Unlocking Business Potential Through Creativity

Hey everybody, Roland Frasier here. Another question we get is, what does creativity look like in different aspects of a business? So I think here we would just break down the different areas of business and say, okay, well, well, and we'll talk maybe about applications. So let's start with finance. That can be good or bad. I'm not sure how creative you want your finance people to be in terms of reporting on the accounting statements, because I know Enron and several other companies tried doing that and it turned out that it got Got them into a lot of trouble and a lot of people lost a lot of money and some people even went to jail. So you want to be careful in business how creative you're getting. I will say that anytime that you are dealing with legal or compliance issues, creativity to circumvent those issues and particularly the public purpose behind those is a bad thing and it's going to cause you some challenges, even though you might be right. They own jails and they own armies and, you know, it's just not good to mess with people that have those things. So let's go to creative finance used in a good way. One of the ways that you could do it is how we buy businesses. So I love to acquire businesses. I've been doing it for years and years and years now. And I'm, I've gotten to the point where I don't really like to have to come out of pocket with any cash to do that. Now that's different from a no money down situation where you're, you're saying, well, I'm going to do this and I'm not going to give any money. It's just that there's a lot of places, about 219 of them that I've identified, that you can find money that's not yours. It's not your money, it's not your credit, and you can still use that to have companies literally pay for themselves. So, so I think when you're thinking about different aspects of business and finance in particular, how can I use creative thinking to pay for or fund acquisitions of companies or assets that I want or need in my business? Without having to have the funds. That's pretty fun to do and exciting. And real estate is like that too. The first time that somebody signs their house over to you, their title, and you gave them no money for that, it's shocking. It's— you're in kind of a disbelief as it's happening at the closing table, but yet it's happening. And now you own the house and you didn't pay any cash for it. It was a no money out of pocket deal. And so doing that in real estate and, and in business has helped me see that there are really a lot of ways that I can go about doing this. And so one of the exercises that I find to be very helpful is a version of the 5 Whys, but it's the 5 Buys. It's like, if I'm going to buy something, what's the first way I would do it? Well, I do it with cash. Okay. What's the second way I do it? Well, maybe seller financing or maybe a bank loan. Okay. What's the third way I could do it if I couldn't get the bank loan and I didn't have the cash? Well, maybe I'd see if the seller would be willing to finance that. Maybe the seller says no. So what's a fourth way that I might do that? Well, there might be some assets that are hidden in the business. That I could use to acquire? And I just go through 5 times saying, well, what if that didn't work? I mean, what if I couldn't do that? What if I didn't have access to that? And it kind of makes the easy things that are sometimes the most expensive or the hardest to do, or the, you know, the most time-consuming, it rules those things out and makes you dig deeper into your subconscious to come up with solutions that are different than the norm. And that creates creativity. It creates solutions that you wouldn't have thought of. So anytime you're thinking about the finance side, I would say, well, what if I couldn't do it that way? How would I do it? What if I couldn't do it that way? And I think then we go over to marketing and we say, okay, I need— and we actually call it creative, like the ad campaigns that you see that have pictures and texts or videos, that's called creative in the industry. So how do I get creative with my creative? Well, one of the best ways is to apply a scientific creativity hybrid process where you first say, what's the data? What's the data on how these different things are performing? Because there's a lot of data that's out there. So you might look at, at 5 different ads and you might see data on how each of those ads performed and then say, well, what if I took the best elements from each of those things and applied them in different combinations or Let's say there's 5 elements to each ad. There's an image, there's a headline, there's an offer or a call to action. There's some text and there's a website. There's 5 things. Well, what, what we might do is test each of those elements against other ads that have different elements and then find out the best of each of those 5 elements and then combine them And so that would be a systematized creativity that would then perhaps lead us to think about, okay, well, now we know the 5 things that work the best in this particular ad. What are other things that could potentially work? And then we just go into a brainstorming session and, and figure out how can we, how can we come up with 100 subject lines, 100 headlines, 100 different images that we might use. And, and then you're going to test all of those. And that's an application of creativity using data science and performance and then testing and validation. And that's super, super powerful, right? Super powerful. That's what we do in our businesses when we're trying to figure out what is going to get the best response. If you get to human resources or people in the business and say, how can I be creative there? I think there the key is that you're, you're going for diversity, equity, and inclusion. You're, you're saying, how can I get people who have diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, experiences, people from different genders, people from different locations in the world, and bring those people together to get all of their perspectives? Because they're going to be people that think completely different from us. If we surround ourselves with people who think like us, we will get groupthink and we'll stagnate. But somebody from India and somebody from Africa and somebody from South America and somebody from Europe and somebody from the United States, and each of them is a different ethnicity and