Insights Archives - Page 27 of 30

Read Pavlo’s new book: Reset Rebuild Reignite

Written by pippa@aurik.com on August 12, 2020. Posted in Innovation, Leadership, Mindset, Pavlo Phitidis, Trends.

Aurik co-founder and business growth expert, Pavlo Phitidis, has released his second book, Reset Rebuild Reignite. Written during the Covid-19 lockdown, Pavlo draws on extensive experience across a wide range of industries, is the founder of multiple businesses, an investor, a speaker and a respected commentator on entrepreneurial and business growth and innovation.

In Reset, Rebuild, Reignite his starting point is not how to avoid crises – because some are inevitable. Instead, he shows how readers can use any crisis to reset a business to become relevant, rebuild it to scale, and reignite it to accelerate growth by capitalising on the change and opportunities that any crisis brings with it.

Crises mean change. And for any business owner, change means opportunity.

There is nothing new about a crisis stalling or wiping out a business. The COVID-19 pandemic that has hit businesses globally does not feel any more or less devastating to the business owner than if their business was affected by the sudden loss of a dominant client, a trade war, burst water pipes halting operations, intransient employees or their product no longer being relevant to the market.

“In the moment of a crisis, we face two options. Step forward into growth and lead the inevitable change it brings or step back into safety and have its impact imposed on you.”

Stories of business owners who have successfully turned crisis to their advantage are underpinned by Pavlo’s practical, action-oriented insights, tactics and strategies that will equip your audience to tackle any crisis that affects a business.

Get your copy from your favourite bookstore. e-books are already available and physical copies will be in store towards the end of August 2020. Follow the links here.

Reset, Rebuild, Reignite as a strategy in any crisis and the evidence it works

Written by pippa@aurik.com on August 12, 2020. Posted in Leadership, Mindset, Trends.

For those businesses that reset their businesses to cope with the lockdown, are rebuilding their systems to entrench their positioning, the data says we are 3 to 6 months away from reigniting revenues.

Pavlo Phitidis drew on a random portfolio of 50 Business to Business (B2B) SME clients, and identified four data points which suggest that these businesses have hit the bottom and are now turning up….at pace.

Listen to him talk about his findings on The Money Show on 702 and CapeTalk:

What data was used

Four data points were used. Average monthly turnover, average monthly profitability, average number of jobs all over a running 3-month average. The fourth data points make up the 7 periods of measure from Nov 2019-Jan 2020 through to May 2020-July2020.

What did the data show

These seven periods of measure take us from a normal economy to level 5 lockdown and then move to level 3 lockdown.

3 Mnth Average	Turnover	Profitability	Jobs	Economy (Months)
Nov’19 – Jan’20	-6%	29%	1,601	3 open months
	Summer holiday period fall in sales, temporary jobs to cope with load
Dec-’19 – Feb’20	10%	101%	1,424	3 open months
	Jan, Feb restocking of product and service to get going, job changes
Jan’20 – Mar’20	1%	-75%	1,501	2 open, 1 lockdown level 5 month (L5 lock)
	1^st month of lockdown, profitability plummets with a 3 week anticipated lockdown not reducing costs
Feb’20 – Apr’20	-2%	-10%	1,395	1 open, 2 L5 lock
	Now evident more than 3 week lockdown, retrenchments activated
Mar’20 – May’20	-17%	-36%	1,099	2 L5 lock, 1L4 lock
	Full lockdown shock, cost reduction, RESET phase activated
Apr’20 – Jun’20	-2%	78%	1,099	1 L5 lock, 1 L4 lock, 1 L3 lock
	RESET phase complete, new business model emerging, REBUILD phase activated
May’20 – Jul’20	-8%	146%	1,263	1 L4 lock, 2 L3 lock
	REBUILD phase ongoing, readying for REIGNITIOIN, employment of new talent picks up

What does the data confirm

Every crisis should see every business owner adopt a 3-phase strategy in response.

Reset your value proposition
Rebuild your system of delivery
Reignite your growth

At Aurik we have been working with businesses throughout the lockdown to do just this, contact us to find out how we can work together to Reset Rebuild and Reignite your business.

WATCH: Build to Sell discussion

Written by pippa@aurik.com on August 12, 2020. Posted in Creating time, Exits, Leadership, Mindset.

