Technology Isn't The Issue- You Are!

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[Music]
hi and welcome to the ecommerce podcast with me your host matt edmondson all of this week's notes links and transcript
can be found at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash
now technology is often blamed for all of society's problems it's certainly
one of the things that as e-commerce entrepreneurs we like to blame for our business but what if the problem wasn't
technology what if the problem is us
great question uh that is uh the topic of today's conversation that i'm going
to talk to ian finch about so don't go anywhere hey there are you a business owner
here at oregon digital we know firsthand that running an ecommerce business can be really hard work
as the online space gets more competitive it is becoming even more challenging to stay ahead of the curve
we totally get it so we want to help you succeed by offering a wide range of services from fulfillment marketing
customer service and even coaching and consulting just so that you can do what matters most save yourself the time and
the money and let us handle the day-to-day tasks this way you can run your business without having to worry
about the boring stuff so what do you say are we a good fit for each other come check us out at oreodigital.com and
let us know what you think
thanks for joining us on the ecommerce podcast it is great that you are here now whether you are just starting out or
if like me you've been around the world of e-commerce for a while our goal on this show is simple it's to help you
grow your e-commerce and digital business and to do that we have what can only be described as a very simple
formula part of that formula bring great show sponsors that can help you another part
of that formula is to bring fantastic guests who are experts in their fields
with their own insights with their own stories with the principles that they've learned and that we can use to adapt and
grow and build our own online businesses and today we get to talk to uh a chap
who is actually a very good friend of mine mr ian finch now let me tell you about ian he is a ceo ceo of mando group
he is a husband he is a dad he is also the chair of the british interactive media association for the northwest of
england which is a national network that drives digital transformation in large-scale organizations
outside of work he is well he's just an around top bloke he's an advocate at the moment of mental
health he is well how can i put this he's an exceptional guitarist he actually played
uh the guitar at the wedding of me and sharon we've been married
a good old while let me tell you so that was i was over years ago when a young lad
called ian finch picked up an electric guitar and whistled some amazing tunes on it so ian is a lovely black known him
known as family for years you wanna gonna listen to what ian's got to say as we dig into this whole topic
of technology not being the issue maybe the issue is with us maybe it's our mindset and uh you know
listen in because he's going to talk to maybe how we can take control of technology rather than letting technology take control of us
interesting so here we go without further ado here's my conversation with ian
so mr ian finch we finally get a chance to record uh this podcast great that
you're here and i i have to start off by apologizing it's taken us what eight seasons to get you on the
show so i realize it's not an opinion or maybe it is but it's good to be here good to see you
yeah i know it's great that we're doing this actually uh he's an absolute legend as i would have said no doubt in the intro ian and i have known each other
for a very very very uh very long time and i think you and i used to hang
around with noah didn't we in back in the day so yeah yeah it was
it's been a while animals and i think it's what years i think nonetheless
yeah it's been a long time yeah yeah yeah it's been a long time so yeah
i i what i should have done when we started the podcast is just going around to everybody that i knew in the industry
and said listen can be on the podcast it would in hindsight it would have been a lot easier than than the route that i did take when
we watched the podcast what was i thinking um
so yeah no it's great you're here and obviously i i've been a follower of yours
um and i've i've seen you know your journey in the tech space the digital space i've seen mando's journey in that
i don't know some of the stories and i know some of the clients that you've worked with and i know you guys are very clever people
um how did you how did you get started in the whole tech digital thing was it by design or
was it by accident um it was by design in the sense of i was
doing a computer studies degree uh in liverpool um it was by accident in the sense that
during the course of my degree we was coming up to our sandwich here and i was
offered a job by ibm and i turned it down uh based on a gut
feeling that it wasn't right which is quite difficult to explain to your
the teaching staff of university but a kid in the s has turned down ibm on the basis of a gut feel
when there's got people to place so i wasn't i wasn't in
the good books if you like um i had a couple of friends uh we're in a band actually uh there was there's
fireworks and two of them what the manager and the drummer um matt was was
was buying modems for quid some of them installed for
and he was making quid and jeff who was the drummer was was doing in store and they
were like there's something bear in mind this is and
getting on yeah it was like this mind-blowing thing and so they were getting people online with a one-page
website an email address um i thought it could be something in this but they were about to go into their last year uni
um and couldn't perceive finish their degree off and doing the business as well and
they said well look you've you've messed your life up
why don't you run the office i'm not running the business definitely didn't work and we'll have a go and i was like
well right yeah yeah let's let's do that and it felt exciting and um
and so you know we wrote a business plan a weekend um my particular version of that business
plan was was vinci needs to last weeks because because that will be my placement year