each is a different gender or gender identity. And you bring those people in and they've each got different experiences and they come from different social strata, different financial backgrounds. They're going to bring a huge variety, a huge array of different thoughts to the business, which is going to result in a tremendous influx of creativity because each of them will be playing off of each other and you'll end up with so many more options. So I think in the human side, that's really important. Then you get to operations. Operations creativity is going to be, okay, well, what are all the different ways that we could do this? What are the ways that we do this now? And what are the places that waste exists? And what are the constraints that we have that we face right now? And if we had to overcome and approach a mechanism for getting past these constraints or reducing them or just blowing them away, what would that be? And what would it look like if that constraint didn't exist? And, and what if we weren't constrained by dollars in solving the solution? And then thinking that way brings to that manufacturing or operational or service process, a whole host of new ideas on how you could do those things. And that creates huge benefit. Sales, similar, right? What about testing all different types of approaches to selling? What about testing all of our different offers? What about having different people who are acting as sales? What about direct sales versus indirect sales, outbound versus inbound? What about using people who set appointments and then follow up with sales? What about sales via chatbots? What about sales via email? What about sales via Zoom? You know, all of the different things that we could do to create a different sales experience for our customer in a way that would be continually monitoring and measuring that by seeing what is the customer satisfaction and engagement level at each point. What's the customer happiness that we're delivering? What is the employee happiness that we're delivering that we're monitoring using employee net promoter score and things like that? That is a really great way to apply creativity to operations. To sales, to marketing, to finance, and any other aspect of the business. So I think just being aware of all of these things can have a tremendous positive impact on your company. The last question that I want to talk about with respect to creativity is how does creativity help businesses grow? So businesses are going to ultimately stagnate with no creativity. And I'll go through a few different things. The first is the world is always changing around us. People are always evolving or devolving, but there's change no matter what. And there are changes in culture. There's changes in economy, economic circumstances as economies rise and fall. There's changes in attitudes as things become more restrictive and more open. Throughout history, we as humans are constantly changing. So if you're in business, you are either selling a product or a service. And if you're selling a product or service and you're ignorant of the changes that are going on around you, then you're not going to be able to sell more. And you're ultimately going to have more competitors that come in and take your business away. So not to confuse creativity with change, but Creativity is necessary. Innovativeness is necessary because there is always change. And so we have to be aware of the nature of the change that is going on and then apply creativity to find solutions that will better serve our changing customer demographic and psychographic, right? The people that are, are purchasing our products or services, we're going to have to get creative and say, we need to adapt And we need to figure out what is the best type of adaptation for our product or service to serve this changed demand, this changed market, to create more demand, right? The definition of creativity, create, create demand. So if you're thinking about like, how does this help business? It helps businesses to survive and thrive. It helps businesses to serve their customers. Better. It helps the employees of the business to be happier because they feel like they're contributing positively to a good customer experience. So creativity is going to be very important in, in just staying alive as a business. Beyond that, creativity in, in terms of innovation is also going to be important because we're going to want to think about what are the things that might make our customers' lives better. That we currently are not doing. And Steve Jobs did such a great job of this. And I think the iPad is a wonderful example because I remember when the iPad, which I'm reading notes from one as I'm talking to you, when the iPad first came out, I was like, what the heck would I ever want one of those for? I've got my phone and I've got my laptop. This is kind of like neither. It's like a bad spork and sporks get a terrible name, by the way. They, sporks can absolutely be good in certain situations. When one needs a spoon and a fork, a spork serves. And it turns out that that the iPad has become one of the most valuable tools that I use as an electrical device, but none of us ever knew that we needed it until we had it. And so the creativity of a visionary like Steve Jobs saying, I know that this doesn't exist and I know there's no current demand for it, but I'll bet you if I made it happen, that people would buy it. And obviously with multiple hits from the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad, to the iWatch and so on and so forth, the Apple Watch, so on and so forth. He's been right, created the most valuable company in the world. And that's a pretty big benefit that you can see from creativity, right? So I think creativity also keeps the, the change of creativity keeps everyone in the company challenged. And challenge creates engagement. Also, creativity creates change, which is difficult, and difficult times make people better. Difficult times make us find the, the parts of ourselves that we might not find if everything was always able to go on as it was. And it also just keeps life interesting. Generally, I think it increases your NPS, your ENPS. Your shareholder value, your happiness level, your customer satisfaction, and your impact on the world. All of those are pretty positive things. And so those are the things that I think creativity adds to and helps with in business.

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