Don’t Be A Bottleneck - Graeme Scott-Dodd - The Revenue Maze - Episode #026

This week’s guest is a highly skilled innovator. Graeme Scott-Dodd is the CEO of Action Insight Management (AiM). Graeme brings his insights on how to grow profit in your business and talks with the host Valerie Cobb. Listen in this week, to hear Graeme’s amazing tips and tricks on improving your company’s revenue.

Takeaways:

  • Make sure to figure out what you are trying to strive for in your company.  Try to narrow down your wants and focus on your needs to make your business skyrocket above other competitors.
  • With your company, make sure you prioritize the clients that are helping your business grow but be sure to fix the ones that may have fallen through. Utilize the lost opportunities for any new clients.
  • To keep a consistent amount of investments coming in, you have to be able to show your category growth in the company to future investors.
  • Make sure you know what your needs and wants are for your company because if you make the wrong move and decide to go head first into something you don’t know, you could be losing a lot of money and not getting the results you’d hoped in order for your company to improve. You would only be digging yourself further down.
  • If your company’s total profit is higher than your average goal, then you don’t need to be promoting yourself. If customers already know your brand name, then don’t promote it. Promoting is what will be costing your company money, which will eventually leave you broke.
  • There’s a difference between the need to know and the want to know. People always get caught up in the want to know rather than the need. People would rather just get any form of information rather than focusing on what they actually need.
  • If you drop the price at your company and you will sell more which means more total profit comes into your business. But if you’ve given away all of your margin because you are paying for all of that promotion, you may sell a lot, but your profit may go down in the process.

Quote of the Show:

  • “So what are you chasing? Is it volume? Is it revenue? The key thing most businesses are now moving to is profit, because, without the profit, you can’t survive. All the other things lead to that profit.” (03:04)

Links:

 

Ways to Tune In:

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Don’t Be A Bottleneck – Graeme Scott-Dodd – The Revenue Maze

Welcome to another great episode. I have so much fun on these shows, and I am excited about this guest because he cracks me up. He’s so fun. He is a commercial animal. Now, when we’re going to talk about a commercial animal, he has worked through his twenty-plus years with Philip Morris. You know that one, but Guinness Diageo, that’s another one. Scottish & Newcastle and last Heineken, many other companies as well, but those are notable at this point in the game.

When he is not a commercial animal, he’s an animal out skiing and traveling. He is the man’s man. He is the most interesting man in the world. I say that because he’s humble, and he is probably dying of issues because I take that to have some fun. Anyway, it’s exciting what he’s doing. He’s in predictive and highly knowledgeable about AI and predictive analytics. He will say, “Maybe that’s not so fun for everybody but for me, it’s like music.” I love that he helps FMCG companies improve their commercial planning. His company is a finalist in the Grocer Gold Awards 2022 for Tech Initiative of the Year. He is the CEO of Action Insight Management. Welcome, Graeme Scott-Dodd.

Thank you very much. I’m a little embarrassed. Hopefully, I can live off all of that. A lot that you give me as an intro. Thank you for inviting me.

If anybody doesn’t know the reservation of Scotsman, you witnessed it. I love it. Graeme, we want to hear about all these wonderful things that you’re doing, especially in the analytics world, because it’s helping so many people, many organizations, I wouldn’t say people. We always answer one question for the audience. What is one thing that you can tell the audience that will help them get out of The Revenue Maze?

I always struggle with getting down to one thing and not a list of things. The best I can think of is to know what you are chasing. The title of this is The Revenue Maze, but is it revenue you’re chasing? Is it volume? A lot of what I say is going to hark back to consumer goods, FMCG, where we’re shifting products and a number of products, but a lot of these things hopefully will transfer into other businesses. What are you chasing? Is it volume? Is it revenue? The key thing most businesses are now moving to is their profit. Without profit, you can’t survive.

All the other things lead to that profit. I’m always intrigued when I get new clients, “What are you looking for?” It seems to throw them because everybody around the room has a different message. Usually, the finance guy can pretty quickly go, “We need profit.” Whereas the sales guy is looking for volume, so you’ve got different views around the table. We then got to try and pull that together to show them, “How does each lever move down towards the profit?” That was a long answer to a short question.

