Peter Fisk

Anthony Fletcher was at work one day in 2009 when he tried some nuts, seeds and dried fruit that had been delivered in the post by a new company called Graze. Graze had been set up a year earlier by seven friends (including Graham Bosher, founder of LoveFilm) as an internet-based business that posted healthy snacks in cardboard boxes small enough to fit through people’s letter boxes.

Then aged 27 and working for a drinks company, Anthony says he was “blown away by the idea of it”. So much so that he immediately found out where Graze was based, drove across London to knock on its door and asked for a job. The team at Graze were impressed enough by Anthony’s get-up-and-go and enthusiasm to give him the job of head of marketing.

Fast forward to today and Anthony is CEO of the business that now enjoys annual sales of more than £70m and that under his leadership has successfully expanded from the UK to the US. With a masters degree in chemistry from Oxford University, and a year spent doing pharmaceutical research at Princeton University in the US, Anthony might not immediately seem a perfect fit for leading a snack food business.

However, while Graze’s food is all natural, the company is renowned for its very scientific and technological approach to how it operates.

Now selling more than 400 different snacks, ranging from flapjacks to beef jerky, and dried beetroot to carrot crisps, it constantly analyses the 15,000 customer ratings it says it receives every hour to tweak and develop new products and product combinations. This has led to the creation of such best sellers as “Veggie Protein Power”, a combination of soybeans and chickpeas. Meanwhile unpopular products such as fennel and caraway seeds can be quickly dropped.

Not that Anthony would claim it was always plain sailing, especially in Graze’s early years. “Lots of founders and CEOs tell beautiful stories about having the right vision from the start, but it wasn’t the case at Graze,” he says. “We had to iterate, we tried and we failed – we had to pivot a great deal. People were excited, but not about the product.”

One thing that Graze initially got wrong was to try to sell slices of fresh fruit, but Anthony says it had to be axed from the range because even though they “tried to ship it as fast as possible” it wasn’t arriving with the customer in good enough condition.

With its own production facility, Anthony says the business can put new products on sale within 24 hours. He says: “We have a vast amount of data that we can use to understand the product and the customer. “It lets you be reckless and try different ideas. That permeates the business.” It was after he had been with the business for three years that Anthony became chief executive, when he led a management buyout in 2012.

The move, which was backed by US private equity group Carlyle taking a majority stake in the business, saw three of the seven co-founders end their day-to-day involvement in the business but remain as shareholders.

After selling direct to customers via a subscription service for its first six years, Anthony overhauled its business mode in 2014. While subscriptions would continue, customers could also start to make one-off purchases. An even bigger move that year was a successful leap into wholesale, with Graze products becoming available at UK retailers like Sainsbury’s, Boots, WH Smith and Tesco.

Anthony admits that the timing of the move into the bricks-and-mortar world was fortuitous, as supermarkets and other retailers were being put under pressure to remove confectionary products from the “impulse purchase” racks near the tills. “We were very lucky, there was some serendipity involved,” he says.  “The UK government was putting a big drive to remove sugar products from the till, and retailers faced a dilemma of knowing customers were tempted into purchases, but they used to make so much money off it.”

The next big move at Graze was its expansion into the US in 2015. Anthony says Graze knew it had to move fast to get to the market before rivals, so rather than try its luck in one state, it decided to launch in all 50 at the same time. The hope was that its focus on data and its quick response to customer feedback meant it would be able to produce a range of snack products that appealed to US tastes, even if at first some items were not successful.

Thankfully for Graze this approached worked, and while it initially started selling its standard UK range in the US, Anthony says it quickly dropped items that US customers “hated”, such as mango chutney, the UK curry condiment staple. More US-specific products were then quickly introduced, such as “Creamy Range Kern Pops”, which is popcorn with a “creamy, zesty kick”, and chocolate pecan pie.

Within three months of its US launch, Anthony says Graze had gained 100,000 customers – a number that has continued to grow.

