I've come up the ranks, I've seen more and more and more clearly how people ape the behavior of their leaders. And I used to consider myself an autonomous free thinker and there's no way I did that, blah, blah, blah. Looking back on it, I was aping the behavior of my leaders, right? So first things first, it's not just enough to talk about culture, you have to live and breathe it and you have to do it as a unit. So your senior leadership team has to understand and believe and buy into the behaviors that you want to embody as an organization and live them day and night, because the minute you don't, that's what people will see and that's what people will ape. And the second thing is, I think, I think you need a senior leadership team that is brave enough to question itself, is brave enough to question one another, is secure enough in itself to not respond negatively to that. And is willing to change and to do it in a way that is aligned. So what— this is a phrase we nicked off you, Gary Gamp. We don't have to agree, we do have to align. And what that means is that we debate, dispute, sometimes we argue, but when we leave that room, we do it in a unified fashion. And the message that we present to the business is a joined-up message, and the behaviors that we follow up that message with are consistent and reflective of the culture we want to build.

Nice.

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And I just want to switch tracks a bit because obviously people listening, they want to know some tips about how do you scale business when the world keeps changing. And, and so can I ask both of you a question, the same question, from your own perspective roles? What do you see are the biggest challenges businesses face trying to scale when things are moving like crazy? What would be maybe the top 3 things that spring to mind?

I think the biggest problem is keeping the lights on and changing is the hard thing, right? So what you're effectively describing is changing the engine in a car while you're driving it kind of thing, which is—

Yeah, nice.

Yeah.

Which is obviously a difficult process and changing the wheels as well. Yeah, exactly. But that's, I think that's what you want to do when you see things are changing. You've got a window of opportunity to make that change. While your existing business is still coming in and keeping the lights on, you've got the opportunity to build the new go-to-market or the new whatever it is that you're going to do in parallel to that. So I quite like the idea of having a little ninja team that can fail fast, go out, prove the new model while the rest of the business is keeping the lights on. Once you've built that out and proved that, you know, failed fast, hopefully succeeded fast, and prove that there's a different way of doing this and addressing the opportunity in the marketplace, you then industrialize that and that becomes your new way of doing it. But you don't want to distract the existing business from what's going on because they've got to keep the lights on for you, keep the money coming in while you're experimenting with the new, the new world.

Okay, well, this is great. Ben, before you answer, I've just got a quick follow-on question for Martin while he's on a roll. So with that in mind, how do you strike the balance then between sort of long-term strategic planning and the need for agility when the the market conditions can change overnight.

Yeah, I mean, that's a real problem, right? So I don't think you can implement strategy over a long period of time. You have to be certain that that change is going to be happening within the next 12 months or whatever it is, because otherwise you're building capability set, you're diverting resources to something that might not happen for another 3 years, and then that's going to reduce your scalability. So you You can be aware of what's happening, but you've got to see the signs that is then starting to come into reality. I've made that mistake many times where we've decided the world is going to change. You build a capability, you can buy a business for that, and then there's nothing there for 3, 4 years. So you need to see the signs in your customer base. I have this like this golden rule that as soon as you've seen this new world appear 3 times in 3 different customers, then it's happening.

Okay, so the 5-year plan is dead, but read the tea leaves instead.

Well, you can do this. It's the same thing.

You plan on a, you plan on on 3-month, 3-year cycles.

So maybe not a 5-year plan, but a 3-week plan, a 3-year plan, a 3-month plan, and a 3-year plan.

Sounds good advice, Martin. And Ben, I can say you're revving up, you're revving your engine.

I'm revved, Gary.

Answer that question.