but it was good enough to get a small grant we got pounds from a graduate trainee resource center
uh between a loan from one of our mums and a couple of student loans we were we were good to go i think we had about
three thousand eight yeah i think to be precise uh my uni uh let me do it as my placement year
which was actually quite yeah far thinking of them actually um it was back
then yeah and um so we opened for trading
and just started in this little office with a computer a floppy disk
um no network floppy disks you know we we copied the files on and passed it and the other one went into that computer
we're doing sales calls by going for yellow pages starting in aaa accounting join our website you know and work your
way through but we couldn't get on the internet and make a phone call at the same time
it's mad isn't it you know yeah portfolio for the first nine months
fitted on one floppy disk which is about the same size storage wise now as a badly optimized
home page which is just yeah crazy it's just crazy isn't it and i i was
trying i was having a conversation with my uh now some year old son uh who is
doing theoretical physics at uni because you know why would you not right yeah and um
and i was talking to him about this you know how modems uh we were all excited back in the sort of
late s when we got you know it went from a k modem to a s do you
remember the came and we were so excited but we're always like kind of you know we're online but get off quick
because there's a phone bill coming in yeah and you know it was pretty google when we
set up so you know you you're submitting your website you want richardson the
search engine to yahoo and some guy emails you back direct because yahoo were receiving them
manually and deciding where they should place them it's just it's unbelievable to think where it
started now it's crazy yeah yeah but it was exciting times wasn't it i mean it's
super exciting times and um i mean this is in the late s isn't it and and
sort of fast forward years as they say here we are
at web and you don't even you don't even have to use dial-up anymore
i found a few other things maybe but you know that's the main thing yeah or floppy disks think okay what was the
capacity of a floppy disk was it about meg or something like precise questions
that's what you needed to know to get your computer science degree uh back in the day
so i mean you know here we are years later you're still i mean that company
was called webshed that you started um that little office on london road it wasn't right right good memory yeah
fast forward years webshed became um mando
i don't even know when it was a while ago i think yep
yeah so you renamed tomando um obviously you're not in a little office on london road anymore you've got very plush uh
very expensive uh officers now um
but you're still fundamentally doing digital aren't you you're still um
the business plan i'm curious to know what that i would love to read that business plan from then to what it is
now um
yeah i was going to say i can't imagine that it wouldn't it's just like yeah we'll sell websites that's what we'll do
um do you know what it's funny to say that because in that business plan there was a swot analysis
strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats and this morning i was interviewed by
our iso auditors where i referenced ask what analysis
now business is business and and doing business online
um the extent of what you can do online and the breadth of it
but it's still it's still a channel shift even now and you're still trying to make it
ever more easy to use user-friendly satisfying as an experience giving
people time back that would and so those fundamentals of what you're trying to give users back and what that achieves
the organizations that you're working for hasn't changed that much
no now there's is if i have this conversation on a fairly regular basis there are some things which changed
almost daily it seems you know and there are some of the things you do some of the tactics which change but the principles which drive those
things are almost timeless absolutely like good customer experience well you you
know woolworth's figured this out you know selfridges if you watch the tv showed selfridges he figured that out years ago
when he started the selfridges store right it's all about the customer experience and so you know the
principles are timeless and but it's just how we outwork them in the in the modern world
and now the title of this podcast uh which we came up with when we're chatting about it is is technology isn't
the issue yes it is and um and why
how did how did you come up with that why why was that why is that a thing to you and does it tie into some of these
timeless principles is what i'm wondering so let's just dive straight into that what do you mean technology
isn't the issue you are so we've discussed already that in the s
you had to turn your phone off to connect to the internet or you had to send your new website to yahoo to be
judged by the eminent put in so you know there was a there was a fair few obstacles to come over um you shoot
forward to the to the present day and i would say probably last five years maybe not much more than that but we're at a point
where technology has evolved so fast whether it's processing power and chips
or or you know cloud computing uh the rise of social or or blockchain or
all the things that happened where we as people aren't waiting for
in most cases you know majority of cases not all we're not
waiting now for technology if only i could do this if someone would just invent you know
the wheel or the latest create a supercomputer we're at a point in history i think it's
unprecedented where technologies evolve so fast that computers can code the human genome
that that we can map the whole of the earth and zoom in um
technology is not the issue we when you know back in the day people you
go can you make my search like google like well if you give me a billion pounds and you know several years that's
why but whereas now yeah so you're an artificial intelligence it's
a microsoft is your service it gives you intelligent search on your website you can connect to services and so you can
pretty much within reason do anything you want from a digital experience perspective