How many hours have you worked on your business? Do a quick calculation based on hours per day, days per week and weeks in each year that you have been working on your business. The average among established business owners is around 40 000 hours.

And yet we only spend between 30 and 60 hours in total to sell our most valuable asset.

Pavlo Phitidis hosted an online discussion with business owners in which he advised that every day we spend in our business, should be spent building it to become a saleable asset.

Watch the recording and contact us to discuss your business exit strategy.

Codifying the customer value proposition

Written by pippa@aurik.com on August 4, 2020. Posted in Lead generation and conversion, Operational systems, Positioning.

Through Pavlo Phitidis’ many engagements with business owners he found a number of common issues facing all of them, as we head back into the economy. Issues of uncertainty, funding, and then one of the most complicated: What led to our success pre-lockdown is not what is working now that people are coming back into the economy.

Waiting for things to ‘settle down’ is a wasted opportunity, according to Pavlo. Things have changed, and how do we make our business relevant – how do we change our offering, service and products?

One way is to codify the problems facing your customers in this economy. Listen to the podcast of his discussion about this on 702 and CapeTalk.

Who knows what things will look like ‘after’ Covid? Pavlo says even by the middle of next year we will only be back to 70% of what it was.

What we all know is that you need revenue in the meantime. You can’t keep waiting.

Finding the opportunity in crisis:

Those at the forefront realise that crisis means change to the status quo, which makes your staff, suppliers and customers more open to change too. So it is an ideal time to implement change in your team and offering.

Codifying the change requires a very structured, data-driven methodology.

Business owners desperate for revenue will amend their business in any way to find a new customer. And this can take you down a dangerous path, where you’ll see costs increase to accommodate the strange new systems of delivery.

The better way to do it is to identify your 10 best customers and approach them to get an in-depth understanding of what they need.

Start with marketing. How do they want to be engaged with about your offer?

Then move on to the delivery of the service. How do they want it delivered or installed?

And then what are the economics that work for them in the current circumstances, what will allow them to afford and pay for your offer?

It is important the you don’t ask yes/no questions but rather open-ended ones to encourage them to give you real insights that you hadn’t already considered.

If you can get a sample of 20 customers, and you’ve asked those questions consistently, you will get a good sense of what has changed, what they need in terms of marketing, sales and fulfilment.

You have to codify the steps in each process to ensure that there is a consistency in your delivery. Or you will lose customers because they don’t know what to expect from you and can’t rely on you.

Reset, Rebuild, Reignite

This process amounts to Resetting, rebuilding and reigniting your business.

This is the time of the great Reset – resetting the way that you do everything. Take advantage of it to meet your customer where they are now, and become a leader in your field.

Then Rebuild your system of delivery to ensure you can fulfil your new offering in the way your customers want.

And then you’ll be ready to reignite your business – to let people know that you are out there and that you are doing things differently, and better than anyone else out there.

If your business could use a fresh perspective to reset, rebuild and reignite, contact us.

Three activities to create wealth through private business ownership

Written by pippa@aurik.com on August 1, 2020. Posted in Aurik Business, Leadership.

Wealth is used to describe an abundance of a desirable thing. It could be friendship, love, money, access to a foodstuff and so on.

From the context of a #businessowner, what does wealth mean and how do you create it?

Before we begin, think about money as water

You are simply the custodian of it for a period. When you make it, you either store it or use it. Stored water eventually evaporates or stagnates. Used money is either wasted or generates more value for you.

In this context, a business should be built as a perennial spring. Well designed and built, it should produce water consistently. You use of that water should be well considered. Fertilise and feed productive lands that bear fruit. Bad investment decisions see the money made lost like watering barren soil with old seed.

MAKE MONEY

Money in a business takes two forms:

Free Cash

Money in a business is used to sustain and grow a business. the money made needs to cover all your expenses. Thereafter, you pay yourself a salary to sustain yourself and your family. Any money left is profit and should come to you as dividends or be used to make investments in the business that will accelerate money making. This free cash can also be used to deepen the value of the business to generate future money. This happens by increasing the value of the business’s equity.

Equity or capital

Equity holds the promise of money. It resides in the value of the business should you decide to sell the business. Built right, a business can be sold and for a premium value to generate a capital gain. This will be the difference between the cost of your initial investment in establishing the business and the sales price achieved.