You should know this one. I'm going to confront Martin as we love it. Secure leaders. I don't agree that the 3-year plan is dead. I don't think that long-term strategic planning is dead at all. I think it needs to be looked at like that is a macro view of what is happening or what we expect to happen. And then I think it needs to be tested at a micro level. That sounds really nebulous, doesn't it? But I'll explain what I mean. So I think one of the biggest places that businesses fail when trying to deliver on a new strategy is how they empower their people, because empowerment is a word that gets bandied around. Everywhere, I think that it is poorly implemented in most places. And I think that comes down to a number of things. So I think everyone in the business needs to understand the plan, the strategic direction of travel, right? This is a 3-year plan, the market's doing this, and we have these things we think are gonna solve this problem. Everybody in the, the business needs to understand the parameters in within which they are free to operate. So we call them guardrails, but it's effectively my job is the following and my objectives are the following. In order for me to deliver on my objectives, I have absolute freedom within these guardrails. And if you line up the whole business like that, you get collaboration, you get freedom, creativity, innovation, as long as they're all aligned to the same goal. And in that way, you can fail fast at a micro level. You can prove the theories that are being produced at board level, the strategy. That strategy has not been guessed at. It's been based on a large amount of market testing. How do we put that into reality at a micro level, empower people to fail fast and give them an environment where they can do that?

And answering the— that's great advice. And Ben, same question to you, answering about what do you see the main challenges businesses face trying to scale in today's madly changing market? What are your insights on that?

I would like to answer at a human level, but I think the truth of it is, is that, is that the, the difficulty is putting the fundamental building blocks in place. So what do we talk— what am I talking about? So we've got a strategy, right? We need to build a budget off the back of that strategy that facilitates what is effectively speculation. We need to build a structure I mean, our strategy, for example, we've gone in the last 2 years from being predominantly tech-focused to being very much services-led, so people-centric. We have to shift our business based on that change. We have to budget accordingly, we have to build our systems and datasets to facilitate that, and we have to do that based on a strategy that we wholeheartedly believe is the right one, but which we haven't had enough time to fully test yet. And I do think that's why the importance of failing fast, like the expression is a bit lean startupy, and I think people generally don't, could therefore be forgiven for not applying it to a business that's been around for 30 years.

But that's interesting. I was watching Martin twitch when you said we're not technology-led. So it leads me to a question for you, Martin. How important is technology in scaling and how do you avoid falling into that kind of trap of tech for tech's sake?

Technology is an enabler, not the end goal in itself, right? So I think the answer to scaling using technology, and we obviously do that ourselves, we practice what we preach, we drink our own champagne as opposed to eating our own dog food. Classy. It's all— you shouldn't be buying technology on a TCO. Model, the total cost of ownership. You should be buying it on an ROI model, return on investment. What is it going to do to my business? What is the business outcome that this is going to generate? And then the TCO cares, cares for itself on that basis. So my view is that you're, you're, you're looking at the outcome, the business outcome. You're then mapping that to how that's going to be implemented. And from, from a customer perspective, that's how we're going to configure and apply that. To our processes. And then the technology is an enabler to do that, that makes you more efficient. So technology is an enabler rather than the, the answer.

No, I get it. But how do you then keep ahead of things? Because there's lots of disruptors out there, particularly in your market. So how do you— if you think about Uber, Uber got disrupted by another disruptor. So Uber were a disruptor and became disrupted. And in your space, there's lots of startups and disruptors.

Brilliant.

Are you a disruptor? Or are you worried about disruptors?

I would say that we are, we are, we are a disruptor in that we— but we want to back the right horse because there's lots of potential disruptors around at the moment. And the trick is understanding which one is going to have that business outcome. So as long as you've got that focus on is this, is this better for the customer, is it better for the consumer, then that's the right answer, I think. So we've done this over time, right? We've done it ourselves. We've seen new technologies coming to the marketplace and we've asked ourselves the question, do we want to be the disrupted or do we want to be the disruptor? And at times we've, we've backed the wrong horse or we've taken it too early. But again, as long as you got to see it starting to get some traction in the marketplace. So I think it's important for us to contextualize that disruption. So there's lots of technologies coming out there and it is what is, what is the impact on your business as a customer? This is how can you take advantage of it? Because that disruption may be happening in the marketplace, but it might not be happening to you as a bank. It might be happening to someone else as a retailer. So you need someone who can contextualize that, that disruptive technology, understand where it fits, and then we can embrace that as an enabling technology. But it's also got to suit your culture, right? There are lots of technologies here that claim they can eliminate people. But if your differentiator is customer experience and empathy, then technology cannot play a part as well. It can play a part, but it can't play a part as well as the person can in terms of empathy. But it can help that person being more efficient who is empathetic.