and at a fraction of the price that you used to do it or in fact
people just wouldn't spend that money but just do without whereas now it's actually in tangible reach and so it's a
question of budgets within the year or is it a program and a question of value that you can derive um
but now the technology is just so advanced and you can do so much if you literally just switched it all on
i went i want one oh it's one of those one of those and i just want to re do my entire supply chain i want to digitize
my business um and and automate everything you could
with right people at the right time do it um but it would be so overwhelming
to your organization but we almost have to meter and pace what we do
relative to the resources available obviously but maybe not so obviously the
level of change by which a human can actually cope with at any point in time and so
some options some organizations are better than others obviously it is um you know but if facebook is doing
several releases per day microsoft is your
i think the last count i had which is a couple years old now is like releases a year
for that platform i mean that's the size and scale that would blow the majority of companies mind certainly ones that
are not tech businesses to start off with and so if that's a pace of change that
continually optimizes the customer experience um then we know that as a direction of
travel most organizations never going to get there but that's the road we walk and we walk a
pace that suits our organization um and so that that's what i mean
by that that you can have whatever you want um but do you really want what you think
you want yeah because are you ready for it do you know you can't even handle it i forget what film that's on you have to
tell me but uh oh you can't handle the truth you can't handle the truth and um
and i think you have an enlightened organization that knows what pace they can adopt
change at and you can talk about a partnership but where you can set a velocity and you can work in an agile
manner um you know and prioritize and walk that journey together
that's a really interesting so do you think um then that actually if you
i mean i i remember that i don't know if you remember this my very first website you guys wrote webshed
uh wrote it um and i i'm just thinking sort of through
the year when when i had my website it was like no this is what you can have
it'll do this uh and okay um sorry whereas
[Laughter]
um do you think there's almost now too much choice so if i was for example starting
again today compared to where it was you know in the late s where you had very limited choice
now the choice almost seems overwhelming doesn't it do you think there's there's do you think then it and i guess it
doesn't matter where you are whether your enterprise clients or whether you're just starting out on the on the road there's too much choice right um i
i say this to the guys that were particularly in um sometimes in sales environments or new
startups meetings like we've got very highly trained professionals that have learned the full
breadth and and they they're willing to deliver on requirements
um and i often say a lot of people in fact the majority of
people they want a ham sandwich and they want to go to the shelf and pull off a ham sandwich and actually if
you go well what type of bread you want and what and did you want butter or olive oil do you want black pepper or
normal pepper what what kind of cheese do you want and then you end up with minutes where the clients go i want this
type of lettuce and i want this kind of dressing and it's exhausting now you know
i'd love a good phil potts bespoke sandwich i do but it's like maybe every few
the brands are available yeah yeah bespoke sandwich most of the time i just want a ham and cheese and
and i think most clients want you to have done the thinking for them you know and so that's
why i think certainly what we do sectoral knowledge a certain range technologies and a
particular offering is is quite important and you see definite trends where
the jack of all trades agency it just isn't around as much or
or the only way you get that is is the staff global scale um so i think
that works on agency side of the client side there's definitely there is this anxiety about what if i commit to the
wrong technology um you know i i want i want to go to
magento i should have done spotify shopify not spotify um or whatever the
amount of technology might be um and i think the industry is trying to address that
uh and so there there is a move uh the acronym is is mac um so
microservices api is composable and headless is what the techie terms are but basically
if i was to try and summarize it here it's a much more atomized approach
to development so you can you can put together a discrete piece of
functionality to serve a purpose knowing that it will interrupt and be compatible with another
discrete piece of functionality whereas for a long time there's been this thing called a monolith where i have to buy an
entire system and yeah i'll take that a reference move
you know sap would be the classic you know i've just bought it for seven million yeah now i need to spend seven
million on it's gonna take me five years and i hope it works um you know sorry sap that's probably old school example
but um don't see me it's just just an observation
and so i think the industry is realizing that but even then when you actually look even at that mac
um acronym and all the technologies that
could be comprised of that there's still an anxiety that kicks in um front end technology is alone
we use a a a language with primarily called vue.js
loads of the industry use react uh and we have reasons we do that people use react for a reason um but you get
almost kind of like this clan uh tribal
devotion to things and oh do we really want to learn that any technology because it just be for that client well
we've got a whole system as a three-year plan i'm sure we could do it and we have these kind of debates internally for clients then well what if you want to
bring in-house what kind of what's going to be easy to hire and so it just goes on and on and on in every
direction and so a lot of what we end up doing much like yourself is is going
