It's Burns night soon. A celebration of the Scottish farmer poet, whose memory is celebrated with recitals, whisky, haggis and more on the 25th January. Love him or loathe him, he had many an insight which we can learn from. In this blog post we look at Burn's theme of looking for an external perspective. Can it help boost your business?
The Insights of a Shrewd Observer
Robert Burns had a varied CV - he was ploughman, poet, government worker and rebel. Above all he was an observer of people, politics and process and had a knack for seeing things differently. He eloquently wrote much of this down and his insights are still relevant to life today.
One of his most famous poems is about sitting behind a bonny lass in church (Burn's always had an eye for the ladies) and seeing a louse in her well coiffured hair. He mused that if we could see what others see in us it'd give us a fresh insight.
Here's the relevant verse:
“O, wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion.”
- Extract from "To a Louse" by Robert Burns
Why Look for An External Perspective?
Just like the louse in the lady's hair we all have blind spots and things lurking in our business that detract from it. I remember for months I was presenting a pitch pack that had a rather embarrassing spelling mistake that a kind client pointed out to me. It'd still be incriminating me otherwise.
There are often things much more dangerous than typos we have a blind spot for. We've worked with businesses that have websites that are breaking data law, a strategy that overlooks an obvious adjacent growth market or take for granted a competitor that's now a threat.
These are all things that can be avoided though.
How Can GrowThink Help?
GrowThink offer a service to give your entire marketing function a thorough appraisal. This is based on a scientific and systematic approach. It compares your capability to a best practice model we've worked up over years of experience. And the great thing is the more businesses we work with the more refined our model has become.
This means we can quickly give you a tailored scoring of your key marketing areas and some insights into what you should prioritise.
Here are some anonymised grabs from some recent assessments we've done to give you a feel for the process:
It's not that we know more about your business than you do. We clearly don't, but we give your business a fresh pair of eyes and will always find something you can act on. The result is we save you money or flag a new revenue stream to grow into.
Some Examples
Here's some examples of the type of improvement areas we've identified with clients and how they've been resolved to drive growth:
One manufacturing business we worked with was paying for CRM functionality they no longer used. We highlighted this and helped then save around over £6,000 in annual licensing costs
A hydraulics company we worked with hadn't noticed the speed with which one of their product lines was becoming obsolete. Some external data we obtained proved to them the need to quickly consider product development
We discovered the trademark protection of one of the key brand names of a client had just lapsed - enhanced protection and a renewal reminder to avoid future lapses was put in place. A potentially very expensive mistake averted!
The lesson is we all have our blind spots. Be they small lice, or bigger bugs, an external perspective is always worth calling on.
If you're going to engage an external party to help you make sure they have a process for conducting any appraisal. Also ask them to prove how thorough they'll be and the kind of recommendations they've produced in the past. Then you'll know you're getting value.
Worried your business might have a bug or two? We'll happily give you the once over. Pick up the phone to Robin on +44 (0)7770 325 252 or mail us robin@growthinksolutions.com
If you're interested in "To a Louse" - the full poem in Scots and English can be read here
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