I had fun last week – meeting the team at Kikki-K – sharing the RedBalloon growth story at their lunch and learn. What a fabulously committed team – it makes sense why the Kikki-K stores are such a fabulous retail experience. We continued our 1,000,000th customer celebrations with a big sale…. I think we were all surprised with the amount of phone calls the advertising campaign is generating and as a result we got in back log in our customer…
Tag Archives: Business Vision
Four great business opportunities
‘Sharing’ is the new business opportunity. People often ask me ‘what is the next big thing?’ Occasionally one get’s an insight into what the world ‘might be like’. Here are some things we know: There is an anti ‘stuff’ movement – not only can we not store everything we own (we live in smaller spaces in cities – and self storage is one of the fastest growing industries) but we are increasingly concerned about the cost to the planet of…
Coming up this week 4 April 2011
I suppose the theme that came out of last week – was ‘am I listening enough?’ It was a busy week, full of celebration. I had a fabulous time at the Contours Conference in the Gold Coast…. What a fun group. I had to rush back to Sydney to host a boardroom lunch at RedBalloon. It is very un-RedBalloon to have a board room lunch – so the invited guests sat amongst the team and we all had lunch together….
Why we must have more women on boards – Part 2
Applauding diversity not fearing it A young woman I know (30 – age is a relative thing) works within the financial markets. She works long hours, with little recognition or even contact with her manager. At annual review time her manager was very tough. He even went as far as to say: ‘the way you approach work is just different to the others.’ Interestingly, all her peers are men. Of course she approaches work differently – she is a woman….
Could a 21 hour work week be good?
I mentioned last week in the post ‘Can we Have it all’ that we are all given the same 24 hours… however how we use them makes the difference of our perception of time… (sometimes time races – other times it drags.) How would you feel if 21 hours was the new norm for the working week? This is an idea being proposed by the New Economic Forum (NEF) that – if money didn’t matter, if status didn’t matter –…
Some days things don’t go as planned – but you still need a plan
With natural disasters in every corner of the country – one can’t help but think of the impact to all those 1000s of businesses… Those who toiled for years – building their enterprise – to have it dashed from them… or maybe not completely but impacted none the less. Some years ago RedBalloon invested in a business continuity plan. The leadership team posed the question ‘what if this building was not here – could we still operate?’ We are an…
Coming up this week – 7 Feb 2011.
Verne Harnish raised an interesting question this week in his Insights Newsletter… the notion that there are no such people as ‘internal customers’. This week I had such a variety of customer conversations. I am very clear that our customers are those people who spend money with us…. However I also believe that the idea of customer extends to those people that allow you to be profitable – and to that end I include my experience suppliers in my ‘customer’…
Help! Can we please all the people all the time?
Things often happen in threes, and today I have had three curly questions; one from a consumer customer, one a corporate customer and one a supply customer. Is exemplary customer service about having ‘Happy Customers’ at all cost? Does a business need to do everything it possibly can to keep customers ‘happy’ – or is it a case of ‘you cannot please all the people all the time’? I’m tremendously proud of RedBalloon’s growth, and the sheer quantity of customers…
It takes 18 years to raise a child – not 18 weeks.
Education is at the source of growth (not just for the individual but also for economies) and, in Australia, the majority of our university graduates are women. We’re number one on the planet in terms of educating women in tertiary institutions – yet the participation rate of those women in leadership roles is dire. So we’re spending the money on education but we’re not getting the return out of our highly educated people. I’ve written before about the economic argument…
Coming Up this year 2011
I always get a little melancholy to say good-bye to such a fabulous year. 2010 was a year that made so many dreams come true. In our wildest dreams I did not imagine that we would achieve the growth that RedBalloon had this year – and more importantly the number of people we have served. If we think about the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Grand Final day – that is the number of people I need to THANK for choosing…
Imagine running a business based on fun - that's what I decided to try when I left a very serious corporate career in marketing to set up RedBalloon...