As a business owner, you can build a business to either make money or grow equity or both. To get this right, you need to build your business into an Asset of Value. This is a business that has the following criteria:

It has a good strategy that sets it apart from competitors
It generates steady, reliable sales
It has a well organised delivery capability
Its people are purposeful and motivated
Banks and funders love it
It’s saleable at a premium price on a clean transaction

Building your business into an Asset of Value will see revenue grow at a higher rate than your costs. This gap generates the free cash to make money in the business.

GROW YOUR MONEY

With money made, you need to now make it work for you by growing it.

You can grow it in your business. by making smart investment choices, you can amplify and accelerate the rate at which your business turns that money made into more money made. This might mean an investment into plant and equipment, people and software etc. Many business owners make their biggest mistakes here. Knowing how to invest in your own business is not as easy as it sounds. Alternatively, you can invest outside of your business into stocks, bonds, shares and other assets. In all cases, these investments must money for you either by generating more revenue in your business with little cost, dividends in shares that you have invested in and other capital appreciating assets.

PROTECT YOUR MONEY

Get smart with insurance and tax management. Insurance, as annoying as it can be, protects you from probable and improbable risks. There must be little worse that having, for example your fleet of trucks written off in a fire without insurance to fund the replacement fleet. It will set you back years if not permanently. Also, some investment products serve to protect money drains like tax. You can legally manage your tax rate down on a personal level by investing in retirement annuities for example.

Wealthy people did not get there in a single generation. Nor did they get there through one activity. Sure, we read about some business people who cracked it and got lucky in a single generation, but they are, by far, the exception. Strategy and habit are what builds wealth. Strategy means being clear on how to make, grow and protect your money. Habit is doing and behaving in this way over time.

Work with us to help get your business into a money making, growing asset. We call it an Asset of Value and we are expert at working with you to build your business into one!

Fighting qualities that build a business

Written by pippa@aurik.com on July 31, 2020. Posted in Leadership, Mindset.

Building a business is a fight. You have an idea, you go out there and everyone supports you with talk, but not the walk. The fight begins. At first, its deeply personal and very confusing. Because starting and building a business remains very personal, its very emotional and emotions always, if acted on, lose the fight. As you stay in the game, and that’s a fight you find more opponents. They are competitors and even customers. Once you have stayed and survived those battles, you hit the environment of business and our country. After that, it’s the rest of the world, often with curve balls like a global pandemic thrown in.

Business is built by your behavior. This is led by your attitude. The right attitude leads to the right behavior which builds the right business.

ATTITUDE IS WHAT BUILDS A BUSINESS

Fighting, embracing and agreeing to fight is the single biggest act of self-empowerment. An entrepreneur believes that they can create a better world. Optimist. Better because what’s out there is not good enough and can be done better. Already you can see, you are looking for a fight. Uber is a good example.

Professional fighters know that the act of fighting isn’t a raw spark of rage. To win, fighters have courage, strategy, tenacity and an insatiable will to succeed. Same-same for an entrepreneur.

Let’s explore a few of them…

Truth is found in action

Learn from being punched. Fear of failure, a certainty in every day actions, is a given. Embrace your fear and it goes. Fail fast, fail small, take small steps before big ones. A good fighter fights ahead of the present moment because success in building a business takes time. Getting wiped out in the first round doesn’t help. This also helps you become familiar with yourself; crucial to manage your ego. Vital to not take things personally. Central to your ability to reflect and learn.

Win with strategy.

Use your passion but have purpose. Asset of value.

Stay in the fight.

Finishing a fight quickly with a single knockout blow is no different to wining a big deal once off. Its opportunistic. A business is built over time and endurance is vital. That means passion is vital. No passion means you are in the wrong game and space OR you have whittled it away because you only had passion.

Stick to your industry. Deepen your knowledge, contacts, understanding and mistakes. Make the mistakes in your industry to develop your experience. Relevant experience. That’s what experience is, a collection of mistakes. Eventually it becomes instinct/intuition. All that is comes from the mistakes that you made, that hurt, that you have consciously forgotten.

Fight yourself.

Avoid comfort, complacency. Be truthful to yourself. Whatever standard you are performing at, raise the bar for yourself and fight for a higher standard. Excellence should be a destination and striving for it a habit. Always stay hungry: perfect your craft, learn new skills and meet new people. If your organization is good, push it to be great. Never settle for the status quo.

