Apr 11, 2019 | Business
According to the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC), Canada’s digital economy is growing steadily.
By 2021, ICTC forecasts that 216,000 new jobs will be created in this sector, for a total of 1,637,000 jobs.
Only 25% of ICT jobs are held by women. Many factors can explain this disparity, and TECHNOCompétences believes that one of them is the lack of networks, mentors and female role models in this sector.
To help buck this trend, the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal is proud to welcome, on March 14, a leader who is deeply committed to the role of women, particularly in the IT sector, the former marketing director of Facebook: Randi Zuckerberg.
Passionate about tech and media, the Harvard graduate launched Zuckerberg Media in 2013.
With her company, Randi wants to further encourage women of all ages to take an interest in tech and entrepreneurship.
To do so, she creates varied content to reach a large female audience. Among other things, she is the producer of Dot., an animated series with a tech-savvy heroine as a role model for young girls, as well as Dot Complicated, a weekly radio show on the business world.
She is also the best-selling author of four books for girls and women, both to inspire and motivate them and to explain how technology and social media influence our lives.
In addition to developing content to encourage women to become entrepreneurs, she is also an angel investor. The businesswoman wants to play a significant role in identifying the next generation of successful women business leaders by financing their projects.
Recently, Randi was appointed to the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Social Media and the United Nations Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurs Council, and was named one of the 50 most influential people in digital media by The Hollywood Reporter.
Over the years, the Chamber has welcomed many prestigious speakers as part of its Bell International Leaders series, including President Barack Obama, U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Prime Minister Manuel Valls, former President of General Electric Jack Welch, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.
Mar 7, 2019 | Business
Women-owned businesses continue to be the shining light in the current market. According to the Center for Women’s Business Research, female entrepreneurs generate $2.3 trillion to the American economy and employ more than 18 million people.
There are many examples of women in business success stories but we did not have to dig deep to find the truly inspirational female business leaders. The following women in business have overcome great odds and serve as a beacon for all those to follow.
Each of these examples provides varying degrees of hardship and success. Some, like former Washington Post CEO, Kathrine Graham, had no idea of the ability in her until tragedy struck. Others, like Oprah Winfrey, have the spark of greatness within them. As William Shakespeare stated, “Be not afraid of greatness; some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.”
Katherine Graham, CEO Washington Post
Graham’s rise to publishing leadership was something “thrust upon” her. Following her husband’s death from suicide depression, Katherine had chosen to fill her husband’s shoes as the Post’s publisher. Katherine had no idea of the greatness ahead of her but as stated in her autobiography “Personal History”, “What I essentially did was to put one foot in front of the other, shut my eyes, and step off the edge”. That courage led her to become the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Katherine’s success can be summed up by her words, “To love what you do and feel that it matters—how could anything be more fun?”
Ruth Handler, Founder of Mattel & Barbie Creator
California female entrepreneur, Ruth Handler transformed her belief of girls playing with paper dolls, to dolls with breasts being vital to the child’s self-esteem. That belief led to the icon everyone knows as Barbie. From a garage in 1945, Mattel grew to become a Fortune 500 company. Ruth’s understanding of self-image continued later in life when she developed the “Nearly Me” breast prosthesis following a mastectomy. Disliked by feminists, Handler’s ability to stick to her vision shows the trait required by all small business owners.
Mary Kay Ash, Founder Mary Kay Cosmetics
Probably one of the most significant impressions left upon women’s opportunities to succeed in business was from the positive and giving attitude of Mary Kay Ash. Mary Kay entered the world of selling for a company called Stanley Home Products. Throughout her career, she won numerous awards and upon retirement decided to take the entrepreneurial plunge and build her “dream business”. And what a business it was, Mary Kay Cosmetics has gone on to change the lives of millions. Success did not come easy to Mary Kay, her husband died one month before the company launch but her philosophy endured, “If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can’t, you’re right.”
These women represent a small sampling of many great women in business influentials. The one common thread among the stories of success is that success does not come easy. Success goes hand in hand with hardship and challenges. Never lose sight of your small business struggles, they are a requirement for great things. |
Mar 7, 2019 | Business
Most early stage companies chase anyone with money. However, if you
truly want to scale you need to learn how to say ‘no’ to a lot more prospects.