Toby Pickard, senior retail analyst at grocery research firm IGD, says there are three main reasons why Graze has become one of the UK’s leading snack brands. “Convenience, its ability to personalise healthy snack deliveries to suit customers’ personal preferences, as well as its ability to tailor new products for local markets,” he says.

On a day-to-day basis Anthony admits he finds it hard to balance being a boss of a company with 500 employees, with being a parent. “It’s a challenge,” says the father-of-two. “One of the most challenging aspects is international travel. It’s demanding, I don’t think there are any easy answers, you just have to manage.” Part of that process is changing his management skills, and taking a step back. He says: “In the early days I was really involved in the decisions, but as the business has grown, I have become focused on not solving all the problems, but still being curious about the organisation and making it better.”

Fatherly is a parenting resource for men who understand that embracing what they’ve become doesn’t mean giving up who they are. Men who want to be great fathers without turning into cliches. Men who spent their formative years laughing at blogs about dads in short shorts, but who will never, ever wear short shorts themselves.

Fatherly’s mission is twofold: first, we aim to be the most robust source of practical parenting advice on the Internet. With a comprehensive suite of content broken down by your child’s exact age, they’ll provide you info on everything from preparing the home for a baby’s arrival, to transitioning them to solid food, to figuring out what to do with this tiny human being once he or she starts walking, talking, and demanding to be shown a good time.

They don’t stop there. To expand your mind and possibly turn you into a super-dad in the process, they publish next-level stories that take approaches as unconventional as the generation they speak to. You’ll find hide-and-go-seek tips from Navy SEALs, travel hacks from professional explorers, even insider school advice from the former Secretary of Education. And yes, of course, they’ll tell you about the best new toys, so you can spend less time wandering the big box store, and more time getting to know the new most important person in your life.

Here’s more about Fatherly by JWT:

Men say their clothing and fitness becomes more important when they become a dad.

Although the parenting landscape is heavy on female-friendly content, millennials are changing the face of the modern-day family. In fact, a recent Pew Research study shows that fathers have nearly tripled the amount of time spent on housework and childcare since the 1960s. Simon Isaacs, co-founder and chief content officer of Fatherly, a new site launched in 2015 to address millennial fathers, sat down with JWT Intelligence to discuss the site.

How did Fatherly start?

When my wife and I were exploring having kids, we signed up for all the traditional parenting sites: What To Expect, the Bump. None of it was really connecting to me. I’ve built and created a lot of marketing agencies in that space, and stuff over at Coca-Cola. There was this idea that women controlled 80% of all purchasing decisions. It wasn’t reflective of what I was seeing, nor could I actually pinpoint where this information was coming from.

In parenting, that became even more pronounced. Everything was geared toward “mommies,” and brands had “mommy blogger” blinders on, and it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. And yet it wasn’t true. At the same time, a recent report had just come out where 52% of men claimed they were the primary grocery shopper. If you look downstream, the majority of master’s and PhD degree students were women.

The way we were speaking to parents was really off. And I realized what a huge opportunity that would be from a marketing and business perspective, but also from an impact perspective. Part of why we exist is that if you can create the content tools and community at scale, you can shift and shape culture. You can get men engaged even more than they already are, and excited about fatherhood. And if you can do that, you can address gender equity at home and at work.

Every new birth today is to a millennial. This is a generation of people who think very differently about gender norms. It’s a generation of people who have equal interest in parenting, as well as in work. Everywhere I looked, I saw men primarily being the one in the grocery aisle, men walking around the park with their Baby Bjorns. Between that and what I was seeing from media and from brands, there’s something big.

How has the reception been since Fatherly launched?

It is beyond my wildest dreams. We had the fastest rise of profitability of any digital media company ever. Last year I had 1.9 billion video views on our Facebook videos alone. We’re now the largest parenting site on social media, and we have about 10 times the engagement of every other parenting site, as well as Esquire and GQ.

