Wiggs’ Way

By Lance Wiggs, June 2, 2011 @ 9:38 am

Let Lance Wiggs help with your tricky business problems. Email him at advice@idealog.co.nz

groupies

In a recent Wiggs' Way you reckoned wannabe entrepreneurs shouldn’t set up another Groupon clone. But they keep coming, and even Trade Me has set up at least two since then. They seem to be making good money for somebody. –Willing student, Christchurch

Technically a Groupon clone sells services, not things, so Trade Me has only launched one clone, Treat Me. But, yes—it kicked off its daily products service a while back, and its daily services site, Treat Me, launched a few weeks back. It was a bit late to the party, but everyone expected it to arrive and it will do well.

The reason for that, and the reason we sold Groupy to Yellow, is that Trade Me, like Yellow, has a huge audience and a large war chest. It’s the same with GrabOne, which, with its majority ownership by New Zealand Herald owner APN, is charging ahead at the front of the market.

To win in the Groupon-clone business you need the ability to find great deals in the towns and cities where you operate, a large audience to market those deals to, money to help you build that audience, and a website and online campaign that embraces usability and quirkiness. GrabOne, Treat Me and Groupy have all of those, but in my opinion no other site in New Zealand does, and arguably no other site will.

Ultimately it’s a matter of timing. Work on Groupy started about a year ago, after founder Scott Kitney spotted the gap, and we were the first to launch. Since then there have been an increasing number of wannabe sites, but without that marketing muscle and widespread sales organisation they are basically doomed. Of course I’m biased and could just be talking the market down, but for goodness sake go and do something where you are not competing against APN, Trade Me and Yellow.

For the chop

I know from the experiences of friends and family that redundancies aren’t indiscriminate or impersonal, and they often seem to affect the quiet achievers while the noisy boofheads carry on. What’s the best way to conduct yourself when redundancies are being discussed? If my company is clumsy in laying people off—which, let’s be honest, is always the case—is it a sign I should get out anyway? –Salaryman, Auckland

The best thing to do in a redundancy situation is to be on the team that is doing the restructuring work. If you are not, find somebody that is, and get friendly.

Redundancy programmes give all staff the ability to step back and ask the hard question: do I really want to stay? If you were offered $50k to move on, would you take it? If not, do you have a price? Talk it over with your family and friends, and if you come to a decision to move on then quietly let your manager know that you wouldn’t be upset. That in itself is a great way to find out whether or not you are on the in-list or the out-list, and your manager should be happy to know she can have at least one easy redundancy interview.

If you want to stay, first assess your own chances. Put your CEO’s hat on. What part of the organisation would you trim, and by how much? Cascade that down to your division and department. How many people does your area need to lose? Get political—who has the tightest relationships with the boss? Who looks great to those upstairs? Who is likely to go without a whimper? Now get commercial—which roles are likely to be in and out of favour?

Add it all together and there’s your answer. You are either for the chop, likely to stay—or you are still clueless, in which case you are out of the loop and can assume the worst.

We haven’t finished. If you are a high performer and you figure you are likely to be asked to stay, you are now in a position of quite some power. Sometimes companies request that staff reapply for their jobs, so if you are confident in your standing you can opt out of that process and make them come to you. Everything is in a state of flux, and you can parlay their desire to keep you into a better role. It might take time, and you will be ignored for a while, but your managers should be fighting for you to stay.

Other times a standard redundancy package is offered to everyone, which is a particularly stupid approach as the great people that can get jobs elsewhere take the money and do just that, and the poor performers hold tightly onto the only employment that they know they can have. Take the money and run, then consult back if you must.

You may detect an overly healthy amount of cynicism from me at redundancy programmes and, yes, my advice to companies is to stay the heck away from them. Instead you want to have in place a well constructed and executed performance management system that rewards great performers, helps underperformers become great, and exits (or fires, if you will) underperformers that don’t get better. The law may be hard to work with, but do work within it to ensure you have the right number of staff and that they are all awesome. Remember also to take a haircut yourself before whacking the employees. They have families, too.

the name game

Pacific Fibre sounds like a Merino breeder. I’ve checked out your other company names— PowerKiwi, Lingopal, MyTours, Texmate. Seems you’ve tried most things. With the benefit of hindsight, what works for a company name? –Eponymous, Wellington

The name Pacific Fibre came in the end in a brainwave from Rod Drury, after a decent amount of time thinking and discussing it among the group. We went through a few scenarios like Kiwi Fibre, Oz Fibre (one for each country), FibreCo (taken) and so on. Pacific Fibre seemed to encapsulate what we are trying to do, building and operating a fibre-optic cable across the Pacific.

Lingopal was started and named by my cousin Richard Johnson to help him in his international adventures. The name is a pretty good description of the range of products he originally wanted to sell, and also of the iPhone app. But while ‘lingo’ is recognisable in several languages, on iTunes we still rely on keywords like Translate, Flirt, Insult, Malay, Russian, Spanish and so on.

MyTours describes really well what the company does—letting anyone create their own museum or walking tour. Glen Barnes came up with that one, and we all liked it. But MyTours.com was already gone, so we grabbed mytoursapp.com instead, and our company is called Authentic Tours Limited.

Texmate is a name that a founder of a US predecessor company chose after he couldn’t register ‘Tech’s Mate’. For reference, that’s not the best way to name a company, especially if you’re not based in Texas. We don’t like it so we retained a branding firm to help us find a better one. We’re changing it to Definer Instruments—you read it here first.

It turns out that those four are a good sample of how names are created and why they work. Where names already exist you can keep them or replace them. When you create new names, you have a choice of someone’s idea, a group discussion until the right name pops up, or outsourcing to an expert branding firm. There is no one best way, so try the three methods in order. However, while you do want consensus, avoid putting a committee in charge or you’ll end up with something inoffensive and useless. So to answer the question—what works is something descriptive of what you do, easy to spell, you can grab the .com and .co.nz URLs and it doesn’t cost you much to do so. It needs to be distinctive in its field, ‘smell’ right to customers and other stakeholders and be something you are proud to put on your business card. Failing all that, just name yourself after a fruit.

Originally published in Idealog #33, page 14

Comments

Jim Donovan

June 2, 2011 @ 10:10 am

On names: Choose a distinctive name not a me-too one. And don't get too hung up on the name fitting what you do (unless it's saying something inappropriate or undeliverable). New names/brands evolve in people's minds to take on the character of the business. Nokia is a tech brand today, but originally it was a forest products business named after a town near its mill. Fronde (replacing Synergy because it was non-unique in IT even in NZ) was panned by many people as being non-tech, but it grabbed attention; and the brand values attributed to the old name have moved to the new one.

Matt Cooney

June 2, 2011 @ 12:38 pm

Fronde could just about be a case study in how to rename … and I remember the scepticism. Ditching ‘Synergy’ was definitely a good move.

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