People who to
scale their businesses are not just looking for 10 to 15 percent growth a year.
They want to grow 50 to 100 percent a year or more. While this kind of growth
is not easy, it’s very doable for many businesses. The challenge is that if
they want to grow at these rates, they need to change the way they do things.
And that change can be tough.
One of the toughest changes they
need to make is who they prospect and sell to. Typically, most businesses with
one to 10 million dollars in revenues use chameleon selling. This is where they
hunt for leads and then customize and adjust their products and services to the
needs of whatever prospects they find. While you can build a good business this
way, you won’t build a scalable business.
In order to grow systematically,
you need to focus on a small, limited set of products and services that serve
the needs of a target set of customers. This is the only way you can hone your
processes proficiently, find talent efficiently, and train your people
effectively, and consistently deliver a quality product or service.
When working with companies who
want to scale, we should typically start
by defining their ideal customer by looking at past customers and finding
companies who have been profitable, easy to serve, and promoters for the
business.
Once we have a good set of example
ideal customers, we can ask a series of questions that define our ideal target
customer. Any prospect who doesn’t fit this profile should be de-prioritized in
the funnel, regardless of how attractive they look.
1. How would you pick your ideal customer out of a crowd?
The first thing we look at is
demographics. What does your ideal customer look like externally. What car do
they drive, what school did they go to, how big is there business, in what
industry are they, or in what geography are they located? These are things we
find in industry reports or through some good Google searching.
This information helps us figure
out where we can find these targets and what strategies might work best in
terms of prospecting and finding leads. The better we do this and the more
refined the demographic description, the easier it is to find a productive
channel.
2. What’s happening in your ideal customer’s head?
The second thing we look at are
the psychographic attributes of these core customers. These are their values,
concerns, priorities, tendencies, and habits. It tells us how they think and
what’s going on in their heads. With a good psychographic profile, we can
understand what will get their attention, what they are concerned about, and
how they make decisions.
This tells us how to best sell to
them and how to position our products and services to meet their needs. It will
influence everything from types and style of imagery we use in our advertising
to the tone and language of the copy we use in our communications.
3. When is the best time to approach your ideal customer and with what
offer?
Finally, we want to ask ourselves
what triggered the sale or beginning of the engagement. Using our example core
customers, we look at what prompted them to start a conversation with us that
led to a closed deal. This can be an internal event that occurred- hiring an
employee, or moving offices. It could also be external events such as a new
regulation going into effect, the introduction of a new competitor, the change
in industry technology, or a change in the economy.
These events tell you when you
need to communicate with you prospect. Too early and you’re jumping the gun.
Too late and you’ve missed the boat. Getting this right will increase the
impact of your message and greatly improve the efficiency of your selling.
It’s also important to map and
understand any lags or delays that happen between these events at the beginning
of a sales conversation. Knowing that your core customer typically searches for
your solutions six months before or three weeks after an event is important for
the timing of your messaging.
By clearing defining your core customer in
specific terms, you’ll be able to be more strategic and efficient with your
selling process. Even better is that you’ll streamline your delivery and
operations management since you’ll be focusing on just a few products and
services rather then customizing your solution for each customer.
Mar 7, 2019 | Business
Educational AI forum
coincidentally started out in 1998 as a ‘Tomorrow Lab’. Here, some 350 data
scientists, mathematicians, and developers are working across more than 40
different areas of expertise at any one time.
At the forum, the talk was
of data lakes, random forests, and “boiling the ocean.” Nature metaphors aside,
it was a chance to experience our newest techniques for analyzing and modeling
data to help our clients solve some of their most intractable problems.
“The thinking in AI has
changed from ‘What’s possible?’ to ‘How do I do this?’” explains Rafiq Ajani,
the partner who leads the North American analytics group. The general session
was followed by a whirlwind tour of demos from our experts.
Up first was Luke Gerdes
developing analytics to help counter terrorist networks and insurgents.
Today, he focuses on natural
language processing, a branch of artificial intelligence that uses analytics to
derive insights from unstructured text—that is, text that is not organized into
a structured table but appears in written documents.