That brings up an excellent topic. The audience wants to know some good ideas on how to get to what they’re chasing for the moment. It also will depend a bit on their stage in the cycle of their business. If they’re an early stage or late stage, what are they trying to accomplish? I’ve said this before because I use it all the time, and people are probably sick of hearing it. The typical Alice in Wonderland thing. If you don’t know where you’re going, then it doesn’t matter. You’ve got to figure out what you need to chase at that moment. Give us some pointers on how you’ve worked that through with some of your clients and how that has helped.

You need to understand what the drivers of your business are. In consumer goods, there are four main ones that a lot of research companies can give you. Kantar is one of the companies that can sell you this data, and it’s penetrating. How many people are buying? It’s frequency. How often are they buying? It’s the weight of the purchase. How much are they buying each time, and what are they spending each time? With those four levers, your total volume may be going through the roof, but you find out that you’ve lost a lot of shoppers.

TRM 26 | Identifying Business Bottlenecks

Identifying Business Bottlenecks: The four main drivers of a business: penetration, frequency, average weight of purchase, and the amount spent/volume per trip.

All you’ve got is the heavy users. How do you get the others back? By those four and trending it over time, you get a message that, “Everything may be going well.” I’ve not seen it when all four are going in the right direction but at least by looking at those, you can work out, “Versus last year, which one’s gone down? Which ones have gone up? Which is driving my business and therefore, what tactics do I need to put into place to hopefully hold the good ones, but improve the ones that have slipped?” They look at the top line figures, “We are selling more.”

Now, I’m going to go back to the list that I started with, but a lot of the drivers that we find are your distribution may have gone up or down, so how many stores you’re in. Your volume’s gone up 10%, so great. If your distribution’s gone up 20%, you’re selling less per store or less per percentage distribution, and therefore your rate of sale is going down. What’s wrong with your brand? Why aren’t people buying it? Looking at the top line is very dangerous and certainly, if you’re planning for the future.

It’s stage words. I’m going to come back, and I’m not teasing anymore. Honestly, knowing that information does translate to almost any industry in the world. You and I have even had conversations about price elasticity, all the things that can change that bottom line. What they’re looking for, maybe they’re looking for an exit strategy. You look at the top line, and you try to get as many clients, but at the end of the day, most businesses are looking to make sure that they’re profitable. You’re in business to be profitable. If you’re eroding margins because you can say, “I’ll sell something for $100,000, and that $100,000 costs you literally up to the penny of the $100,000. You’re not profitable. That’s the dumb thought process of top-line only.

You’re bringing up a good point. When I jumped ship from Heineken and started my own consultancy, one of the clients I’d gone and did all the crunching news. I showed them how to make the most profit, “Here’s the pricing.” It was a pretty good presentation as far as I was concerned, but until the end, the CEO turned around and said, “We are not looking for profit.” I hadn’t thought to ask. It was a naive thought. They were VC back and trying to grow.

They needed to show that their category growth was faster to keep investment coming in. They were stealing more and growing within the category. That was their target. Whether they made any money or wanted to make money, that’ll come eventually once the investors keep on investing. That was a huge learning for me that I’d done quite a bit of work and then shown them something that they weren’t interested in. I went back and went with it. All the information was in there, but I had to bring it back out to show them how to target a different player and how to become number 2 rather than number 3. I suppose I’m using my own advice there, “Know what you’re trying to drive for.” I drove for the wrong thing.

We’ve all been there. There are famous case studies of Silicon Valley that talk about buying a business. Your goal is not profitability. At that point, it’s brand recognition or getting customers in the door. It is a strategy, but in general, as I said, unless they’re trying to sell off or they’re doing something like that, most companies would like to be profitable. As we look at that, a number of variables impact that and a lot of modeling. You get a lot of people saying, “I’ve got a gut sense,” but what is that gut sense telling you if the numbers tell you a completely different story?

I talked about a CFO that literally made music with numbers. He was like a maestro with numbers. It told a fact-driven story that sometimes people will say, “In communication, it’s words, but numbers can communicate very concisely.” I love hearing your analytics story. I love how you’re taking those numbers and driving a story that helps these companies. Tell us a little bit more about that. There’s some fun stuff with the Scottish government.

We go way back. When I was at Diageo, there was a great finance guy called Don, who’s now in the food industry, and he had a relativity tool. You could look at your own product versus another of your own product and see how much was stolen. If you did a price deal on one, what comes to the other? That whet my appetite. I’ve always liked numbers. I’ve moved from selling and never liked asking a question unless I knew the answer to it in selling.