Well, this is great. What a great lead into my next question, because I wanted to ask Ben about his philosophy, because it says on your website your philosophy is exceptional customer service for everyone. It's everyone's responsibility. As Martin's saying, I get the more you use technology and the more you try and improve efficiency and optimize things, you might throw away the good stuff, which is customer experience? What's your thoughts? How do we maintain it?

So I wrote that bio on my website as a consequence of my running internal departments as opposed to being on the coalface of providing customer experience to our customers. What I was getting at and what we've done is we've looked at building a— I started with the legal team, was the first team I built, but it's expanded beyond that. And we said, look, the reality is The most legal teams in most businesses are seen as business prevention. They're difficult to deal with. And we flipped that culture on its head and said, look, if we're going to have an in-house legal team, we're going to build it in a way that lends itself to becoming a competitive advantage to the business. So that means my lawyers know more about the technology than most lawyers they ever meet. They understand the law better. They understand the operational aspects of the business in a way that enables them to navigate what are effectively black and white legal clauses and get to an answer that suits everybody. If I was to expand that out, I would say it is a matter of reframing the status quo in a way that is absolutely designed to deliver customer experience.

Yeah, that's great. Good advice all around.

Well, this is the segment where the only the second yet to be named segment, Claude's Corner, Claude's Quickfire, George's Grill. We're not sure what it's going to be called yet. We're still playing with the names, but I have a series of questions and I'm just going to sort of fire them at you. They don't have to be quickfire. They can be sort of— they can be thought about. But starting with the sort of general one, maybe I'll start with Martin. Is scaling at all costs justified? By which I mean, does growth outweigh profitability?

Uh, no, no, no, definitely not. And it depends what that growth is, right? Revenue growth is often the measure that people think growth is, but I'm not necessarily growth in revenue, right? Because again, that revenue is just a number. Profitability is what pays the wages. And so I think you have to, you have to have a set of KPIs, measurements that you, you, you want to grow against. And then you should then task those. So for us, we have a revenue growth number, but that's obviously balanced while we have a profitability number that we're wanting to grow as a percentage of our turnover, right? So as our turnover grows, we want to be more profitable than we were before. And also the nature of that revenue, we want recurring revenue, contracted recurring revenue as opposed to one-off, because that just— that's a nice safe type of revenue. That means if the world does change, you've got a, you've got a ramp of that recurring revenue to be able to adapt within to, to find new opportunities. So for me, it's, it's having that mix. I like that. I particularly like that mix. I think it applies to many different businesses. So you've got revenue growth, recurring revenue as a percentage of your overall revenue, and then the profitability as a percentage of your revenue. And have, have stretched targets in those. Don't settle for 5%, go for 20%, and then you might just reach 7% or 8%, right?

Excellent stuff. Emphatic answer there. Ben, on to you. You've sort of clearly expressed some passion about giving people the freedom to innovate and to experiment with things. But how do you go about giving them that freedom? How do you instill that sense of experimentation in their thoughts and what they're confident enough to try out?