These could be legal
contracts, consumer complaints, social media—and, in one example, conversation
logs between pilots and towers.
“Almost 90 percent of all
data is unstructured,” he explains. “We are just at the tip of the iceberg in
developing potential applications.”
Following next was Jack
Zhang, who has been with the analytics group from its humble beginnings of
Excel sheets and traditional statistical models. Today, he leads our work on
AI-enabled feature discovery (AFD), which he describes as “boiling the ocean”
to find the insights.
AFD is about testing every
possible variation on a set of information to understand outcomes, such as why
customers cancel a service or patients make certain choices.
“It’s a statistical-modeling
concept that’s been around for years—but automation has changed everything,” he
says. We can test every possible variation of immense data sets—hundreds of
millions of variations—in a fraction of the time, and it highlights pockets of
features we can dive into for new insights.”
Adrija Roy, a geospatial
expert, demoed our OMNI solution. It combines geospatial data (transit hubs,
foot traffic, demographics) with customer psychographics (shopping history) and
machine-learning techniques. Businesses are using OMNI to understand the
economic value of each of their locations in the context of all of their
channels. It’s guiding decisions on optimizing location networks.
The final demo was about
deep learning, presented by Vishnu Kamalnath, an electrical engineer and
computer scientist, who did early work training humanoid robots.
In deep learning (DL),
algorithms ingest huge sets of unstructured data, including text, audio, and
video, and process them through multiple layers of neural networks, often
producing insights humans or less complex models could not grasp. DL algorithms
can detect underlying emotion in audio text, are used in facial recognition,
and can track small, fast-moving objects in satellite imagery, such as fake
license plates in traffic.
“People used to think of deep learning as a
really expensive proposition, requiring complex hardware,” says Vishnu, “But
the cost is dropping; tools are becoming commoditized. Don’t shy away from it
as an esoteric solution.” Deep-learning applications are estimated to be $3.5
trillion to $5.8 trillion in value annually across 19 industries.
While technologies are advancing at a healthy pace, one challenge remains
unchanged: getting right kind of data for the right use case at the right time.
“The data component takes 80 percent of the time to gather, clean, and run in any
project,” says Jack Zhang. “We still live by the maxim ‘garbage in, garbage out’.”
Mar 5, 2019 | Business
So, you dream of the corner office? One thing to remember is that along with that ambition comes the responsibility of dealing with a whole bunch of people trying to rise up below you.
You may allow your mind to run wild with thoughts of captaincy, authority, vision and all that other good stuff your dreams tell you are the meaning of being a CEO. But guess what? It’s not for everyone. Why? The realization of that dream is a massive undertaking: You will have to oversee every aspect of the business.
And that’s just the beginning. Take a look at these five things to focus on before you pursue — and perhaps down the line accept — a position as the captain of a ship.
Learn To Say No
Turning down requests or ideas is a learned behavior — and one you’re better off mastering quickly. A CEO’s mission is to keep perpetuating a vision for the business; that means always being on the lookout for new ideas without being tempted to try every one. Along with vision comes the intuitive process of what is good for the future of the business.
Learn To Promote Your Business
A good CEO is interactive in promoting the business. You never know where the next idea, alliance or collaboration may come from. Building a case for your business lets people know you have a passion for and belief in what you do and what the business can do for those listening. It means having a real and true understanding of your business and what it can contribute to people and to the community.
Learn To Read Financials
The best way to stay ahead of problems and opportunities like potential embezzlement and takeovers or acquisitions is the ability not only to read but also interpret financial statements. It’s a great skill to have when negotiating with banks, investors or potential partners. Remember, there’s always someone who can spot something you may have missed.
Learn To Be Open To Critics
Everyone loves to take a shot at the big guy. It’s part of the job that nobody wants, but everyone has something to say about it. It’s a merciless position that has you listening to a myriad of interpretations about you, your team, your business. The secret? Don’t take it personally. Just be proactive with the things you can change, because no matter what, people who are ignorant to the process and what is involved will always have something to say. All they want, really, is to see change — therefore, it just becomes noise in the end. As the saying goes: “Ignorance, we can fix. Stupidity is forever.”