We’re doing some stuff right. Parenting media, in its digital form, was built around gen X. We’re able to also attract millennial parents. There’s also a truism that women read men’s publications, but it doesn’t go the other way around. So if you want dual audiences, men aren’t going to the Bump. But women are coming to us, though we’re very focused on fathers.

How does “fatherhood” square with the traditional stereotypes of millennials? Do you still find the generational stereotypes useful?

The millennial stereotype is a little bit of a trap, to some extent. With that said, there’s a lot of examples where millennial parents and millennials are very consistent. For example, a focus on experiences rather than things. We’re seeing that in the way people parent. We’re seeing that in their interest in travel and destinations and experiences with their kids.

Of course, this is digitally native parenting. This is parenting through Alexa and Facebook. Another area where you see distinction and change is in the workplace. Once you are a parent, you are going to be changing jobs less. You’re not throwing caution to the winds. But this generation of parents is certainly freelancing. They are part of the gig economy more than their parents were. But they also have a core understanding of the realities of raising children, because they are so invested in their kids.

What about outside the workplace? It’s interesting that you also have pop culture and regular news, alongside parenting content.

Our guys still want to maintain their identity, of being a cool guy. In fact, men say their appearance and their clothing and fitness becomes more important when they become a dad. They see themselves with their family, and they want to present them and their family in the best possible way.

They’re still watching great shows. They’re still interested in going to cool places. Rather than going to that family-friendly resort, they want to go to the cool place, and they want to bring their kids with them. They want to go to the beer garden, but they want that beer garden to have a kid’s area with a playset in it. They want cool coffee, and they want that coffee shop to have a book corner for their kids to hang out in. They’re not leaving their kid home with a nanny to go to the bar. That’s a big difference.

What is the average Fatherly reader?

It is 100% all over the map. It is America, in many respects. It is as conservative as it is liberal. They are mechanic and vets, and they are executives and stay-at-home dads and artists. What’s cool about parenting is that in a world that has become more divided, there is this uniting of “dadliness.” And we’ve built a really strong community around that.

Are you seeing shifts in how brands speak to fathers?

Yes, massively. One area is brands that have traditionally engaged moms that realize they missed the mark. Those could be stroller companies, personal care companies, cleaning products, you name it. Today, 80% of millennial dads say that they have a primary or equal share in grocery shopping. So these brands need to start to really reach out to them and engage them. They are coming to us to begin to right their ships.

On the other hand, you have brands that have traditionally engaged men: GMC, Spotify. Now that men are putting families at a higher point in their value set, they’re coming to us to help shape their narrative around fatherhood and family. The Esquire, GQ, ESPN world of connecting with them doesn’t resonate as much anymore. And when they did work with those guys, they mostly captured a male audience.

If you look at the Super Bowl last year, it’s all dad-vertising. What used to be the Father’s Day ad is now kind of everywhere. We’re seeing a ton of engagement from finance, for example. Not only are dads still making a lot of the primary financial services decisions, but this is the most important time to engage them. They’re going through this massive life stage. The millennial generation is going from generation rent to generation buy. Sorry Zipcar, but we actually do need a car. And while it sounds nice to have a tiny home, we realize that we need a bigger one. There are other realities.

Often, there’s a massive uproar when brands depict dads as idiots. These guys don’t want to be seen as idiots, as the doofus dad. Yes, everybody should know that by now, but not always. Earlier this year, Yoplait had an ad that was probably well intentioned, but the ad said, “mom’s the boss.” There was a big backlash against that.

On the other hand, they don’t want to be seen as superheroes. They really just want to be seen as parents. And that’s it. Where we’re going with a lot of the brand communications is that it’s not your special dad spot. It’s just fully integrated into how you communicate.

What’s coming up next for Fatherly?

We are going to put a ton of emphasis on YouTube. Men search more for parenting content on YouTube. We’re going after some new platforms this year. We have a big event called the Father of the Year awards, which is our version of the Glamour “Women Of the Year” for dads. That’ll happen in October.