Obsess

Balance is an anomaly for the top fighters. Building a world class business means constant vigilance, attention and care. Its unrelenting. The better you do it, the more you’ll love it. The more you love it, the more it will grow you. You never hit plateaus in your spiritual and intellectual person.

You must obsess to stay ahead, to win and to be the best. Competition out there as well as inside of you as a fighter is relentless.

Have a bold battle plan

Set some goals. Get a plan in place to reach them. Set a big vision for the business because that’s where energy comes from. If you are fighting for tomorrow, you will be constantly investing in yourself and your business. If you are fighting for today, you will become an event. Wealth is cumulative. It takes time to build and it requires one brick placed on top of the next to create the home you envisage.

Get a good team around you

Hire experts who understand all aspects of running a successful business, and listen to their advice. Create several goals that you hope to obtain in the coming years. You know you have created a good battle plan when others think you are crazy for trying to accomplish your goals.

Creating opportunity that didn’t exist before

Written by pippa@aurik.com on July 29, 2020. Posted in Innovation, Lead generation and conversion, Trends.

Creating economy is a key entrepreneurial skill. Its something that is entirely possible irrespective of the environment you trade in. It needs an adept, curious mind and courage. It also needs a well developed and relevant asset stack.

Asset Stack

This is about you. Your track record, relationships, skill, reputation and resources. It’s something some people are born with through the families they are born to. Most of us however need to develop it overtime. An asset stack’s relevance is only useful if it’s aligned to the venture you are going to create. For example, a great understanding, relationships and skills in the food sector, which make a big asset stack, are not valued in the mining sector.

Frameworks to craft new economy

All businesses work in a value chain made up of the many activities that add value to the final service or product for customers. Understanding the value chain forms a good theoretical framework to analyse opportunities in that sector. But that alone is not enough, understanding people and social dynamics is vital too. Combining the insights from both are the building blocks to spotting how to create new economy in the sector.

An Example of how it’s working

I’m going to talk about a client that we work with in the USA. They have recently gone to market with their offering that has been 3 years in the making. They are limiting their offering to a few locations in the US in order to further prove it and develop it before going to full scale. They are in the shampoo industry.

The Shampoo Industry

In the traditional, established and accepted value chain dominated by the big shampoo brands, the steps include, for example, the following:

Lab and Research -> Market analysis & Segments -> Design & Coms -> Costs & Pricing -> Distribution & Merchandising -> Sourcing & Procurement -> Demand Forecasting -> Marketing & Sales -> Manufacture -> Promotion & Endorsements

Success here requires that each of these activities are optimised in their performance. Several key measures are used, for example; costs are impacted by volumes of raw materials. New products must then match big market segments. Afterall, everyone needs shampoo. Brand is driven by packaging and endorsements and needs to be matched by distribution and so it goes. All the way through, value is added and so are costs. In distribution, getting the 100,000 bottles of shampoo out of the first run into the market goes through two or four links from distribution centres to wholesalers to merchandisers to retailers to you the customer. More cost is added. And more cost is added too to the endorsements and marketing efforts to get the shampoo into the view of you, the customer. To get the many parts that make up the service and product, these companies organise themselves into silos. Marketing, research, procurement, manufacture etc. they all have chiefs and they all hold tightly onto their domains. Their power lies in data and budgets.

Structure determines behaviour

These businesses rely on predictable demand, long lead times, standard products for mass markets, stable suppliers and dedicated production lines. Chopping and changing production is costly and a big deal. They are all measured on monthly reporting.

Entering and competing in this space is hard. You can see, feel and hear the weight behind the momentum required to compete with the big, established players. Retailers lock you out through unaffordable deals and consumers are hard to reach without them. It’s exhausting but that’s the way it is.

Consumer experience

Our hair changes over time and so should our shampoo. Unless its all the same. But marketing tells us it’s not and science does too. So, we constantly face a knowledge gap and its hard to resolve. You need to go and visit a salon and get an expert opinion which mostly rests on the brands the salon carries. You need to get shampoo too. This means time, cars, parking, queues and aggravation. Errands sounds laborious and inconvenient as a word because they are.

And that’s the material you must work with if you want to challenge this industry. It is well serviced; hard to compete with on prices and access; and with fragmented consumers impossible to reach at scale.

This team wanted to do just that: made up of a hairdresser with 30 years of experience, a value chain expert and a production expert. They tried to get in with a new brand and failed twice. When we met, we decided that doing it the way it has always been done is not going to work for them despite their asset stacks. So, we did it differently and raised some money to make it happen.

