Adaption - survival of the fittest

Adaptation - survival of the fittest

There are very few good examples of businesses that have managed to adapt sufficiently as a means of survival. Normally, there are just bad examples. Currently (in year 2010) the newspaper companies in the United Kingdom are facing a sort of financial extinction that no-one seems to have an answer to.

The only clever player in this realm seems to be Rupert Murdoch, who diversified into satellite television (Sky) before the newspapers came under pressure from the web. However, some famous names in newspaper publishing, the Evening Standard and the Independent, have been sold for token gesture figures of a pound.

The real problem is one of lack of adaptation; the newspapers behaved in much the same way on the web as they had in print; except that people got the news from the web for free! I can sympathise entirely, thinking of an analogy; how could Marks & Spencer survive if there was a store down the road giving away its stock for free.....they couldn't.....but this is what the newspaper industry is up against.

When was the last time you saw someone under the age of 30 reading a quality newspaper? A recent podcast on the BBC's excellent business program with Evan Davis suggested that there is a generational divide where generation Y (born between 1980 and 1995). The notion is that this Generation Y has been steeped in the idea that the majority of media that can be downloaded from the internet is free, unless there are impassable barriers to useage.

I would tend to agree that I find it difficult to imagine why generation Y would bother paying for news. Adaptation appears to be one of the most difficult things to achieve in business. The majority of companies will “stick to their knitting” i.e. not to take the risk of adaptation, however, this is a luxury afforded only to those with a consistently selling product. Again, this is an argument (going back to the notion of “ignoring the curve” of setting up a business that is not going through a particular growth boom.

Incremental Change and Adaptation

Some of the most successful businesses have been following the path of incremental, small step change. This has the added benefit of remaining in the consciousness of the consumer as a consistent and reliable product. The Volkswagen Golf, first brought out in 1974 has gone through 6 adaptations yet somehow is still reminiscent of the original. I would be very surprised if in twenty years time there isn't a VW Golf available; it may be running on hydrogen and or lithium electric batteries, but I bet it will be still be called by that name and that it will somehow look like a VW Golf.

Change is Hard

There was a superb television programme in the UK in 2009 called “All Over The Shop”. The gentleman presenting the program is Geoff Burch, who has been writing books for many years on selling, persuasion and general business advice. I was very lucky to have heard Geoff's advice at a very early stage in my business life, twenty years ago. I was nineteen and about to set up my first enterprise.

Geoff was doing a sales coaching course for the Business Link group in Gloucestershire. I was extremely impressed with his anarchic attitude and irreverent style and of course the extreme logicality of his advice. If you can get to see anything of the BBC series, I would recommend doing so. Also, when I last visited his website (just google the name) there was a free ebook to download, so that is obviously well worth doing.

However, the point that I'm going to make is that even with the benefit of this advice (in the tv program), many of the shopkeepers completely failed to make changes to their business. People become ensconced in a way of doing things, making change painfully hard - even in the face of clear and present economic dangers (falling sales etc).

When Do You Need To Make Changes

For a new business, this is a very tricky dilemma. If things aren't going as well as you expected, what do you do.....perhaps it is your expectations that were unrealistic. Maybe your business hasn't had time yet to gain traction in the marketplace. On the whole, I've noticed these things about businesses:-

If you are retail based - then you ought to be worried if your business is not profitable quite quickly (within a few months of opening).
If your business is web-based then you will almost certainly need to look towards a couple of years before it becomes profitable.

I have had the misfortune over the years of seeing cafes and restaurants (retail based businesses) go out of business whilst the owners staunchly believed that it would take time for “people to get to know we're here”. The sad fact is that people knew they were there and had already rejected the offering. There will always of course be exceptions to this, but on the whole I'd say the rule is consistent.

The opposite can be true with web-based businesses. To begin with, people really do not know you exist. Not unless you've put money into advertising. A lot of web businesses will hope to bring in trade from search-engines. This does work, but it tends to take a while for a website to become high-ranking in the search engines (I use the plural “engines” but in the UK, the firm Google has over 90% market share of searches).

Repeat Business is the Key to Business Success

Once you've found a customer, the task is to keep them as a customer and also for them to become a sort-of human megaphone for your business. People will tell others about the great experience they had in such-and-such restaurant. Nowadays with the social-media phenomenon that has struck the world, the “word of mouth” has become an extremely powerful means to dissemenate the joyous news of your fabulous establishment.

The Exceptions to the Rule of Repeat Custom

This may only apply to certain types of business, such as pubs and cafes. It may seem that the customers who keep returning to a particular pub is a good thing for that pub. It may not be. If those customers are the type that annoy other customers, you will probably be better off somehow dissuading them to come to your establishment.