Moving into category management, right at the early stages and then finding this tool that whets my appetite, “You can get something out of the numbers.” Moving onto the beer company was slightly like moving back several years in thinking and data availability. You were saying about people having an opinion. Every man and his dog had an opinion based on gut feeling. It always started with, “I think,” and there was no backup or no proof and everybody around the table tried to plan. There were fifteen different plans. Part of my role there became, “Tell them what they need to do.” That’s where this germ of, “Let’s get it.” I went to one of the big data houses that also do consulting.

Every man has an opinion based on gut feeling.

I went back and embarrassed them by saying who they were. Everybody in FMCG will know them. This was many years ago. I was spending £500,000 on raw data, which shows how much we bought. We were spending about £100 million a year as a business on pricing, promotions, and trade support. We didn’t know what we were getting back for it. We knew we had to do it. I went to them and said, “Tell me all about that. What should I tell these guys? What’s the elasticity?” I didn’t know what elasticity was at that state. Apparently, neither now.

They went off and did lots of crunching. I still remember I spent 105,000 pounds on 1 report, 82 pages long. It only had two numbers in it that could tell me what to give to the guys. That went into a drawer very quickly. The one number that they came back with was, “Beer has an elasticity of minus 2.6.” In my naivety, I was, “Fine. Now I’ve got a number.” That means for every 1% of the price you move one way or the other, the volume will move 2.6 in the opposite direction. The problem is that it makes it linear. That’s a straight line.

If you take 10% off and get 10% extra back, according to them, if you take 20%, you’ll get 20%. You don’t. It’s a curve and an exponential curve. It’s a lot more difficult to work out, which is probably why they didn’t do it. In my naivety, I used that figure and then realized very occasionally we were correct. Most of the time, we were wrong because we were at the wrong point of the curve. From there, I whet my appetite. Tell me when I bore you on this, by the way, because I can.

You’re not boring me. I’m seeing numbers in my head as you tell this story. Keep going.

At that stage, I thought, “I’ve spent a lot of money.” I’ve hidden that because it doesn’t want to reach how much spent and get very little back. I thought, “We can do better.” That’s when I started getting into it, using my knowledge from Diageo. I went out to wholesalers to begin with, not even the retailers. I got some different data and started crunching them myself, trial and error. I started working out the elasticity curves.

That’s where it all started. I took that to the MD at the time, who, luckily for me, got it, understood it, and thought, “That makes sense.” Two weeks later I was running a department called Market Modeling before anybody even knew what that was. I had a load of statisticians, some very bright people working for me. It took about fourteen months to go down the rabbit holes and think, “We’ve got it. No, we haven’t.” It is difficult. There are so many moving parts, that’s why when you think you’ve got it, no. Anyway, I did manage to crack the key part of it.

I then moved on to other things. The analysis there are a few learnings, measure what you can manage or what you can control. There was a time that I employed somebody purely for a week. We got access to a very clever tool from one of the biggest retailers. All it did was it gave us a lot of information about what happens when something moves, and it costs £20,000 to have access for the week. It was hugely expensive. I employed somebody to download things for a week and not analyze anything, just download it.

We realized that we had so much information that much of it was nice to know, but we couldn’t use any of it. We couldn’t replicate any of it. This sounds terrible, but I’d spent quite a bit of money, and we got some good stuff out of it. Probably about the same time, there was a story, Ashley, which came over from the US whether it originated. The story was that it came from analysts and Anheuser-Busch, and they had worked out that blokes men will get sent out to buy nappies at 5:00 on a Friday night because we’ve run out and the lady of the house will say, “You’ve got to go.” If you put beer next to nappies at 5:00 on a Friday night, all of a sudden, you sell more because the men have been sent out.

That story went around the industry and everybody’s, “Very interesting.” You then start realizing, “That’s great to know, but we can’t do anything about that. We can’t afford to put somebody into every store, half past 4:00 on a Friday afternoon, to reposition the beer.” That’s when you start realizing there’s a need to know and want to know. Most of us get caught up in the want to know because, “That’ll be interesting,” but it’s the need to know.

TRM 26 | Identifying Business Bottlenecks

Identifying Business Bottlenecks: There’s “need to know” and “want to know.” Most of us get caught up in the “want to know.”

There’s a level that you can go down to. You go too far and if you can’t control it or do something about it, not one of your levers to sell with the buyer, you’ve probably gone too far. That was one of our key learnings in that. Certainly, in those fourteen months, we went too far and analyzed everything and then realized that we’ve spent six months getting to the nitty-gritty that’s something we can’t use.