here's through consultancy you go here's some shortcuts we know work and here's an area where we're always genuinely
an important staking around where we do need to sit down and re-discuss this and do the leg work and do research to work
out what's next but that's not shouldn't have to be every day if you work on the right people yeah
that's really interesting that's really interesting we are going to get into this a whole lot more so don't go anywhere as we just
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[Music] hey there are you a business owner here
at oregon digital we know firsthand that running an ecommerce business can be really hard work
as the online space gets more competitive it is becoming even more challenging to stay ahead of the curve
we totally get it so we want to help you succeed by offering a wide range of services from fulfillment marketing
customer service and even coaching and consulting just so that you can do what matters most save yourself the time and
the money and let us handle the day-to-day tasks this way you can run your business without having to worry
about the boring stuff so what do you say are we a good fit for each other come check us out at oreodigital.com and
let us know what you think
i'm back with the legend which is finch uh mr ian finch
um before we were talking uh uh in about how there's too much choice uh in in a
lot of respects for the consumer and this is true even i mean you you you know went into the whole mac thing which was just fascinating um
and even if you're just starting out actually there's a lot of choice which platform do you do you start with right
and i need to get the right one which template do i use and all that sort of stuff and and so on and so forth
what what ways have you found um work to help narrow that choice how do
you make the right decision i mean you do a lot of consulting with clients in effect um a lot of enterprise clients
and what are sort of some of the things that you need to think about so i think the
the first thing i always suggest is do not see this as a
one-off whatever it is if you if you're automating something if
you're investing digitally if you're doing a channel shift online if you're selling products online
whatever you use today it will need to evolve and that has to be okay so it's a
plan for the ongoing work as much as the project itself um
i think secondly i think particularly in in the techie arena um there's this
real fear of um ripping it up and starting again
and and it's understandable but sometimes it's okay
so like for example it's a couple of months ago someone was talking about oh i've got this idea uh i
wanna i wanna sell cushions i think it was whatever it was i was like well there's etsy why don't
you start there no i want my own website why you don't know it's going to work yeah
in fact just set up an instagram page you know there are plenty of people that are making a fortune out selling trainers just on instagram pages start
where you're at um start with your product and your
customer service and and your words but people get a little bit obsessed about
brands and and the website and forget it's it's still communication it's still
service it's still a product and so um now obviously that's a really micro end of things and on the enterprise
level then it's i'm you know most large organizations
notice you there isn't a light switch where you can just turn off the old systems and put the new systems on and
so priorities will be driven by maybe legacy systems that are running
out of support for example or whereas a huge license fee about to kick in um and we want to get rid of that one
and put something else in new before we have to pay for another three years or whatever so there's burning platforms
then there's the the aspects of well i'm certainly regulated industries
then what what the regulator is saying so within the the water sector um
in terms of your customer experience the brand empathy and the brand awareness and the brand
ended up having a scorecard of what your brand stands for what one particular
cycle um and and so there's a lot of head scratching about that okay right well
what does that mean for social and and actually if someone contacts us on a
social channel that probably ends up needing to be in our service level agreement of how quickly we respond to a customer or do
we want to do social how do we handle that and and so you then got the external facts like regulations and so
on um so we need to kind of categorize these kind of big areas
um and so and i'm sure you recognize to your customers as well that you know what are
the big rocks what are pebbles what are the sand and let's get the big stuff there and then start chunking it down into more
manageable chunks and that which we don't need to worry about now we'll move back and so in simple terms
i always kind of draw up a matrix really and like you know what he's done are you looking at me this way is this left for you is that
right for you or is it everywhere else anyway it doesn't matter i have no idea which way it turns out
future uh and then like a park yeah and and then down this axis like what is it we want
to achieve whatever goal what are the things that need to happen to achieve that goal
what are the dependencies for those things to happen time resource budget other tech and what what's our training comms and
bringing everyone along with us going to be and so and the things you want to do end up
being well we can do this goal now if we have these dependencies in place we communicate this way but oh
actually there's a show stopper here so we can't possibly achieve that goal until more time in the future and so very quickly
you can get a rough swim lane diagram of priorities and then get everyone coalesced around that and
by everyone i typically mean marketing i.t as the two people that
most need to play well with each other and and then you know get get the c-suite on board and the sponsors and
and get the governance in place um because if someone that's not on board
who has a senior role of an organization i would say either an actual senior role
or the hidden power org chart that no one publishes but happens you know the political orchestra
