Nobody likes negativity. And yet it often surprises me that so much exists when you look around at business marketing and personal branding.
Some businesses make money from it and some personalities thrive on causing negative publicity. None of this sits particularly well with me, nor do I find it particularly engaging. When I started Space HR I made a pact with myself that I wouldn’t focus on the negatives.
It’s easy to get drawn into thinking that providing employee engagement as a managed service to businesses involves solving negative problems that already exist. Before I started working with any real customers I had to put some copy together for a marketing pack to send out to some prospects. I laboured over it.
I looked at the competition and spent way too long putting some words together that helped people to understand the problems I was solving.
It read something like this...
Spotting The Symptoms
Many of the companies we speak to suffer the same underlying challenges. These are often costly and include;
- Regular recruitment, escalating salaries
- Difficulty finding great talent
- Poor customer feedback
- Targets & deadlines being missed
- Lack of creativity, innovation and motivation
- High sickness and absence
- Good people leaving, average people staying
Letting these problems develop, embed and grow in any business can lead to much bigger problems down the line.
Initially I thought this was great! It identified the issues my potential customers might be facing and if this sounded familiar they’d contact me - simple! But the more I read it back to myself and reflected, I started to think about how it would make me feel as a potential customer of Ten Space.
I might recognise some or even all of these problems in my business, but would this make me want to speak to Ten Space? Probably not - It’s too negative.
I’m currently in the process of writing copy for my new website. It’ll launch in the next few months and I’m really excited by the prospect of moving quickly from ‘what I thought I was doing’ to ‘what I'm actually doing’ now I’ve got real customers!
Using my new methodology and some employee feedback tech, I’ve been working with a bunch of new customers over the last 6 months. Even though it’s early days, I've come to realise that none of my customers are really experiencing the issues outlined above - and thank goodness for that. In fact it's been a thoroughly positive experience all round.
Some of the common characteristics I’ve found with my customers have been;
- They’re all great business leaders already
- They’re all running great businesses already
- None of them have difficulty finding or retaining great people
- They are focused and great at what they do
- None of them have issues with sickness and absence
- They have a loyal customer-base and very limited customer churn
So, you may ask, why the heck did they want to speak to me? Answer - Because they wanted to achieve more with their businesses.
None of them had deep rooted problems, but they were all ambitious and wanted to get their businesses into the best possible shape for continued growth.
Importantly they all recognised three key things that I knew already;
1. The prevention is better than the cure - There are no quick fixes, but a regular temperature check of engagement coupled with regular feedback is the ultimate preventative measure rather than trying to fix problems after they occur and the rot has set in.
2. Constant and consistent effort is required - A big effort once a year will achieve very little. It becomes a colossal effort that nobody enjoys and can often lead to lower engagement in your teams when nothing really changes. Keeping it simple and regular achieves better outcomes.
3. Marginal gains create major success - My customers recognise that if they get just one highly useful piece of feedback from the survey then they can achieve great things from it. We’re not trying to solve the world's problems with each survey, instead we’re trying to build an amazing business, one brick at a time.
As I continue on this journey, I’m sure I’ll learn a whole lot more about what business leaders want from the Ten Space experience, but one thing is for sure, the way we promote Ten Space will focus on positive outcomes all the way!
If you want to achieve more from your business, Ten Space can help. Drop me an email - victoria@tenspace.co.uk