When you’re dealing with some of that, you find yourself going, “That’s cool,” and then you turn around and go, “But that was a total waste of time. Why am I doing it? Why am I thinking that?” Maybe in the UK, they have Jeopardy as well, but all the factoid stuff that goes on. That’s so nice that they know all that. You spent all your time trying to figure out facts and memorize facts. It’s almost like when you’re looking at what to capture.

First of all, companies need to know where they’re going. That’s the starting point. Where are you going and what are the drivers that are going to help you figure out that you’re winning, you’re losing or whatever you’re doing? Look at those things. On top of that, we were talking on another show, simplifying it because we’re often like, “What if?” You get in these what-if scenarios and spend months or years doing what if. Sometimes, what if before you ever even move on anything?

As I said, everything we do now is based on the levers that a sales guy can use with an account. What can they influence and what can they negotiate on? In the UK, I’m not sure about the US, but in the UK, the actual retail price is the retailer’s prerogative by law. As a supplier, we could never dictate what that is. However, we could influence them by saying, “If you do this, this might happen,” which is pretty much where my business is anchored on. All the other levers and this is where we get the difference from the revenue down to the profit.

Certainly, in consumer goods, it’s what you are selling. What price are you selling to the retailer? How much money are you making, and how much are they making? If you do a promotion, who’s paying for that, and whose margin is that coming out of? We find a lot of the time that a product may be price elastic, which means you drop the price, and you will sell more and if more total profit comes in, great. If you’ve given away all of your margins because you are paying for all of that promotion, you may sell a lot, but your profit may go down, and the retailer is laughing.

They’re not having to pay anything and get more sales. For us, a key part is working out. There’s the total profit or profit pool, but also, how do you split that down? Who’s paying what? That’s when the finance side comes in. It’s putting the predicted volume onto an existing P&L. You know what you’re paying for things and if the volume is predicted and is accurate, then pretty much you know what your costs are. We find at times that, the old way for sales and if the salespeople are reading, they’re going to hate me saying this.

Certainly, in my experience, we had some salespeople that wanted to do a promotion with their customers because the customer wanted it. You want to keep the customer happy. They would do a normal, “Here’s the plan, and it does a quick cash up and thinks that loses us money or it doesn’t make enough.” All they would do was change the volume they were going to sell. This activity is going to sell 10,000 units. If I sell 20,000, “It makes money,” but they haven’t changed anything to sell that 20,000 more. Unfortunately, for some salespeople, what we do now, because a smart prediction takes away that guesswork. Also, if they want to put a different number in, and they can justify it, great.

Any company, anybody that’s reading that is managing any sales team at all, runs into that. The first thing the salesman comes back and says is, “The customer wants a discount. How much can I give them?” You’ve answered the question. It’s funny because sometimes people say, “You’re a sales manager.” I’m like, “Not really, because at the end of the day, I do the exact same thing. Let’s look at the modeling and see if there’s any room. If there isn’t, we look at all facets of what that’s going to do to the profitability, not just the top line but the profitability of it.”

You and I have talked about this. We do it strategically. There are times when you’re trying to get a big client on, so you’re willing to pay for that client because that’s what you’re doing in profits. You’re paying for it in profits, and then eventually, have a plan of attack to get out of that mess. What I like about what you said is you’ve got the model that also says, “This is how much we need to do to make up for buying that customer, discounting or however you want to verbalize that.” At the end of the day, we talked about you and tribal knowledge.

Some of this was all locked in your head, and you had to be the one who went through and consulted the entire thing. You became the bottleneck of the system because it would take time for you to do this. You’re creating a proven and repeatable technology that has given that brain dump or that tribal knowledge to create something that makes it easier.

I’d forgotten. I told you. I love it. Talking back. As a consultant, we’ve been going for about nine years, going into clients, and we’ve never gone out looking for a business. The network has always gone because we get a pretty good result. As you said, I was working with the Scottish government. They are helping us grow in certain areas. They turned around at one point, which I probably knew in a way, but I was turning business away because I was the front guy and there were only so many hours of the day.

That was a great situation to be in a certain degree, but as the emotional animal, I wanted to make more. They turned around and said, “You are the bottleneck,” which I had to listen to. They said, “The way through this is obviously to turn everything you’re doing into software, and then it can be scaled up, etc.” “It makes absolute sense.” That was probably a few years ago we started doing that. That’s when I learned to sit in darkened rooms with some very clever software engineers, trying to get all of my thinking and the modeling tools that I had, etc.