we need to get the key people in place and understand and once yeah marketing understand that they can't have widget x
because it needs to put a crm system in place first then they unclench a little bit they'll say no not not for
a a a reason because they they hate marketing and they're resistant you know what i've got this to do is that okay
you know and um i mean i'm i'm stereotyping for the sake of articulating the point but
the getting everyone around that high level plan and then
you can t-shirt-size it then in terms of the people involved and the money involved and then that gives you another
dimension of going in light about what can we do now that
gets us to the future and what does that journey look like can you start planning it out
that's great that's great i like that phrase you used they unclench a little
um and the thing is i know exactly what you're talking about i've been in those
meetings i've had those conversations when the shoulders dropped down in there yeah
it's just really funny isn't it really funny one of the um
one of the things that you mentioned earlier that i just want to sort of circle back to if i can um [Music]
because i i i realize actually um it's a it's a term you use it's this term called agile now um i appreciate that a
lot of people know what agile is but i also appreciate a lot of people don't and it's one of these words which is
thrown around the
this is therapy yeah yeah this is a safe space um
so for those that may not understand what agile is um is it possible to give us a quick
overview bear in mind that whatever i say will end up with of dissent in
your audience immediately there's basically there's a website called agilemanifesto.org
and at its heart it's about delivering working software with every release and
so in my way of looking at the world it's
um in in old well still actually no it's it's not even old it's just horses of course but
in what we call a waterfall model which some people that have been around like might call prince or prince two
you kind of you speck it to hell so it's with an inch of its life respect in there and then you build the thing
for however long it takes and then you you test it and then you launch it and
in large-scale projects three or four years might have elapsed by the time the thing's gone live
technology's obsolete there wasn't even a business need anymore yeah and you know please see any one of
a number of government projects for the early naughties and so on um for horror stories around that whereas the idea of
agile is that you prioritize the most important things right now and in whatever length of time
you determine you go one week two weeks one month from now we will deliver working software
and that working software is against a prioritized list of things that need to
happen and then a team swarm around it with total concentration
regularly checking in with each other uh and it flips everything on its head so
call it every two weeks every two weeks some stuff that works go live that everyone's happy with and then two weeks
after that and the important bit is the two-week cycle not so much what you release
whereas in the old way it was all about that i haven't got that extra bullet point on page of a spec and that's a
problem um and it and it gets things to market quicker you can test you can release you
can iterate and the whole hence agile by name agile by nature and
so it's it's more about ceremonies and communication and people coming together
and going right we're gonna we're gonna tackle this rather than paperwork and specs and there's a massive place of
paperwork don't get me wrong but um but the emphasis has shifted to getting stuff done
rather than the paper paper trail for us we we actually preferred the word
agility because um agile is so associated with a particular methodology
which even then has is it kanban yeah or is it some other derivative
of agile um the scrum for example um
yeah whereas agility it kind of is a little bit of a broader brush and so we've done
plenty of organizations where or work where you get a tender or a request for proposal when you put a bid
together it's like we want to be agile um you know and then you realize it is entirely an aspiration
of the product owner who's done an agile course this is brilliant i want to do this and you know it's other people
in the organization like i'm no no no
they're clenching they're clenching um great butt workout not so great for like
letting the meeting happen and throw freely um so everyone's clenched and they're all a bit stressed and but
they're interested about agile oh that looks into oh that sounds great you're not drowning the paper i could just get
stuff done that's amazing um and then then it starts to change your
negotiations well we kind of want you know wagile i've read this blog and it combines waterfall
with agile and so we want wajo we're like okay or add you fall there's another one
eventually you just go okay let's call it fragile because it is because there's nothing that's gonna work here you know
and then we ended up compromising ourselves let's do phased waterfall
or whatever it might be and what happens is because there's a high degree of trust required
for agile because in in waterfall i have specked a car
and i want a i respect the car with four wheels and a windscreen and a windscreen wiper and i want a car at the end of it
because that's what i expect and that's what the budget's for in agile you you want to get from a to b
faster than you can on your feet and you think that some kind of mechanism with four
wheels and the gearbox would do that um but you don't know you're just going to start and it could be you end up with
a tricycle or a skateboard or a plane and that's okay because
what you wanted to do you're getting me to be faster but you put that in front of a legal
team or a procurement department uh like these contracts have been around
years and very little updates and and that's just one example of how you need to get a whole organization
coming around the same principle and is that why when i mentioned that
you said you might start crying is that why um you might stop crying it's not there's a problem with agile per se it's just
actually the biggest problem is the is the is the end user as a customer is the is the guy financing the whole thing
