How the power of the crowd will transform business

One revolution that’s in the making today is that of the crowd.  There’s  lot of literature around it but it hasn’t yet transformed business in the way i think  it inevitably will.

The staffing industry today is a whopping $450 Bn market. Of that only a mere $1Bn has been captured online. That’s 0.2% penetration.

If we compare that with commerce which leads services, there’s somewhere between 10-15% of the total value of commerce transacted online today and that’s projected to increase to over 50% in the next decade.

In relative terms the market of eServices is where eCommerce was in 1996!continue reading »

Reflections on 2013 and resolutions for 2014

It’s been a good year

2014 has began well. Partly because I was skiing with my family as I usually do in the beautiful alps. The fresh air and the mountain always helps me self-reflect and think more. Without a shadow of doubt that one week skiing may be the most productive of my entire year. And whilst I always push myself to self-reflect that time of year – and this year in particular- is the deepest and most meaningful retrospection of all.

As I reflected on the past year I realized how much had actually happened. We started the year on steroids, the typical ‘go go’ top line investor fuelled growth mode. We operated on vanity metrics instead of sanity metrics.  We were fat and over-bloated. We were management heavy and inefficient. We were shooting for the stars and developed tunnel vision.

And then something painful but retrospectively lucky happened. The investor appetite changed, some of the assumptions, promises and myths came out sour. Some hidden realities came out of the wash. The froth came off the cappuccino.

I’ve said time and time again that the true test in life is what one does when that happens. In our case I’m proud to say that we just picked ourselves up, implemented some drastic changes, got real and elevated sanity above vanity.

It wasn’t easy.  We had to let go of team members, change plans and direction, scrap a lot of things that had emotional equity built in, and especially for the guy at the top who gets the shit from both ends – investors on one and team on other – I can tell you I had more than a few sleepless nights.

But we pulled through. We turned the business into cash-flow positive, we became leaner and meaner, the people staying over being part of the earlier hires who had more dedication and passion about who we are and what we stand for. Who share our sense of purpose.

We made drastic changes like moving from two split locations to one, which meant making our support team in London redundant. We dropped a few balls in the process with some metrics temporarily dipping but overall we came out a winner. Our costs overall halved and our revenue trebled in the year.

For this I am most grateful to the team that’s left over. They are warriors, with heart, passion and dedication. To reward them I doubled the stock pool and allocated a much bigger chunk of equity to the team that stayed for the fight. Some of the more senior management voluntarily took salary cuts in exchange for more stock.

The difference I’ve seen in mindset and perceptions is that from night and day. Its almost a different company now. Before I had employees. Now I have partners. Co-owners. And I push them to look at me more as a peer than a boss.

But good is the enemy of great !

Yet with all of that, I was still troubled at the end of the year. I had a niggling piece of the puzzle missing somewhere. I felt we did good but not great. continue reading »

Listening to our users..introduction of new features.

In a recent Google Hangout which I now hold regularly with our users, one of the features that was requested was the ability to dive into your activity as a Buyer and a Seller separately. This was launched on the site yesterday. Just navigate to the top of the header and click on your avatar to drill into  your activity as shown by the screenshot below

Other features to follow soon re an enhanced Inbox with inbuilt search facility and much easier navigation to drill into your messages. Again – requested by PPHers. Stay tuned!

 

Getting PPHers together.


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Another great hangout with PPHers!

This last Friday I held the second video chat with members of the PPH community via Google Hangouts. Both hangouts were so successful (at least I felt so and gauging by the tweets from those who participated I think that is the general consensus) so we decided to regularize them. From now on, every Friday whoever wants to chat with me with no particular agenda, just to share their concerns, issues, delights and whatever else regarding PPH, please sign up on: http://pphgooglehangouts3.eventbrite.com/ (The time of the hangouts may vary depending on what time zone I’m in, but they will happen nonetheless.)

At this point, I should say a special thanks to all those who participated so far! A lot of great things came out of these hangouts, including the need to communicate certain things to the community, like the ones below.continue reading »

The move to a cottage economy?

Something interesting is happening in the world today. Whilst the first big step in technological evolution – the industrialization of the early 20th century- pulled masses of people out of their cottages and organised the workforce around large centralized institutions, the second wave underpinned by Information Technology revolution is seemingly reversing that trend and driving people back to their ‘cottage’. How is that?

Let’s take a few innovations that have become integral parts of our personal and business lives. Relatively recent yet ubiquitous innovations – the internet, social networks, the PC even and the mobile phone, or more lately the blackberry – what do all these have in common other than a few microchips? They are increasingly making us more connected, more mobile, more interdependent yet more independent in terms of how where and when we work. And ultimately more in control of our own time and space. So is this rendering the traditional office as we know it obsolete?continue reading »