Yeah. So I think that there are several different aspects to it. So, so lay the foundations. Number one, explain to people exactly what part they play in the overall plan. There's your guardrails. You then have that person has objectives, KPIs, whatever you call them, that align to the overarching goal of the business. That's how, that's where they need to get to. So they're the key parameters. How people then go about those delivering on that objective within their guardrails. Is a, then a personal choice. But for me, that's where the importance of business values come in, company values, because a judgment should be made based on some informing factors. And for me, those informing factors are the company values. And if you tie it up like that and you position it like that and you give people that instruction, then I think that's how you achieve empowerment. There's a couple of other aspects to it. You need, at a practical level, you need to give people the tools, training, and datasets they need to make informed decisions. Because you can't just say to somebody, well, you're empowered to do this, and then not explain to them what that is, how they do it, and what is the tooling and data they need to inform that decision. And then your leadership absolutely has to walk the walk, because the minute you start chastising somebody, for failure, the whole thing grinds to a halt.

Good stuff. And maybe sticking with you, Ben, what have been some of the main barriers to scale that you guys have experienced?

Timing's a massive one. So I think Martin alluded to having misjudged timing on potentially one or two things. I think he's such an oracle that he was a couple of years in advance of the market. The market's now caught up with him. But we made a misstep, a false start by not seeing, I think, soon enough that we were ahead of the market, which is a bizarre thing to say. And then what Martin touched on around growth mindset and resistance to change, it's really hard to navigate a business through change and getting as many people on board as you can is fundamental. That is probably the biggest challenge because at the end of the day, it's all just human nature.

Yeah. And Martin, sort of calling on your oracle skills, have you got one particular trend that you see might impact sort of efficient scaling over the next, let's say, 3 years? Is there anything blipping on the radar?

Well, I mean, AI is obviously the biggest thing in the market at the moment, and I think that that has the ability to allow you to scale your business. And going back to something Ben was saying, you were asking Ben, right? Which is one of the things that challenges scaling is finding the right people, right? Because obviously as you're scaling, you can become more efficient, but ultimately you're going to grow your people by some percentage. And finding those right people and hiring the right people, because good people aren't going to be around necessarily the time you want to hire them. You've got to wait for the right people. And I think that's— that it's important to be always looking for the right people. But to go back to your question, I think it's— AI is going through this normal adoption of technology. Where, um, you have a massive hype, then you're going to realize that it does— it doesn't solve all of your problems in the world, and you're going to be disillusioned in it. And then you start to find the actual niches in which it can really work. And I think that's, that's the next phase of how you're going to scale your business, is actually rather than taking the hype and, uh, using AI for everything, is finding that niche areas in your business that it can really make a difference. AI is becoming ever more autonomous. It can start doing what people do. It has no emotion. You just have to rely on the fact that it has no empathy and you're going to need to enable people to do those bits. But for the bits behind the scenes that people don't want to be doing, then that allows you to make individuals more efficient. So rather than replacing the individuals, it's empowering them, I guess, is where that's going to be useful.

I feel like we could do a whole episode on AI and scaling, but just to keep this sort of quickfire, Ben, going from a sort of people perspective, as Martin was alluded to, And my final question of the quickfire round, what's the key to making change feel seamless? If there is one sort of real fundamental key to this.

Comms, comms, comms, comms, comms. One of the things that I've learned and one of the failures I've made, probably repeated as well, is not being clear enough and repetitive enough in what it is we're trying to do and why. And I've subsequently seen people make mistakes I have definitely made, which is thinking that the world has the context you've got when they don't. And so why are you doing something? What is it you're doing? Who is responsible for it? What are the expected outputs? And just repeating that over and over and over again. Because I hear quite a lot of people say, I've told them that. Okay, that's one conversation of 1,000 that person's had today. Which is 7,000 in a week. Like, how— one conversation is not going to stick in the brain. So you need to, you need to reiterate and reiterate and reiterate and reiterate.

Good stuff. Thanks very much. Sorry that I'm not probing further, but as I say, this is a quick fire round. So thank you. Congratulations for surviving. Back to you, Gary.

I've got a couple of questions. And then we get to your musical taste. The first one's for you, Martin, because I watched you in a video Don't get worried.

Exactly.