it's you it's not agile it's you uh and obviously we did that as a bit
clickbait for the uh podcast didn't we but the uh but it you know no one individual is ever a
problem someone that can see the future can have a career path from the front of them and training course and still just
refuses and sticks their heels in probably is them but for the most part it's people with day jobs or other
things you know going on and even now digital can still be the second
job for a lot of people as a you know rather than a dedicated role or
certainly working with with partners and so um there's there's a lot
to put around in term i mean i'm reading a book at a minute called agile conversations but but it starts with you've read
enough about agile i don't need to talk about that but here's what a real conversation where you get truth out and everyone look at it in a view
and don't hide stuff can change life you're like
i can think of loads of organizations said there's a benefit it's not just a scrum team but you know churches
organizations government teaching marriages everyone should read his books like how
to have a truthful conversation in a short amount of time you know and but the point is you need a high degree
of trust with your team um to achieve that you know without wanting to get into some cynic world um
you know there's loads more that goes on to make agile successful than than simply getting a kanbad kanban board up
on a wall and then having a go yeah yeah thank you for that
it's like i say for me agile is one of those things i i'm it's thrown around scrum kanban waterfall and you're like
what no it's like people just invent words just because they can uh threw it together
there you go yeah pretty much it podcast over right there
really about business plans yeah the first business plan is like pages and now it's a list
whether is it done or not on our internet
it's just like get rid of all the stuff you're doing to put a piece of homework in front of your
boss or your school to pass an exam and just get on with what and most most of life comes down to lists
and thinking things off yeah it does prioritizing it doesn't it and thinking outside the box
not being rigid about things and just going actually if i do it this way maybe actually this is a better way which i'm
coming back down to that whole agility thing and i i'm i'm going back to the title i mean
you mentioned it you know the technology isn't the issue you are and so we've talked about how there's a
lot of choice but i mean technology is there pretty much technology can do what we need so we now need to figure out how
we respond to that accordingly and we you know we've talked a little bit about you nice matrix and we've talked about you
know maybe agile's a way to go if you're in some in some respects and just start
and see where it goes i'm always i was always i was always the guy who said it's easier to turn a car when it's moving
and it's just that for me is agile right just get the car moving and turn it as you go
and and i think what else can we do if we're the issue
technology is and what else can we do to help ourselves do you think so i think having um
an attitude or or of a growth mindset of learning you know i
i can't bear the idea for myself and i think it's really sad when i see
it enacted in the workplace or whether people were you know whatever i'm i've learned
all i'm ever going to know about everything and that's it for me now you know i've plateaued this is it done deal
you know and but and of course no one's going to admit to that but
you see heels digging in everywhere you know and we've we've
always done it like this and why change and um people
typically humans typically fear change uh so when you meet someone
who just sees change as part of the creative process and is just just like let's keep going this is
amazing they stand out and you want to be around them and then it's exciting but also a bit dangerous and
so i think we i think there's a there's a getting used to
being comfortable with change um and then
it's it's a commitment to making other people feel safe as well um
so i always say this to whenever we're pitching for new business that if a client has a brief and they therefore
they have an aspiration what they want in the future um and so
yeah here's how you achieve that if it's the right thing to actually maybe challenge it as well um but but two
um as well as how you're going to get there and how much it's going to cast on the rest of it and but it's going to be a pleasant
experience as well it's going to be fine with doing this but you're not going to get sacked you're not going to have to
work loads more hours it's not going to go wrong here's why it's not going to go wrong and so much of
those early investment in a relationship is to make sure things aren't going to go wrong we
and we make people feel safe first so internally we we run what's called a pre-mortem so so here's how everything's
going to go wrong let's do a pre-more i mean and just plan those risks in any delivery you want more risks than issues
because a risk you can predict identify and mitigate an issue is already happening so so i think
we as humans can and i've done some training on this at mundo actually is what if it sounds
really dry doesn't it but it's life-giving i promise but what if you had a risks and issues document for your
life what well if you lived your life like a rain log where you just yeah well
that might hurt in six months so let's let's do that now and that can be attitudinal it can be in terms of your
own experiences um and so be aware of what's coming and
embrace it and and get excited about learning something new rather than
feeling threatened but then knowing that people are going to feel friend work really hard to make
everyone else feel safe too and so if you've got a gross mindset and you're making it safe for other people
to experiment and fail in their growth mindset then you can go on a journey
as a team and it has to be okay to fail i don't think it's okay to fail three
times two's borderline for me is fine twice it's like we got this now
third time are you even looking so you're talking you're talking about failing at the same thing yeah yeah no
