1. Limited resources requires sharp focus

Limited resources, both financially and in terms of manpower means you have to choose between different options. For example, Trufflenet ran a reasonably effective Twitter account for a while (it built relationships which generated sales) but we didn’t have time to blog. I always wanted to do a customer newsletter but never had time. Lunching clients was more effective.

In contrast, the Labour Party tries to do too much. For example, in a meeting about digital I asked whether the intention was to service members, win hearts and minds, organise activists or shape public debate. The smart answer was ‘all of the above’ but the truth is that we don’t have the capacity to do all equally well. David Miliband used his leadership campaign to highlight the party’s own lack of corporate social responsibility. He’s absolutely right that this is a weakness (particularly when criticising ‘predators’) but is it a priority given our financial state?

2. Nice words don’t reap rewards

Before I launched the business, 98% of people I met thought we had a great idea. All were hugely encouraging. Yet no prospective client parted with cash. There was a gulf between the analysis of a concept and the delivery of a compelling proposition. It is unlikely to have been realised in focus groups.

Nice words are important in politics. The context surrounding the ‘brand’ sets a mood, although the ‘consumer’ isn’t usually listening. But as Glenys Kinnock remarked in 1992, there’s a difference between people liking you and voting for you. I suspect we weren’t liked in 2005, but we still got votes. Converting doorstep conversations from vague encouragement to pledges of support requires skill.

3. There’s a gap between what you say and what people hear

The subject has been done to death by people more expert than me. But it rarely ceases to surprise me how the best crafted messages get heard differently when they are exposed to the real world. From the pronunciation and memorability of your company name to the description of the service down to vitally important issues like the wording of commercial proposals and agreements – the expectation gap is significant.

For years I knocked on doors with a script which asked ‘which political party do you identify with?’. Even when I corrected the poor structure of the sentence for posh houses, it still didn’t make sense. Yet we used it perpetually across the country.

4. Make the right impression

In the first year of the business I knew that the first contact, if bad, would be the last opportunity with that person, and by extension that company. A typo in a flyer, an email without an attachment could all cause commercial failure. One of the most important lessons I learnt was trying to limit failure to a small sample. Rather than distributing a mailshot to 1,000, I sent it to 10 and found out if it worked.

I’m sure that the Labour Party does lots of market testing of which I’m unaware. And much of its materials are often very good – with the resources available. But I’ve also put some utter crap through people’s doors; material that is worse than a fried chicken advert. Whilst on the leaflet we’re claiming to be able to run a council or a government!

5. You don’t need permission

Seth Godin isn’t all wrong! In business, if you do something that works, people will buy into it. But no matter how much buy in you get beforehand, if it doesn’t work, you will be left standing alone. But if you are successful, the chances are (assuming they pass a basic political test) the activities will be embraced by others. Oh – and if you really want to get involved in the Labour Party – you just have to turn up to a campaigning session.

For years I worried about the structures and processes of the Labour Party. I feared that they were off-putting, archaic and a barrier to progress. Little did I realise how little structures matter. If you want to do something, you can. In a current political party the earliest measure of success if whether you can engage other people consistently.

6. Success is fleeting

There was no greater feeling than winning a contract; winning a big contract; hitting income targets. It was almost enough to justify the misery of those months where none of those things happened. And then at the end of the month it starts all over again. I kept my sanity by breaking it down in to manageable chunks to ensure a steady supply line – the number of meetings in a month, the number of proposals generated a week, the number of calls made in a day.

In politics, winning an election or passing a bill can be such an all-consuming activity that it feels conclusive. It isn’t – and I’m sure that’s not news to people who hold public office. Winning an election is the start, not the end. It is less of a mandate than it ever was.  Yet the Labour Party is engaged in some wars that will never be won. Successes need to be identified but never taken for granted.

7. We have more in common than we know

Outside the Labour Party it’s hard to remember the details of who you are meant to like and who you aren’t; who’s a Blairite and who isn’t; who’s done what to whom. And it doesn’t even matter. Occasionally, I’d go to dinner and say pious things to political friends like ‘does any of this really matter when the economy is in such a state?’.

By the time I stopped active politics I was very clear what side I was on. And that wasn’t just the Labour side but a sub group within. That reflects badly on me rather than the Labour Party. But now I look to get back involved with the party, I’m struck by how nice most of its members are, and how much we have in common.

Related posts:

1. What Labour taught me about setting up a business
2. Minding Labour’s Business
3. Should Labour bother with policymaking?

1.       Audience segmentation

We know all about segmenting our audiences in politics. Identifying which wards to contact in which order. Putting out different leaflets depending on likely voting intention, targeting switchers, ignoring non-voters and so on. Running a successful commercial operation is not very different. You identify who you want to pitch to, why they want to use your service and how much income you expect to generate from them. You then keep contacting them until you get a ‘no’ or, better yet, until you find out why they don’t want your product. Ok, so there’s no electoral roll but there is LinkedIn.

2.       Making an impact . . .

Election campaigns are all about making an impact. There’s activity that identifies voting intention – sales in a business but some of it is just about making a noise in the market place. Posters, banners, street stalls, loudspeakers. We know how to make an impact.