You look shocked. And it was a digital transformation documentary. I think it was after COVID. I thought it was great, by the way. I thought you were great. And so my question was, and I'm leading the witness a bit, can you give us an example where, you know, something has happened that has caused a business to pivot and scale and been successful, either in your experience or, you know, through your career? 'Cause I think people listening want to get some ideas about what's the therefore, what does it mean? How do I apply that to my, what I do?

It's maybe obviously a hackneyed answer, but you mentioned the word COVID itself, right? So obviously we've been running a business that was providing technology that goes into companies' offices and helps them do all sorts of stuff from those offices. And then COVID hit and there was nobody working in the offices. But what we realized was that the technology was a key enabler to help people work from home, how to connect them to their customers and to each other as employees. And we became experts. Well, I'm not sure we became experts, we were already experts in this.

Of course, good, good row back.

We were already experts in this, but we realized that that expertise was then at the forefront of our proposition. So how do you get agents, how do you get staff from home? How do you get advisors from home? How do you get customers to reach those people from home? How do you make sure there's a quality of interaction? Through that process, how to do that securely. And all of our historic expertise could be applied but to a different outcome. So again, it was reacting to that outcome and shuffling the deck in a way that then suited what the customers were asking for. And so everyone else was obviously struggling through COVID. People were being laid off, people would be putting on furlough. We were hiring and growing during that phase because it turned a difficulty into an opportunity.

Yeah, and I think a lot of technology businesses, you know, had growth periods during that time for that reason. But then again, I think it plateaued afterwards. But it's an interesting— but, but, but it's actually— it sounds like it was a catalyst for, for growth in a technology area.

Yeah. And post that, obviously people's attitudes to working from home and so on changed and people started to come back to work. Other people decided this is something we want to continue with. And again, we didn't, we didn't see that plateau off, right? We saw that continue, which is the— a bit, I think, the idea that technology as an enabler can really help businesses be more adaptive to change, be more agile, be more effective. And then we've had, we've had obviously AI suddenly disrupt this marketplace in exactly the same way. Again, you ask the question, do we want to be disrupted or disruptor? We want to embrace AI, but it has to be practical and realistic and how it can be applied in the real world. And so we've been at the forefront of using AI in a very practical way in our world of customer experience.

Very good. Thank you. And Ben, I've got a question for you. If you know, you've got a lot of experience. I think you used to be an electrician at some point as well, by the way.

I did.

Yeah, I used to be a sparky.

You're wired and fired now. Yeah. So the question is, and I'll ask you, Martin, the same question next, but if you could look back on your career thinking about the issue of scaling when the world keeps changing. And you could do offer one bit of advice. Well, I know it's hard to do this, but what would it be?

I'm going to tell you a story because I really like the question because I've got— I once heard a quote that was like, innovation is either coming up with new things or applying old things to new scenarios. I was an industrial electrician 10 years ago, I think it was, and I was working on a big transformation of one of the tunnels running out of London. It was all being rewired, all new fans and everything. Put in their new lighting. Massive project. There was one of the things that we were doing was pulling in ginormous cables to provide the power to this tunnel. And there was a fella, one of the electricians I was working with on that job, was employed to terminate those cables. He nicked one of the cables, right? He sliced the insulation of one of the cables, and that is dangerous. Now, this guy had a choice to make. He could have covered it up, he could have taped it up and just hoped nothing bad happened, potentially put public at risk, or he could go and fess up to it. He fessed up to it to his line manager and they sacked him. Oh wow. Now, if you think another mistake was owned up to on that job after that message was sent, you are absolutely fundamentally wrong. So what I'm talking about here and how it applies to this conversation is, is we need to build a culture. If you want to change, if you want to foster innovation, you need to build a culture where people are safe to try things and fail, because if they don't feel safe, they will not stretch themselves and they will not innovate.

Thank you for that. And the same question to you, Martin. Then we're going to go to your musical taste.