Get all that into a usable format in the right order, doing the right thing, and all the binary decisions. When you are planning, “Do we want to do this or that?” All the thought processes were way more difficult than I anticipated to begin with. I’ve been pulled away from dealing with clients for a while, so we could sit in these darkened cupboards and write code, which I’m not a coder by the way.

I pretend to be one. I’m kidding. Keep going.

We then came out the other end with a few tweaks and everything. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so I’m never happy about these things because there’s always something we can do. We came out with some great tools that accurately predict the future based on what’s going on. We found different things. Markets do move on. We built it, and then we created it four times. We now do all our modeling. When you put the data in, it will then look at 13 weeks, 26 weeks, 52 weeks, and 104 weeks. It does it four times to work out what is the strongest model so that we know that the best advice is going to be the one that comes out.

Not the one with the highest stop lift, but the one with the strongest relationship. All the way through this, as a user, anything that gets put in front of me, I want to know, “How much can I trust this?” If I don’t know how to do something, I need to know how much I can trust. We build that into all the models, so you know exactly per SKU, Stock Keeping Unit, per product, per portfolio, per brand, and how much you can truly trust what you’re seeing on the front here. That helps when our clients see it, not only they may know when we look at history and say, “It should do this.” We then say, “It did do that.” We build that into the system. If the data’s good, we’re usually within 1% to 2% error across a year, which are predictions. We’re pretty happy with that one.

As a user, you want to know how much you can trust anything that is put in front of you.

You brought up some good points about trusting or credibility in what the output is. We run into that all the time. I was working with a company, and we’re needing to obviously get some data on sales teams, and they don’t have a baseline yet. There’s always that cart before the horse thing. If we need to see how much effort it’s going to take, what teams do you build? All of that stuff.

Modeling out five years like you and I talked about, as the CRO, I look five years out and walk backward. Sometimes it’s not terribly accurate. You do a Tam Sam Som and you hope you’re pretty close, especially with either early stage or resurrections. A lot of those companies either have very bad data if they’re a resurrection. They don’t even know why their product has gone stale or they’re eroding margin faster than they know what’s going on because they weren’t tracking it properly.

You have the early stagers relying on best practices in there, whatever their category or industry. When you’re talking about trusting, that part of it is saying, “This is the best practice over 25 years, so I can get within 1% to 2% margin of error.” That is incredible. There is a lot of what we call swaging out there, which is a big guess. I won’t go into the acronym, but it’s a big guess. You’ve solved a bit of that and that’s what’s cool.

In the beginning, I like numbers, but I like knowing the answers. For me, going into a negotiation and knowing, “If we do this, you’ll do that.” Somebody said, “It’s going to cost you £10,000 to do that,” You know whether it’s worth £10,000. One of our earliest clients before we built it into software, in certain parts of it in different Excel formats and I may have told you about that. That grew arms and legs and became so big, you couldn’t even email it. It was so big. Some of the learnings then were understanding what would happen if you did X, Y, and Z. I’m not going to name the retailer, but the retailer that this company was dealing with, I told you we keep all our clients confidential.

You need to keep them confidential. We’ll guess.

This client was having a negotiation with one of the retailers and trying to do a promotion and the retailer said, “That’s fine. Pay it to play.” If you want to do the promotion, it’ll cost you £7,000 to do it for that week. We put it straight into the black box, and it came up that the only benefit we would get was £2,000. They went straight back. In fact, they turned the PC round in the meeting and said, “It’s only worth £2,000.” The retailer went, “£2,000 will do,” because it was in the black box. They saved £5,000 by being able to push back. Whereas before that it was £7,000. Instantly, by having it in numbers, something a bit clever than the retail buyers that he’s been given that he or she has to charge. Having something in a black box would be a good negotiation tool.

Sometimes in the world you’re consulting, we’re fractional CROs. Sometimes in that world, I will be working with downstream companies, and they’ll say, “I can’t afford it.” That answer would say, “You can’t afford to not do it.” Everybody’s looking for that return, whatever that return is going to be. A dollar or a pound is too much if you don’t have it. What if that pound generates X because you’re going to go borrow that pound to get it done? That’s how that would help so much in decision-making trees too. You’re saying, “Should we go this direction or this direction?” You have it immediately.