you're absolutely right yeah that's an important really important point to me i think you can you can carry on failing
in degrees providing something new every time you know that's how you learn yeah but doing exactly the same thing
either by literally doing or just having an attitude or whatever it might be and expecting life to be different that is
insanity um you know was it einstein said that insanity is
doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results i'm pretty sure it was for me
i'm pretty sure it wasn't you um but no it's true isn't it and i find i like that you know have that sort of
growth mindset and change mindset because and again you touched on this earlier on
that the industry that we're in and if you're in the e-commerce business you're in the digital business right
digital changes inc in leaps and bounds for me i always
ever since the early naughties when we started out in e-commerce we just had this policy which says every two years
i'm going to have to redo my website now if you need to but accept it and put it in the plan then you can move on
yeah and and then you can cope with it because you can breathe again and it's just like okay this is going to last two
years awesome so i know i now need to in months time i now need to start thinking about the next project and and
you just you are perpetually redoing your website as you go through as an e-commerce entrepreneur so just you've
got to get used to that factor and every time you redo it there are new things you need to learn there are new uh
avenues there's a you know and you need to understand your customer experience more and more as you go down
that journey to deliver a better and better customer experience with the technology that's now available
and i think i think it's it's a really it's a really interesting mindset to
have alongside the mindset which says it's okay to fail um have you read the
book black box thinking no it's a really interesting book by i
think the guy that wrote it matthew i think i i may have done a missed justice
he wrote a book called black box thinking which is it contrasts
the healthcare industry in the states and the airline industry and how they both approach failure in
very different ways so in the healthcare industry you cannot fail and if you do fail you cover it up why because you're
gonna there's litigation involved right and the head and the hairline
in the airline industry
in the airline industry they approach failure in a very different way um which says
right what can we learn from this so we don't make the same mistake again it's a growth mindset and so now the
airline industry um you know airline aviation one of the safest ways to travel in the world
right because of the way that they and he so in his book he contrasts the the i mean i've been in effect sport
but i haven't it's a really interesting book full of great insights that's a bling the map
yeah just subscribe do a book every week um but i thought it was a fascinating insight into this
whole concept of just being okay to fail and being okay with failure but learning from that failure and not just repealing
the same mistake over and over i think as um you know as i always i still feel really awkward
calling myself an entrepreneur and that weird years in it's still like yeah you need to get over it
sex is strange but um anyway as entrepreneurs you you um
you just fail all the time you know i i i i packed cages and and cut chips in a
chippy then i set up an insect business and learned how to make a website on my first website uh and and you know
years later i've i've got quite a lot of confidence and skill i've developed over the years but it's all new so over christmas i was
going right i really really really do have to get my head around blockchain at nfts right now because
this is weirding me out [Laughter]
um but but it's a given and what what i
forget is when you lead an organization
and what you do doesn't work and sometimes people lose their jobs because
you hit a downturn or you go public sex is a really good idea
tory's getting oh [Laughter] didn't see that one coming yeah
you fail on a really grand scale and and there's no it there's no getting
around it you know and um and over time you get used to it
uh and and so when i say to people it's okay you fail you know it's all
right this will learn we'll dust ourselves down and move on they don't hear
me living years of continual failure and just calling it iteration yeah they
go okay i don't know what that means don't know how i feel about it are you actually
saying it's okay to fail because you are the boss and i've only known you with you know a day a year whatever years
but and there's a whole load of angst that i can't possibly know
because they've been an organ and organized they might have been in your pharmaceutical example um and we're like hell no i'm not
admitting anything you know and someone else or a legal firm would be a classic um
or someone else's company airline industry and go yeah okay you could do that it's fine so many people dying and playing crashes
after all you know and they they're used to it because the failures are massive and they have to get an open
and that cultural backdrop of what someone comes into you have no idea what they've
lived and so you have to spell that out and so we did some training around being
comfortable with failure and the response was overwhelming of just
what it meant for people to for us to commit to training how to
deal with failure for for us to call out examples of these cataclysmic things that we've done or it's okay to
experiment as well as successes um and yeah i think it's so important to
just continually reassure people and just make it okay
um and that kind of you know be accountable and so we don't fail at the
same thing you know too many times like i said i'm in two minds about two but three i've
got a problem with one's totally fine um yeah but that you can't underestimate the importance
of reiterating that to everyone and i think as entrepreneurs or business owners or
ecommerce um people we
you will get a product that doesn't work frontline is and you will spend money on it we'll lose money and and sometimes
dispatch won't work or someone let you down or whatever else but i think for me
amongst many many great successes that amazon had my experience with amazon was
