Perseverance Week

Perseverance, it took Edison one thousand attempts to create the light bulb, when asked how did he feel in getting it wrong one thousand times, he replied that it he did not get in wrong but it was a one thousand step process to create the light bulb. What a fantastic way to think. James Dyson had thousands of goes to get  his vacuum cleaner to work, it was his sheer persistence and determination that evolved into a billion euro company.

I was employed by a company that was part of a rather large PLC., when it came to the year 2k, we were not sure that out IT system would be able to cope with the fears that had accompanied the year 2k. The system was out dated & needed to be replaced. It was decided that we would join the IT system of the holding company. I was given the task of project manager on our end, I mentioned that I knew something about computers & was landed with the job to be exact. The roll out went fine & we rolled it out over a weekend by working through the night. We had done our homework we had test systems in place, training had been completed all the comms were working & tested before we went live. The working through the night was taking the live information from one system to the other across all the branches. Overall it went well & it was rewarding to see the whole thing up  working correctly after all the effort that we had put into it.

As part of the exercise I had become familiar with the holding companies IT system & how many customers they had. They had thousands of trade customers on the system far more that we had, even up to ten times more. We could see their customers on the system if we done a global search. I came up with the idea that we would offer all the holding companies customers credit facilities with us subject to their accounts being in terms. The plan was that they could use their accounts that they already had on the system  in our branches. Now having such an innovating idea can have its problems, can we cross sell to other companies & who will collect the money, were the two big issues. I could have walked away from the idea but I knew there was value in this, so I persisted. We went to CEO of the holding who thought it was a great idea & would allow us to cross sell. The next thing to deal with was the collection of monies. It was agreed that the accounts would be treated the same & the credit controller would collect the money as normal. If an account turned into a bad debt we would take the hit for the debts.

So we now have a green light to cross sell. How would we get the message out there to almost twenty thousand customers. If we post everything out the postage bill alone will be close to €10k. I approached the idea of sending the letter of offer with the holding customers statements. That meant I would only have to pay for the letter that I was sending out & more importantly it would go with the holding companies statement run so you could very quickly see the connection between the two companies. As part of the letter I put a fax back on the letter for further details. We got permission that we could do this & we sent the letter to the print house to be printed. The statements & letters went out within a couple of weeks. When the letters went out our fax machine was on over time within the first  week I would say we had over three hundred enquiries looking for information. The whole thing cost less than one thousand euros to print. We had pulled in over €750k in year one. I ran this a couple of times a year & we were over €3m by year three. It cost less a couple of thousand a year to run but I have never seen such a great return on investment as with this campaign. I knew that there was money in this & it was through sheer persistence that pulled it over the line.

I would subscribe to what Melrona spoke about in psychological capital or the power of positive thinking. I leave you with the quote from Henry Ford & a graph on attitude.

Regards,

BIP / SO'D.