3.       . . . with limited budget

Election campaigns rarely have the luxury of spare cash. What you do spend, has to work. The thing that I found most challenging about the early months in business was keeping control of costs. You want to do marketing, but you can’t afford for it to not work. There are ways of doing it cheaply, but you don’t want to make a bad impression.

4.       Managing people

Campaigns would be nothing without the volunteers. There is a hardy group that will do it whatever the candidate, cause or climate but most will give more if they are more energised. But party members are often a cynical lot and no level of sophisticated fakery will work. Early hires in a business will need to contribute much more than the hours for which they are paid. And they won’t be as well-remunerated as you (or they) would like. You need their goodwill and forbearance whilst having to manage their confidence when income doesn’t match expectations.

5.       Telling a story

Election campaigns that work tell a story about the state of the country, the merits of the candidate and the failure of alternatives. In business stories are also important – particularly for early investors who are interested in the person as much as the business.

6.       Responding quickly

The best election campaigns react to events in minutes or hours. A press release written, a photo stunt organised, a leaflet printed. Even great businesses take weeks to turn things around. Startups don’t have that luxury. Responding quickly is massively important, whilst not losing sense of the strategic objectives.

7.       Managing failure

In politics you are meant to lose before you win. It teaches you what you need to know before it really matters. Yet even with a British business culture (as opposed to an American one) you aren’t meant to be doing badly. It isn’t in the lexicon of entrepreneurs to admit to having a bad month. But managing the early, inevitable setbacks is vitally important if you are to maintain your business – and your sanity.

Many Labour Party activists – and most representatives – have little obvious experience of running a business. But most have already learnt some of the most important lessons. In my next post, I’ll examine what I’ve learnt from setting up a business which could be transferred to electioneering.

Related posts:

1. What setting up a business taught me about Labour
2. Minding Labour’s Business

I’m not sure I’m ready to throw myself into active trade unionism, or that most unions can easily accommodate someone who is not from a workplace with a recognition agreement. However, I hope that the observations below may be of some benefit.

1. Trade unions over promise

Unite has the most compelling list of reasons to join the union I’ve ever seen. Ten Good Reasons to Join Unite is the sort of marketing that I used to wish could be produced. But it massively over-promises. You may earn more if you join Unite, but I reckon that the chances are that you earn more because you are more likely to work for responsible employers. I’m sure you are less likely to be sacked, but every member who is (and there will be lots) will feel considerable pain on reading that claim.

1. Trade unions under promise

There’s an awful lot of good that a trade union could do. They helped me with public speaking. With understanding how to sit through long meetings. They could have taught me negotiating skills. A better understanding of HR and employment law would be a massive benefit. ‘Join a trade union to get on in your career’: that’s an attractive proposition.

1. It’s facilitation, not insurance

Lots of comments on my blogpost were from people who felt let down by the union, its reps and its solicitors. Actually their grievance ought to have been with their employer. But the union helped encourage (or didn’t confront) an expectation that the union could sort out your problems. Actually, if the focus was on helping employees represent themselves, the unions would have more resonance in more workplaces. Yet at unitetheunion.org it’s easier to find ways to buy members’ benefits than communities to stimulate solidarity – just the sort of free market attitude that unions oppose.

1. A lack of grassroots debate?

Depending on your search criteria my blogpost can appear in the top 10 search results for the union. It appears that’s how little people write about the trade union online. The union doesn’t seem to offer any public platform for its members to organise campaigns, chat about workplace experiences or network with each other. That’s extraordinary and must be ripe for change (although there does appear to be an ‘Activist Portal’).

1. Low awareness of accountability?

Reading through the website it’s very hard to find who works at the union, beyond the general secretary. When people have contacted me reporting problems with union staff, there’s no obvious route through which they can register concerns. There are lots of elections but apparently little awareness of the more mundane procedures by which members can register gripes.

Not all of these observations may be complete, or even fair. But I’ve posted them in an effort to be constructive and learn from the people who’ve shared their experiences of the union with me to discover if these are commonly-held opinions and how we can encourage a more effective trade union. After all, any organisation can only ever be as good as the people that drive it forward.

Related posts:

1. Why I’ve left Unite the Union
2. What matters to trade unions?

What’s good for Business is not necessarily good for business

Many of the professional organisations that speak on behalf of business are the preserve not of the small startups that the government wishes to encourage but the large or mature businesses who are fighting for their own interests. There’s nothing wrong with that. But the views of the CBI or Richard Branson do not particularly reflect what’s in the best interests of promoting startups. These representatives should be treated with no more or less scepticism than the TUC or the AA.

Often the best business people will have half an eye on what’s bad for the competition when they call for changes to government policy. I was also told by a special adviser that the tax that business people complained about most to Cabinet ministers was the top rate of income tax. If only startups had such things to worry about!