Once you control the crunching, then every product comes straight up to a profit curve, and you see where the optimum is. If your optimum price for total profit pull is higher than your average at the moment, you are already promoting too much. You shouldn’t be promoting as much because promoting will cost you money. If the peak of the profit curve is, on our thing to the right, which means lower price, then, yet you can still promote harder and make more money. As I said before, who’s paying for that gives you the actual margins? Can you make more money? There was another point that you made there, and I’ve lost it.

TRM 26 | Identifying Business Bottlenecks

Identifying Business Bottlenecks: If your optimum price for total profit is higher than your average at the moment, you are already promoting too much. You shouldn’t be promoting as much because promoting will be costly.

You’re in the consumer goods. When I look at some of the implications that you’re talking about, there are tons of marketers. There are tons of decisions that need to be made and the implications are far-reaching. To me, it’s not just in that arena that this could help, for sure. There are decisions I have to remodel every single time. How many hours does that take me to remodel every single time to try to make a decision? You’ve got it right there.

If I go back to the beer days, and that’s when we started building all of these thoughts and building it together, it was probably taking 2 to 3 months of data crunching or mandates data crunching to get to the result that we get in about two minutes now. Everything’s built-in. That’s using the speed of Microsoft Azure. It still takes two minutes. There are over 2.4 million calculations done on each swap, which is why it took so long to do it manually. The other point I was going to go back to and did come back to me was you mentioned trust. We talked about trust before. I’m going to pick on local photographers who I know nothing about.

It’s like you’re playing one on TV, so here we go.

Trust, in our world, it’s how people value your product and your service and part of that is trust in the product or the service. That builds what we term shopper equity. Let’s stay with the photographer. Local photographer and I have no idea what they charge, but let’s say one’s got a very good reputation, and they charge $500 to do whatever the photography is, and you’ve got another one that is as good, but nobody’s heard of, and they try charging $500, but because they haven’t got that perceived value in the shopper’s mind, “I know about the letter A, but I don’t know about B, so I won’t take the risk on that.” This is a way that you can bring the prices down if it’s a price thing, or you can build your brand equity up. That’s what all brands do.

They build the brand equity, and then they find what pricing you can get for it off promotion. Are you elastic, and what could you go down to make the most money? On the hairdressers, you’re pulling different levers and sorry, I’ve gone from photographer to hairdresser. In a more local business and understanding, again, we’re back to, “What are those levers? What’s driving my business or what’s stopping my business?” As with mine, I was a bottleneck that was holding us back. We needed to change that. The photographer then, how does the photographer build that equity?

It could be long-term by getting more people in and all they need is more local people to be talking about them the same way as they are about letter A. Whereas lowering the price, you may have to come down a long way in price if people don’t know your product. They don’t know what it’s worth. Dropping the price may not be the best way of doing it. While I’m on a roll, if I were in that small business situation, I would be noting down any data I can create myself. “How many customers I get at this price? How many customers I get at that price?” Trying to work that out.

Any bits of data that you can put in, if you’ve got Excel, you can put in any different subject. I told you I could bore you on this subject. Any different measure that you can get hold of on a time series, and then you can put it into Excel to do correlations. If you’ve got your volume or your sales, your revenue, whatever you’re trying to measure with the correlation, it’ll give you a figure of which one is driving those. You then know which lever you might be wanting to pull. If you pull the wrong lever and don’t know all these things, you could be spending a lot of money and not getting the result you want back.

If you pull the wrong lever, you could be spending a lot of money and not getting the result you want.

I don’t know what these links are, but one of our clients had three different product ranges promoting all of them pretty much. That’s what retailers want. We did the crunching and the result that came out was only one of their product ranges was elastic. If you drop the price, you’ll sell more or sell enough to make more profit, which is a slight difference.

On the other two, they would drop the price and sell a very little bit more, but not enough to warrant the cost of reducing the price. They’d been either not measuring or measuring the wrong thing. They were looking at their total revenue or their volumes. The volumes were slightly higher, but their profits were down. They understood what lever does for your business.

People, especially new entrepreneurs, because they’re very visionary. Some of them are great with it, but I don’t know if they sometimes comprehend what you’re saying because I’ll use old Zig Ziglar in the United States. Zig Ziglar was a preacher and salesman. He’d get up and he’d get everybody. Zig Ziglar would say he bought a bicycle. He bought it from a thrift store. It was used and was because the price was the most important thing to him at that moment until he realized that he had to rebuild the bike for more than he had bought it new.