Creating new economy

Instead of their value chain being linear and in sequence, its circular and simultaneous. Imagine a central core or brain. It’s a cloud ERP system and linking into it we have:

A hair analysis app
A robotic, automated production line
Sourcing and procurement
Digital design and packaging
Marketing and inside-sales demand creation
To your door distribution and delivery
Customer driven engagement and endorsements

All these individual capabilities link into the ERP cloud of which you, the customer is the centre of attention.

A new agile structure

They have designed this business to rely on variable demand, short lead times and product cycles, real-time live suppliers and all share access to and generate data to present a real-time live experience of the customer. This all procures the following experience:

New consumer experiences

You analyse your hair from your phone, anywhere, anytime. It recommends the most appropriate treatment based on that analysis at that time. It’s private and discrete. From there, the shampoo treatment, now customised to your hair alone is formulated and prior to making it, it offers you the chance to personalise your packaging: “Bruce’s Shampoo”. It offers the shampoo to you after that for $18 with a promise of 24 hour delivery to your door. Once bought, the app confirms your receipt of the product and asks what it feels like, smells like and how your hair looks. It’s You Shampoo. You look and feel great and in your response is a real-time endorsement. This amplifying consumption is tuned into a monthly buy pattern of the brand because you are encouraged to promote and share it by way of a discount on your next purchase. This happens easily because the shampoo will eventually offer this through a membership translating the multiple once-off purchases into a lifetime annuity revenue relationship.

A new economy was created. It wasn’t shampoo. It wasn’t clean fresh hair. It didn’t exist before. Shampoo is the commodity, cost was the problem, time and convenience are the experience. A new economy was created, and we call it the experience economy.

Your opportunity

Any sector or industry is open to being reinvented and redefined. It simply needs love, passion, determination, courage and the right combination of asset stacks.

We obsess about this at Aurik. Working with businesses that generate average annual revenues between R12m and R300m, the competition in this segment of the economy is fierce. Competition that requires innovation as a survival response, not a luxury. To make this happen, work with us. Together, our assets stacks will be formidable.

Friction – it can drive and stall your business

Written by pippa@aurik.com on July 29, 2020. Posted in Innovation, Lead generation and conversion, Positioning.

Within friction, lies opportunity or demise. If products are products, which they mostly are, and service is service, which it mostly is, where is the next edge of competition? Friction holds the key to unlock your advantage. As it does for your competitors too.

Listen to the podcast from Pavlo Phitidis’ discussion about Friction onThe Money Show on 702 & CapeTalk or read on:

What is friction?

It’s resistance. It interrupts free flow and creates discomfort. It’s necessary in some cases, like tyres on the road to give grip. But too much resistance slows the car, not enough will see you spinning wheels and standing still.

A simple example

I workout at a gym that is 700m down the road from a competing gym. They are premium gyms, big, spacious and have top-end equipment. They have pools and tracks, trainers and studios. They offer towels and fruit and they have coffee-cafes too. They cost the same. They have parking and they have views with lots of natural light.

A new gym brand has come into town and is locating exactly equidistant from these two gyms. It is big, spacious and holds the promise of offering great service and equipment. The product is the product and the service is the service. But say the new gym offers boxing classes and they become popular. I’ll bet within a week; the two other gyms will do same. So where is the edge of competitive advantage?

Friction mostly lies in experiences – conscious and unconscious

To enter my current gym, I arrive at the parking, collect a ticket, walk up some stairs which land in the foyer. There, I must present a plastic card that is then swiped at the turnstile which unlocks and lets me through. After my workout, I have to validate my parking ticket, exit the turnstile, validate the ticket again and then exit the parking. It’s the standard operating procedure at my gym and the competing gym.

I do this mostly unconsciously until I don’t have my card, cannot find it, keep forgetting it or it malfunctions. It’s annoying and its offensive. After years of loyal membership, being scolded at the reception for not having a card again is unpleasant. Yet I tolerate it because it’s the standard operating procedure at my gym and the competing gym too.