Anything that we didn’t talk about?

Previously, with gen X, everybody was an “expert.” All these content platforms were built around a chat room, where every mom and dad could be the expert. That’s no longer interesting for parents. We’re seeing a big rise in backlash against parental judgement. This generation just wants the damn answer, and they want it from an expert. They want it from somebody who’s the most credentialed. A lot of our approach is to deliver that

The other thing I think we’re going to see is a real focus on boys. The world has put a lot of focus on girls’ empowerment, and rightly so. But we tend to see boys as “easy.” Shrug it off, man up, all these things. We don’t recognize the complexity. there’s a lot of work to do there. I think we’re going to start seeing a lot of work around emotional intelligence and boyhood, overall.

Aspiration is a financial services with a conscience.

Unlike traditional investment firms, which charge a percentage of the assets invested, the company plans to go in another direction: Pay whatever you think is fair.

“Our fee structure is very revolutionary,” explains CEO and founder Andrei Cherny. “It empowers customers to make that decision and gives them the ability to decide whether or not we’re doing a good job for them, and whether or not our values are aligned.”

He points out that in most investment firms, the people managing your money get paid the same amount whether or not they do a good job, and that hinging the company’s livelihood on pleasing customers provides an incentive to serve them well.

Cherny, who has a long history in financial regulation, ranging from a position as a financial fraud prosecutor to working with Senator Elizabeth Warren fighting for the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, built his investment firm for middle-class investors, who he says are under-served in the current market.

“We’re bringing forth a wide range of investment products and investments geared toward the needs of the middle-class investor,” he explains. “Look at the customer base of hedge funds and private equity shops. They serve a clientele that’s mostly multimillionaires and large institutions. Everyone else is buying stocks and mutual funds, doing it on their own.”

Aspiration is so committed to serving the middle-class investor that it has imposed not only the usual minimum investment requirements on its clients (in this case, an unusually low $500), but also a maximum investment: $100,000 per customer, per fund.

Cherny says the cap is to keep the company focused on the under-served investor. “If you have a fund where some people pay $500 and a handful put in $10 million, you’re almost naturally focused more on that type of customer.” With the investment cap, Aspiration aims to limit that sort of bias.

Aspiration — whose motto is “Do Well. Do Good.” — is also focused on giving back to the community. Through its “Dimes Worth Of Difference” campaign, it donates 10 cents of every dollar of revenue to provide micro-loans to struggling Americans.

Additionally, users are encouraged to give the amount of their choosing to the charity of their choice on the website’s dashboard. “It’s the TOMS and Warby Parker approach to charitable giving,” explains Cherny, “but instead of shoe for shoe, it’s economic opportunity for economic opportunity.”

Cherny isn’t worried that his clients will refuse to pay. “A lot of behavioral psychology over the past 10 or so years shows that people have a strong sense of moral obligation and reciprocity,” he explains. “That’s as powerful or more powerful than locking people into a legal contract. If we’re not delivering the products we said we would or living up to the values we set up for ourselves, they have the ability to not pay us.”

Aspiration is not the only company to use a pay-what-you-want strategy, but it’s the first financial company we’ve come across. Some retailers have had success with the model — a North Carolina diner initially tripled its revenues when it asked customers to pay what God wants — but there’s little evidence it’s sustainable or that users trying to make the most of their money would choose to fork over fees.

However, Cherny isn’t alone in his confidence. The company, which has spent a little over a year getting ready for launch, has raised over $4.5 million in funding and counts eBay founding president Jeff Skoll as a member of its board of advisors. Aspiration’s “radical approach to its customers’ fees relies on a trust-based model, consistent in spirit with an approach that I saw drive eBay’s early success,” Skoll said in a press release. “It’s a bold bet and one that I believe will shake up a financial industry that could use some positive disruption.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo-kvh1w60w&list=PLN6pYXbF4CdSxzSMmoO-X9OI7QUEinOtg

Aspiration also wants to help its customer keep track of the impact of their purchases.