yeah we'll sort that don't you worry about it and it came the next day or whatever it might be and that
yeah that ownership you know people are okay with mistakes
if you own them you know they're not okay if you don't earn it one of my favorite
quotes they ever had for me my possibly my favorite customer ever actually um on day one of a new contract he just
went in i just need i've got some really simple rules really and the main one is this
um i love bad news early i can't say i love bad news but i love
bad news early if it's going to be bad news give it to me i can't bear to the point of sense in
fact not even sense of human offense the point of violence the bad news late are we clear
abundantly you know you know to the point of violence i
can't bear bad news late but yeah i might use that line that sounds right he was absolutely consistent with that when
i went but we spotted a risk it's all worse what an issue here's what we're
going to do about it um if it's a few weeks out fine if
if it came out that we knew this earlier and didn't tell him even if we were
trying to solve it that was bad you know you did it once
and that was a lesson yeah yeah yeah never did it again consistency that level of enlightenment
i mean there's a guy that leans in you know i might have been in the airline industry just tell me how what the
problem is and we'll deal with it that kind of person changes as well
yeah that's really fascinating that's really fascinating listen i feel like we could carry on
talking about this all day long yeah yeah uh but i i've got to be mindful of time
um how do people reach you how do people connect with you if they want to if they want to do that what's the best way to
reach em best i'm fairly i'm fairly searchable it's not loads of ian finches around particularly if you use my middle
name in david finch i think you'll find that on linkedin or via our mando.agency website uh
they're probably the best mechanisms and yeah more than happy to continue in conversation we've we've done a very
broad brush with a lot of big principles today haven't we um yeah if anyone wanted to go into any more detail about
specific technologies or running projects and by all means get in touch
yeah absolutely and we will of course link to ian's uh linkedin profile and commander agency in
the show notes as well so if you regular and you do get those via email um the the links will be in there uh but in
it's been an absolute treat i've i've really enjoyed it thank you so much for being with us
uh we'll have to get you on again in a in a much sooner time frame and carry on these kind of conversations but
um yeah brilliant thanks but well a huge shout out and thanks to my
uh good friend and special guest ian french what did you think hope you found that
helpful i hope you managed to take lots of notes but of course if you didn't and you would like access to notes and you
want to go over them again thinking about some of the stuff that ian's mentioned just head on over to the website where you can get all of the
notes the transcripts and all of the links to ian and connect with him uh at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash uh
he'd love to hear from you so go ahead and do that now if that's not enough ecommerce digital
goodness uh if that's not enough conversation about technology you'll be pleased to know next week we have
another fab episode next week let me tell you what's coming up i'm gonna chat with a man from the other
side of the world the man from down under uh mr stewart leo uh he is gonna talk about how to grow your ecommerce
business by stealing these seven secrets from the military
i'm loving all our new cryptic titles but stealing seven secrets from the military ah
it's a great interview and to wet your whistle as i like to say here is an excerpt from next week's show
and if you're solving a real problem if you're you know if a
friend of mine an older gentleman a mentor of mine he runs a little tool shop you know rare tools for woodworkers
um oh give me his name and number okay see see see what just happened there
why why were you excited because you're like oh man i'm i'm like it's so hard to get those things um
and and so he's niched he's found a problem with a distinct audience and
and if you go on if you're into woodworking and lathes and making
stuff um clearly i'm not um yeah you're way out of your comfort
zone i am right you can educate me um that problem resonates because you can't just go down to walmart or sainsbury's
or tesco's and buy that tool or bunnings here in australia you've got to find that is this making sense he's found a
problem um and he's solved it by going out and and talking to or wholesalers around the world
finding those products and bringing them to one place so people who love woodworking can go there and get it
i'm looking forward to this let me tell you and you should be too it's a great interview uh i i really love my
conversation with stuart um so if you've enjoyed this podcast i would appreciate it if you could rate the show on itunes
or wherever you get your podcast from and of course share it out share it with people that you know
share it out on linkedin or wherever you are it just enables us to connect with more folks from around the world and
that is another simple formula the bigger the show gets so easy it is to get great sponsors the more great
sponsors we can get the easier it is for us to bring this free content for you so it's a win-win
scenario as i like to say as i said at the start all of the notes links and transcript from my
conversation with ian are online and you can get them for free at ecommercepodcast.net forward slash
and whilst you're there sign up to our newsletter and we'll email you all of these notes in future automagically i'm
talking about magically if you're subscribed you will get next week's show with uh stuart just it just appears it
just appears it's a beautiful thing uh in your podcast program uh so that's it from me thank you so much for being with
us thanks for listening and i'll be back again next week bye for now
you've been listening to the e-commerce podcast with matt edmondson join us next time for more interviews
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