Yeah, I guess it might be a similar, a similar philosophy to it, but I think for me it's just to back yourself and back your gut feel. Just because everyone else in the marketplace is doing something different doesn't mean that you're wrong, even if they're coming up with some very compelling arguments. I remember the story around the time when Apple came out with the iPhone and there were two big businesses that were kind of running that market at the time, Nokia and Research in Motion, which was the BlackBerry. They renamed themselves BlackBerry subsequently. Both did a load of research, right? So RIM did a load of research on would you be happy typing emails if you didn't have a keyboard? And they got compelling evidence back that no, the iPhone's never going to take off. And Nokia then asked the question, would you spend £500 for a new phone? And again, they— evidence came back, their research back, but they were right that the, the iPhone was never going to take off. But they were asking questions, there were loaded questions. If the question was, would you like to be able to do something entirely different on your, on your phone, effectively have a mobile computer with you to play Angry Birds, the answer was going to be yes. So even if the world around you is saying something different, I think back yourself, and that comes back to the fail fast thing. If, if you are going to back yourself and take a gamble, then fail as fast as you can.

Two things just to add a little bit of context to Martin, Martin's view, because I agree with it. The first is it's incumbent on us as leaders to set those parameters so that fail fast isn't detrimental, because you could fail fast at something that costs you an enormous amount of money and that would be problematic. So there is a bit of a safety element that needs to be applied to that. And the second thing is understanding the feedback loops that enable you to determine whether you are right to back yourself quickly. Because, because if Apple, Apple subsequently went on and never sold a phone, we wouldn't be telling this story, would we?

Great, thank you so much, guys. So, but I'm just going to hand you on to George. But before I do, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It was really insightful. There wasn't much blood, although when George was grilling you, it might have, you Yeah, it was a bit more telling, but thanks for coming on, and I'll hand you on to George, and we'll see you again soon.

Thank you, Gary.

Great stuff. Thanks, Gary, and thanks to you both. It's landed to me to ask you about your musical tastes, and I think we've put you on the spot a bit here, so if you do need time to deliberate or even have an argument, then feel free. But yes, we do have the Company Doctor playlist, and we do ask guests to contribute a song or songs that have meant a lot to them over the years, and that can be something that's motivated you or helped you through a challenge. So yeah, putting you on the spot, what would you both like to add to the company doctor playlist? Maybe starting with you, Ben.

This is easy for me. No deliberation required. I have two, if I may. Absolutely. So if you're talking about karaoke classics, I've recently taken Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus on tour. Excellent. So that's got to go on there. And then my motivational one is My Way by Frank Sinatra. Because if you talk about backing yourself, that song spells it out for you.

Yeah, very good. And in terms of the Teenage Dirtbag song, is that your version of Teenage Dirtbag, or is that the Weezer version? And if so, can you record yourself singing it at some point soon?

I have got multiple recordings of me singing it, and I would gladly, gladly add one of those to the playlist.

Great.

Well, that is a first for us, I think, a self-recorded submission to the playlist. So thank you very much.

I'll send it to I can send it to Gary now if you like.

Excellent. Maybe we can use it to sort of play out the podcast. Martin, have you got anything that you'd like to add?

Well, shockingly, actually, Teenage Dirtbag has been an anthem of mine for a long time, and I have indoctrinated my children to that on our long journeys to Cornwall in the car many a time. So for our household, Teenage Dirtbag is definitely one of those. So I would obviously— it's kind of handy actually, because given you've got two people now on the call.

Yeah.

We can coalesce on a single song. Great. So that for me would be the one that comes to mind.

Well, that's in with double whammy. That's in. So thank you for that. That's fantastic. Excellent song choices. Thanks so much, guys. We really appreciate you joining us on this episode of The Company Doctor. Thanks again to you all for listening and we'll see you next time.

Thank you very much for having us.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening, and a massive thanks to Martin and Ben for joining us and giving us their insights on what can be quite a challenging topic. If you want to find out more about Connect and what it can offer, visit weconnect.tech. And if you want more Company Doctor action in your life, you can find it in spades over at thecompanydoctor.com. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.