The company recently equipped its customers with a new tool, Aspiration Impact Measurement, that shows them how sustainable their purchases are. The firm has about 100,000 checking-account customers.

Let’s say, for instance, an Aspiration checking-account user buys a coffee from Starbucks. When that person checks their account balance they’ll see that they spent $X for their grande frappe whatever. But they will also see a score that gauges Starbuck’s sustainability on a scale of 1 to 100.

In this case, Starbucks has an AIM score of 78, which is the highest of any eatery. The point of the tool is to inform users about a firm’s sustainability so that they can make informed choices about spending. Users can also view their personal AIM score, which essentially aggregates all of the purchases a person makes into one score. It is updated on a daily basis.

“Today, more than ever before, Americans are looking to put their values into action and their AIM score empowers them to demand that corporations act responsibly toward the environment and their employees,” said Aspiration cofounder and CEO Andrei Cherny. “Americans spend $36 billion a day as consumers, making decisions based on cost, convenience and quality. Now, for the first time, they’ll have an easy way to make spending decisions based on conscience, as well.”

A firm’s Aspiration Impact Measurement (AIM) score is based on two different measurements: a people score and a planet score. The former score takes into consideration data such as the ratio of employee to CEO pay, employee benefits, equality of benefits, and the percentage of woman who are managers in the company. The planet score measures things such as a firm’s green house gas emissions and carbon footprint.

AIM scores are calculated using Aspiration’s proprietary algorithm that examines more than 75,000 data points. According to Cherny, the numbers behind the AIM scores are typically used by money mangers to inform their investment decisions.

“These are the kind of data providers that are working for investment firms, and hedge funds,” Cherny told Business Insider.”We repurpose this investor data for consumer purposes. It goes into an algorithm which then figures out those scores.”

The service is only available for Aspiration customers, who can access their AIM scores for free within their Aspiration mobile app.

The brothers Shoichi and Shigeru Yamanaka established an optical glass production plant in the city of Hoya near Tokyo in 1941. Now, with over 150 offices and subsidiaries worldwide, Hoya currently employs a multinational workforce of over 34,000 people.

Vision is at the heart of the Hoya corporation.

We live in a highly visual world where sight is the most important gift of life. Giving you new views and perspectives everyday. Hoya Vision Care manufactures spectacle lenses and optical products. Their motto ‘Eye for detail’ is reflected in top-quality lenses, advanced lens designs, lens treatments and excellent service to wearers and opticians alike.  As Hoya Vision Care says “we embrace your sight, helps to open your eyes and discover the beauty of the world and see more of life.”

Hoya’s Yuniku 3D tailored eyewear is designed entirely around your face and your vision. Regular spectacles can be customised only to a certain degree. The frame and fitting are a given, and the lenses have to be adjusted to suit them. Yuniku, by contrast, uses a revolutionary vision-centric approach. It begins by assessing your visual needs and facial features. Advanced software calculates the ideal position of the lenses in relation to our eyes, and then 3D prints the frame based on those unique parameters. For the first time, you can enjoy the ultimate in optical precision, without compromising on style or fit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_prJ_XvB3g

Traditionally, cyber security software relies on reinforcing the perimeter of the network and applying rules or signatures that identify known threats.

Darktrace’s Enterprise Immune System uses AI algorithms to automatically detect and take action against cyberthreats within all types of network, including physical, cloud and virtualised, as well as internet of things and industrial control systems.

Modelled on the human immune system, it uses unsupervised machine learning and AI to detect threatening deviations from those considered ‘normal’, without relying on prior assumptions. Its technology then creates digital ‘antibodies’ to automatically fight back.

Darktrace was founded by a group of mathematicians from the University of Cambridge, and a group of government intelligence experts. It has raised over $100m (£76.6m) in funding to date, and the system has been deployed over 2,400 times across 64 countries worldwide and detected over 30,000 in-progress attacks.