Business doesn’t vote – startups won’t donate

Building a coherent story to support enterprise won’t be easy for the Labour Party. Businesses don’t vote and most startups won’t donate money to the party. I was once fortunate to be invited to Labour’s Thousand Club annual summer party. A Peer and former senior party staffer looked at me with the disdain most reserve for bedroom-based eBay traders when she heard I set up a company. Her mood only shifted when she heard I employed people – as if that was the only measure of success she could understand.

This isn’t natural territory for Labour. That means finding unfamiliar ways to engage with business people – for whom much of politics is equally alien. Entreprenuers don’t like meetings that start late, lack focus and don’t have a clear benefit.  Finding activities that can be useful for both parties will not be easy.

So what can Labour do for startups? Here are five modest ideas, intended to help Labour’s Business.

No one got sacked for hiring MIB

‘No one ever got sacked for hiring IBM’: an old adage but absolutely true in my experience. I met many organisations who were very attracted in our ideas but without 2/3 clients and case studies behind us, we were untouchable. Once we had that, we accelerated at great speed. One way of helping organisations reduce the risk aversion to something new would be to provide a ‘Made In Britain’ tax break for any company using services / products from a startup (perhaps within the first 12 months). A 25% tax break would be a significant incentive.

Secondly, stealing an idea from the West Wing, civil servants could be encouraged to spend a day meeting relevant startups with a service to offer. Once we had meetings with the public sector, many civil servants were very amenable. But identifying the right ones required a particular set of skills. And a case study from a government department can be hugely beneficial to get a business moving. Whilst in opposition, why doesn’t Labour publish tenders on its website? Or run a scheme for MPs to volunteer to serve as advisors to startup businesses?VAT free purchases

In the first year (or 2 if you’re unlucky) you will spend more than you earn. And cashflow will be a waking nightmare. Being able to reclaim VAT costs every quarter is painful. Not having to pay them at the start would be a major boost. Giving startups a VAT-free card to reduce B2B costs (web build, computer hardware etc) would free up cash to run the business.

The Child Trust Fund

Financing a business has never been easy but, right now, has rarely been harder. The Child Trust Fund meant that school leavers would have a put of money to invest – ether in HE or, possibly, in starting a business. That would mean fewer bank loans and less reliance on a small pool of hard to reach angel investors. That has to be a good thing.

Good skills

This is a long hard slog; more so than starting a business – probably. Mature businesses may suffer because of small increase to national insurance. For startups, the 12% cost is marginal once we’ve persuaded ourselves that a) we can afford someone else and b) that person isn’t going to absorb so much management time that it holds back the business. That’s about having people who turn up on time. Don’t spend an hour on the phone to friends or checking Facebook. Who do what they’re told and don’t call clients ‘bruv’. It really is that simple, although I have little doubt how difficult it is for government to help achieve this. A small start might be encouraging universities place students in roles with businesses during their degree.

Celebrating failure

Most small businesses fail. Government doesn’t like failure. Better visit ‘success stories’ like Innocent Smoothies or be associated with a Richard Branson than a miserable failure of a business. But most businesses are small nad unglamorous, even if they succeed. But failing can teach you a great deal. And if those lessons can be captured, society is better off. Fewer people make similar mistakes. Government ministers aren’t going to embrace failure in a photo opp. But at the very least remember that a photo opp at the corner shop will likely mean more to more voters in a constituency than a visit to a remote industrial park.

Related posts:

1. What Labour taught me about setting up a business
2. What setting up a business taught me about Labour

Listening to some of the organisations that had been awarded catalyst funding it was clear how the RSA had helped. The programme enabled people without any organisational form or legal status the money to take the idea beyond conception. From memory, there aren’t many grants available to organisations that don’t yet exist! For Plan Zhero, for example, it provided a great deal of what they needed to get off the ground. But refreshingly its founders also told me that the process of applying for the grant was challenging yet engaging and actually helped improve the idea.

The RSA helped further by bringing together the award winners and organising a roundtable workshop style event which ensured that it was more collaborative and engaging than the typical platform-style event. In fact, by the end of the event the jaded energy of the room suggested that the fund winners would benefit from meeting more frequently – perhaps working in partnership with the social entreprenuers’ spotlight scheme. It’s when the RSA is able to effect introductions to like-minded people with a common interest that it becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

Following the event, there was a lecture and the award of the Albert Medal to Alberta Ruiz, a social entreprenuer who helped organise waste pickers. What was particularly powerful about her moving story was that it combined community activity, awareness raising and policy impact. So often organisations achieve one of these three things and so rarely are all three combined. With its growing interest in social enterprise, the RSA too has the potential to do this through matching its project research, public events and fellowship networks.

One of the challenges for the RSA in this space is how it consolidates the learning from this activity. The Albert Medal lecture will doubtless be available in multiple digital formats, reaching a global audience. And that’s a massive achievement. But the lessons from an event like the catalyst worksop, or the social entreprenuers programme are currently held in the brains of each who attended. Writing these down in a report may feel very 20th century (and is also time-consuming) but each group funded by catalyst needs to be able to learn the lessons from previous startups.

When I was first labouring with setting up Newscounter, my experience would have been radically different if I’d had the RSA networks to draw on. Yesterday the RSA made a significant contribution towards its mission and it was great to witness.

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