Learn The Business From Every Angle
Whenever a CEO takes over a business, it’s not just about financials, meetings and strategy. It’s about understanding the inner workings of the business itself. From the production line to the manufacturing department to shipping and delivery, the CEO should understand and witness every function that contributes to the bottom line. This way, in case of emergency, a CEO can step in and show that their position is not relegated to the corner office only — that they have earned their respective title because they not only know their job, but they know everyone else’s, too. |
Mar 4, 2019 | Business
Do you ever wonder why some companies are successful and perform better than others? Or why some are hard to beat and others are not? Well, if a company wants to stay competitive in the industry, it must create and execute a strategy that is good and sound.
For example, companies like Amazon have been successful for years because their strategy is tightly tied to their vision. Amazon is known as the most customer-centric company in the world. Its products and services provide a seamless experience, where people can come to a place, find, discover and buy online.
A strategy is a long-term plan that you create for your company to reach the desired, future state you envision. A strategy includes your company’s goals and objectives, the type of products/services that you plan to build, the customers who you want to sell to and the markets that you serve to make profits.
A strategy is solid when all the assumptions you make at the time of its creation have been validated and tested for accuracy, and the decisions you’ve made can be presented with clear facts and evidence. It is important to ensure that your strategy aligns with your company’s objectives, the type of business that your organization does and is known to do and the environment in which you plan to thrive. For example, Google’s vision is to provide the best internet experience to users. It’s well-known to the public as Google Search. All the products and services that Google builds are aligned with its core objectives.
A good strategy will help you make good investment decisions, like how and where you would like to spend money. It also helps to provide guidance on project prioritization and other activities within your organization.
What To Consider When Developing Your Own Strategy
1. Clear, long-term objectives: Prepare a strategic plan that is long-term and realistic. What type of products/services would you like to build? Who will be your customers? What markets would you like to serve, and what activities would you like to carry on to get to your desired future state?
2. Opportunity: Carefully analyze what opportunity exists in the future and how it might evolve over time. Gather more data and facts associated with it before finalizing any decisions. Clearly diagnose the risks and challenges anticipated in pursuing this opportunity and come up with the mitigation plan to address them.
3. Innovation: Ensure that the products/services you plan to build are unique, with clear differentiation — and that they are aligned with your business. Think back to when Apple launched the iPod, a truly innovative product. The company has since been well-known for its brand and quality. Along with its computers, people buy Apple’s other products too, like the iPhone, iPad, etc., even though they might be more expensive than the alternatives.
4. Competition: Ensure that your strategy remains competitive. Choose a market that is either not served or underserved with little or no competition, and be the first one there. This way, you capture the market share, build your brand and position your company well in that marketplace, making it harder for any new entrants.
5. Economies of scale: Lower the cost of your goods/services while remaining innovative. Offer unique features and high-quality customer service. For example, Walmart always tries to sell its products at a much lower price, increasing its sales through a large customer base and generating higher profits.
6. Time to market: Carefully evaluate the options of “build versus buy” for the products/services that you plan to offer your customers. Sometimes, it might be cheaper to buy part of the products or solutions that are already available or outsource to a third-party vendor to save some cost of producing your goods/services and getting them out in the market.
7. Tests: Periodically review and update your strategy to ensure that it’s valid at all times and meets your company’s objectives and market needs. Test it out in small phases. It’s better to fail fast when it is less expensive and recover from mistakes.
8. Risks and failures: Factor risks into your plan and allow your organization to accept failures. Use unique insights gained from successes and failures to learn from your past experience and improve your future.
9. Stakeholders: Once your plan is finalized, share it with employees in your organization to provide them with guidance and reasoning on the initiatives that will be carried out within the company. Explain how it relates to them and to the firm. Additionally, prepare a separate plan to share with your external stakeholders, like investors, partners, suppliers, industry analysts and your customers. Let them know what you are doing, why you are doing it and how it affects the company’s forecast in generating revenues and impacting shareholders’ value.
Want your company to be successful and perform better than your competitors? Develop and execute a solid, competitive strategy to make profits that generate above-average returns. |