Customers span all industries including financial services, healthcare, legal, retail, government and transportation.

Indonesia-based innovation catalyst Padang & Co works with businesses and governments, helping them to connect, create and innovate. In February this year it partnered with Unilever to launch Level3, a co-working space within Unilever’s Singapore headquarters, bringing the company together with startups and entrepreneurs to encourage innovation and create new partnerships.

Padang & Co was born out of social enterprise and technology company Newton Circus, founded by entrepreneur Daryl Arnold together with consultant, investor and entrepreneur Adam Lyle and Derrick Chiang, formerly a director at Newton Circus.

The self-funded company was incorporated at the start of 2014 to consolidate its open innovation activities, including the management of UP Singapore, an ‘urban prototyping’ community that encourages people to come together to solve issues affecting cities. Its initiatives include startup matching, hackathons and cloud-enabled challenges, designed to stimulate meaningful and effective outcomes for business and society.

Padang & Co has been growing over 50% year on year since inception.

LEVEL3 is an initiative of the Unilever Foundry and Padang & Co. Connected to Unilever’s regional headquarters, it is a new workspace that supports Singapore’s emerging startup ecosystem and entrepreneur community to create and connect to real business opportunities. It’s the first of its kind in corporate innovation.

LEVEL3 will be a vibrant and inspiring coworking and event space. This is where some of the most interesting startups with leading-edge technologies and business models come to work with the world’s biggest and most innovative companies.

LEVEL3 will open in January 2017. We are on the lookout for startups and enterpreneurs in Singapore and the region to join LEVEL3 as members. Get in touch if you are pioneering the future in marketing and AdTech, enterprise tech (analytics, IoT, etc.), product and ingredient tech and consumer insights. LEVEL3 is also perfect for those inventing new business models or making an impact through social entrepreneurship.

At the launch of LEVEL3 … Speakers (in order): Paul Polman, CEO, Unilever, Derrick Chiang, CEO of Padang & Co and Dr Beh Swan Gin, Chairman of EDB.

Founded in 2013, ZhongAn has rapidly shaken up the insurance market in China, with radically unusual policies targeted at younger consumers.

One such policy covered people for self-inflicted alcohol poisoning if they got drunk while watching football during the 2014 World Cup. Another pays out for delayed flights while customers are still in the airport, sending them electronic vouchers so they can occupy their time by shopping.

The online-only brand, founded by Alibaba’s executive chairman Jack Ma, Tencent’s chairman Pony Ma and Ping An Insurance, already has over half a billion customers holding more than seven billion policies and is likely to opt for an initial public offering in mainland China this year.

In November 2016, ZhongAn launched its own internal incubator focusing on an ‘ABCD’ strategy of artificial intelligence, Blockchain, cloud computing, and data, aiming to develop new technologies for itself and its partners.

Extract from Wall Street Journal, November 2016

Medical insurance often becomes invalid if the customer is drunk. But during the football World Cup in 2014, Shanghai-based Zhongan Insurance turned that rule upside down by offering Chinese football fans a policy specifically for self-inflicted liver damage.

It cost less than $1 and covered sports enthusiasts against alcohol poisoning for 30 days — paying out up to Rmb2,000 ($290) for hospital fees. It soon came to be known as “watching-football-drinking-too-much” insurance.

This has not been Zhongan’s only foray into more specialist areas of China’s insurance market. Another of its policies, called “high heat”, reimburses customers when the temperature hits 37°C. Another insures against flight delays — and, in many cases, pays out while the customer is still waiting in the departure lounge.

But while such products might seem niche, the company behind them is anything but. From a standing start three years ago, it has sold 5.8bn policies to 460m customers. This has quickly translated into profit. Zhongan went from making a loss in 2013 to posting Rmb168m in net profit two years later. Total assets jumped more than 500 per cent between 2014 and 2015, to Rmb8bn.