He tells that story and it’s funny because he’s talking about the value. The brand value is part of what you’re saying for credibility in PR. I’m not a PR specialist, but when we’re dealing with trying to get a company’s revenues going, it’s usually the forerunner because it gives value and credibility to the brand, which shortens the sales cycle, customer acquisition cost, all the things kind of roll down that direction. When you’re looking at all the drivers that you’re talking about, the value portion of that, how they value, you can sometimes command a higher price.

We use influencers for the same thing. If this is a known persona, people will follow that person, whether or not that person even lives that value. If they say something, they will believe it. We see that in movies. We see that in the Celebrity syndrome, we see that in almost all of those things. It’s pretty amazing what you’re doing. If we look at the value of the time spent doing that, sometimes people will think, “That’s easy. I’ll monitor my own drivers. I will create this Excel sheet and I will start to see the correlations.” You were talking about you being the bottleneck because of how much time it takes to do that.

They’re not always factoring in how much time, which there is also value to how much that time is. You’ve got to replace it because time is the only commodity. The only thing you own is your time. That’s one of the things and, hopefully, the only thing you own at the end of the day. This has been so much fun. You and I could talk forever about this stuff because I love it. I bet I want to hear a little bit and so do the readers. What do you do in your free time? I talked about skiing. You talked about family somewhat. They want to hear a little bit more about Graeme himself and maybe not the music of the numbers and analytics so much at this point. What do you love doing?

TRM 26 | Identifying Business Bottlenecks

Identifying Business Bottlenecks: The only commodity you own is your time.

In addition, I like sports in general. I was a skiing structure at one point. I’ve started getting into cooking. My family will be a bit surprised by that one, but I have, and usually when they’re not there. I suppose one of my loves in life is innovating, inventing, and problem-solving depending on which word you want to put on. If you say inventing, people think, “You’re a mad professor.” Over the years, I’ve got about 55 different things that I’ve invented and going to build at some point, not particularly patented. I love looking at a problem, usually a practical problem, and thinking, “How can you sort that?”

I won a prize a few years back. It was Popular Science Magazine. It was for an oil reclamation system. When there’s been an oil leak of which there have been a few, how can you, A) Contain it, but B) Reclaim it without using chemicals? I won quite a nice prize on that one. It’s never been put into practice yet because I haven’t done anything with it. There’s probably a mix of DIY, fixing things, and innovating rather than inventing.

That’s probably the next thing that I’m starting to get interested in all of the renewable energies and using renewable energy to create hydrogen. At the same time, you can use electricity to do desalination. That way, you could pump clean water to more average parts of the world. That would only take multiple billions to turn on, but that’s the small part I’m going to do somewhere.

I bet you could figure out the modeling to sell the fact that it might take multibillions, but how much will it do for the future? I don’t know. It’s pretty exciting stuff that you’re doing. I know that you’re extremely humble. You haven’t told me that. You’re like, “I don’t talk about myself.” I was going to say, you can’t be humble if you told me that. Maybe we need to practice humility.

For people who are reading, before this interview, Graeme was dying because he was like going, “I don’t talk about myself. I don’t get into it. I’ll talk about numbers and all that stuff.” He is quite humble, and it’s fun and refreshing to have had this fantastic conversation with Graeme. Most people want to know, what’s one way they could get ahold of you to talk about global economies and everything else, but also maybe for their studies and their business to help them get off the ground?

Probably the easiest place to find me, and other than my email, it’s Graeme@AiM-EU.com. Those two will usually get me and if they reference your show, then at least I know where it’s come from.

That would be great too. We love having readers, so thank you all for reading this. We’re growing as a show. That’s super exciting, and it’s because of readers and those that support this. If you loved reading this, love what Graeme was saying, share some love, like it, share it, and tell people about it. I’m so grateful again to all of you for reading. Graeme, thank you for being on the show.

You are more than welcome.

Thanks again, everybody.

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About Graeme Scott-Dodd

Graeme Scott-Dodd

For over twenty years, Graeme has lead sales, marketing and category development teams in a number of international branded FMCG companies such as Diageo and Philip Morris. Previous roles included the development and roll-out of in-depth analytical modelling tools across the UK multiple grocer channel, integrating profit building methodologies across Europe as Commercial Director with Scottish & Newcastle International and rolling out global commercial best practice with Heineken International.

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