Say the new gym adopts a different approach. For example, upon becoming a member, when you arrive at the parking, the camera recognises and identifies you. You park, enter the building and the path from there into the gym is unimpeded. Through facial recognition, correlating me to my membership, I have no need for a card, no need for a parking ticket and no need for any of the off awkwardness that I experience when I have neither of the cards for any number of reasons. Now, suddenly, through that experience, the former experience is not only annoying, but an issue. Why should I now tolerate it when a new operating procedure that makes me feel welcomed, easy and relaxed be possible. I only notice it when I have it but when I have it, I notice it angrily.

Friction is competition at the edge, and it stacks up to put you ahead

This is one example that this new gym could deploy to set a different standard. This mindset also translates into other areas where friction in the entire gym experience exists. By solving and removing friction from an additional 8 or 9 interactions, they stack up and through that amplify a fundamentally different experience. Subtle, small, silent in many ways, friction unseen in your business will harm it. Seen and addressed, it will stack up to set you apart.

We work with established business to build competitive advantages through understanding who your clients are, what problems they have and then curating experiences for them that sets you apart. It’s critical to survive and valuable in valuations and exits. It is the essence of a brand and that means a business that is beyond you, a saleable business that is!

Fund your business growth through Aurik Capital

Written by pippa@aurik.com on July 28, 2020. Posted in Aurik Capital, Funding.

Historically, 60% of the market recovers within 6 months of a crisis. What this means is you don’t have a lot of time to capitalise on the opportunities presented by the change brought about by Covid-19.

Now is the ideal time to focus on business growth, and through our specialised equity fund, Aurik Capital, we can offer you funding to support your business growth.

Aurik Capital is designed to invest exclusively in the growth of established businesses generating annual turnovers between R15 million and R150 million.

We invest differently to traditional venture capital funds. Our offer includes:

Working with you through Aurik Business Accelerator to develop and structure a growth plan to meet your ambitions
Actively supporting the implementation of your growth plan and build a body of evidence to demonstrate its achievement
Providing funding through multiple tranches for the duration of the growth plan to meet your growth targets and ambitions

We specialise in providing growth funding only, between R1 million and R7 million for the duration of our engagement.

Our Investment Criteria include:

Established businesses with annual revenues between R15 million and R150 million
All sectors permitted by the regulations for Section12J funding
Only businesses that are engaged with Aurik qualify for funding

Please join Pavlo Phitidis for a discussion on the fund, and how it is more relevant than ever to invest in your growth.

Date: 12 August 2020
Time: 08h00 to 09h00
RSVP: Here

Collaboration for revenue generation

Written by pippa@aurik.com on July 24, 2020. Posted in Lead generation and conversion, Leadership.

Generating revenue in this unhappy economy is a major issue for most business owners. Until the velocity of the economy picks up again, finding the right partners might enable you to do something, and sell something, to get through this tough time.

If you can collaborate with someone who has earned your trust, you can get access to some good revenues until the economy sorts itself out again.

Listen to the podcast of Pavlo Phitidis discussion about collaborations on 702 & CapeTalk:

Crisis does push people to change their behaviour, and that ability to change brings a willingness to see, listen, hear and engage with new offerings.

How do you find a collaborator?

These collaborations are relationships you’d be looking to establish outside of your everyday operating business. So it starts with understanding your own business. You have to know what you do, and what you do not do.

When Pavlo is approached to collaborate, and he sees a lot of crossover between what they do, and what he does – that’s not a collaboration. That is sharing your clients with your competitors! When you understand what you do an don’t do, then look at what your collaborator does and does not do. They need to have complementary skills and offerings, not competitive offerings.

A good collaborator serves the same customer in different fields or areas. In this environment, where people are very apprehensive about spending money, the client gets increased value, at a lower cost than if they were seeking both of your services independently.

How do you take the new offering to market?

Pavlo advises each party approaches a customer of theirs so that there is equal exposure to risk, and ask them whether they would see value in the collaborative solution. At the end of the day, the customer is the 3^rd party in the collaboration. That’s the starting point.

Is it a match?

You need to believe in the value of your collaborator, if you are going to trust your customer with them. And there needs to be an alignment of values, to ensure the relationship remains regardless of how the collaboration may change in response to customers’ needs. You don’t know what you don’t know when you go into the collaboration.

Once you have success in a collaboration, then additional pressures may strain the relationship – who’s going to market it, who’s going to run the administration etc. You need to think of the whole package.

Pavlo’s recommendation is to visit customers together, and then build the solution together to fit the customer. Then proceed slowly. Let things settle before putting your foot on the accelerator, because truth is only found in action.