Now backed by Chinese ecommerce company Alibaba, internet group Tencent and financial conglomerate Ping An, Zhongan is often cited as a candidate for an initial public offering.

Wayne Xu, chief operating officer, does not dispute the often light-hearted nature of some of its products — admitting that some are simply designed to “make people feel better”.

The flight-delay insurance product gives customers digital coupons on their smartphones that they can redeem while still in the airport. “It gives them a reason to walk around while they wait for their flight,” Mr Xu explains. He sees this as a radical approach in an industry that has long struggled to attract young people.

All three investors have already collected user data across vast swaths of China’s internet, through online merchants, messaging applications and bank accounts. Now, when Zhongan underwrites its retail credit insurance products, it can tap into the personal credit scoring databases of the three Chinese internet groups — giving it one of the broadest views of credit data of any company in the country.

To continue the push, Zhongan has prioritised recruiting staff with tech, rather than insurance, backgrounds. “None of us have been working at an insurance company before this,” notes Mr Xu, formerly a product manager at Google.

Henri Arslanian, an adjunct associate professor at the University of Hong Kong who teaches financial technology, says he regards Zhongan as “a technology company that happens to focus on insurance, rather than an insurance firm that is looking at digital as simply another distribution channel”.

Alibaba has acted as the channel through which the majority of Zhongan’s products have been sold, and the insurer’s flagship policy is return shipping insurance for goods sold on Taobao — Alibaba’s online shopping platform. Zhongan’s policies reimburse the cost of shipping when a shopper returns a product.

Last year, on the Chinese shopping holiday known as Singles Day, which falls on November 11, the group sold more than 100m return shipping policies in a single day.

Zhongan is finding it has competition in the market for offbeat insurance policies. TongJuBao already sells specialist policies to cover for the cost of divorce lawyers and for search teams to look for missing children. It also sells insurance that offers income protection for people who leave their jobs to move to a different city.

Launching offbeat policies does not always go smoothly. Zhongan discontinued its product for heavy drinking football fans for an undisclosed reason, and China’s insurance regulator has since issued warnings about companies selling “exotic” insurance.

Some analysts also question the long-term viability of Zhongan’s other policies. It has several hundred low-cost niche products, from drone insurance to policies that cover cracked mobile phone screens and cost only a few renminbi. On these, customer uptake is likely to be slow, the analysts claim.

“We hear that they have many teams developing many different kinds of products but the volume on individual products is still very low,” says Li Jian, a Hong Kong-based insurance analyst at Autonomous Research. “If you don’t have scale the costs will go up.”

A pure online insurance operation also has its limits. Motor insurance is one of the fastest growing categories of property and casualty insurance in China today. But the business requires insurers to have big claims teams that can visit accident sites.

Lacking those capabilities, Zhongan has instead focused almost entirely on niche motoring policies, covering tyres and other individual parts — missing out on covering bigger ticket items, says Stella Ng, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Moody’s.

“Given an operating history of three years, with limited track record of good underwriting profitability, we still believe it remains to be tested over time,” Ms Ng warns.

Extract from Bitcoin News, November 2016

China’s First Online Insurance Firm Initiates the ‘ABCD Plan’

ZhongAn Online Property & Casualty Insurance was China’s first online insurance company. Partners Ant Financial, Tencent, and Ping An founded it in 2013. Now the service has over 460 million customers and 5.8 billion policies under its management. Then in the summer of 2015, it raised 5.78 billion yuan ($931.3 million USD).

The company is now focusing on its “ABCD plan” which aims to harness AI, blockchain, cloud management, and data-driven applications. Soon, the ZhongAn Technology subsidiary will launch its services using the blockchain cloud platform.

“With the creation of ZhongAn Technology, we are developing a new fintech ecosystem, integrating technological research with financial innovation,” said Xing Jiang, ZhongAn’s CTO and chairman. “We aim to be an accelerator for both finance and healthcare sectors.”

Jin Chen, Chief Executive Officer of ZhongAn, said as an internet-based company the firm has created its own ecosystem, tailored to clients. So far, the company has formed two pillars with its customer base: a “connector and a stabilizer.” Now Chen says ZhongAn’s third pillar will be at the forefront of accelerating financial technology, amplifying its benefits to become a “commercial driving force.”

ZhongAn Technology’s Blockchain-Based Open Platform

ZhongAn said the company has already been researching and developing an open blockchain platform. ZhongAn created its blockchain protocol to enable insurance transactions and cushion the growth of its insurance ecosystem. Moreover, the company says the secure platform provides connections between business partners and data of operations within a distributed ledger.

“The open technological platform has much lower technical doorsill and threshold in development and maintenance, reducing barriers to business cooperation, and improving operation efficiency,” the company stated.

ZhongAn Technology and twenty like-minded business partners will create a collaborative alliance. Members include representatives from financial institutions, insurance, construction & decoration, consumer finance, logistics, payment, security, healthcare, and retail services. The group has already established the Shanghai Blockchain Enterprise Development Alliance. The group says it is dedicated to promoting blockchain-focused research and development in China.

ZhongAn’s Blockchain Utilizes The Ethereum Protocol

ZhongAn’s website gives a lot of descriptions of the various use cases its blockchain protocol will offer. The Chinese online insurance firm uses the Ethereum blockchain for its operations.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said he’s pleased to see ZhongAn implement the technology he helped create.

“ZhongAn Technology has integrated our technology to build an open platform and the Chinese insurance industry is actively exploring the applications of blockchain technology,” he said. “I hope that more and more Chinese companies can tap into this field and help develop this new area.”

In addition to the blockchain alliance and multiple R&D projects, the company is partnering with Fudan University School of Computer Sciences and Technology. The organizations will also develop a “blockchain and information security laboratory.”

The Babylon Health app lets users book face-to-face consultations with doctors via a smartphone or desktop computer. They can also check symptoms using artificial intelligence (AI), ask medical questions, monitor overall health indicators (including pulse, stress and blood pressure), carry out health tests and keep clinical records in one password protected, secure location.

“The majority of digital healthcare companies simply connect people to doctors through a mobile phone. Our next-generation app will harness the powers of AI and machine learning to not only prevent ill health, but also predict it and intervene when necessary,” says Dr Ali Parsa, CEO and founder of Babylon.

Prior to Babylon, Parsa founded Circle, Europe’s largest partnership of clinicians with £200m of revenue, 3,000 employees and a successful IPO. Babylon currently has more than one million downloads, 800,000 registered users worldwide and is free to 220,000 employees on benefit schemes at 120 companies.

How it works

With the intuitive design that makes it even easier to get medical advice than ever before, you can now chat to babylon and get 24/7 medical advice on your symptoms or health queries. Anywhere, any time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMD6B8h6Pzg&t=24s

It’s easier than ever to book an appointment with a doctor. Babylon enables you to talk to a doctor via live video chat straight through the babylon app, and all from the comfort of your own home, office or hotel, wherever you are in the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLOeTEVJB8c

Babylon GPs prescribe the medications you need to get you healthy, and keep you healthy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCI4AKr5SsM

Babylon also offers an easy and affordable way to talk to a fully-qualified therapist, wherever you feel the most comfortable. The babylon app covers a wide range of mental health conditions including stress, anxiety and depression:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlUjqdsU518

Dr Ali Parsa, CEO, Babylon Health, London, United Kingdom, discusses the Babylon health app which allows patients to get a virtual appointment with a qualified doctor on their mobile phone.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, lifestyle underwear brand MeUndies was launched in 2011 by graduate Jonathan Shokrian with $400,000 (£311,000) of startup funds raised from friends, family and angel investors. His aim was to produce the world’s most comfortable and sustainable underwear that is quick and easy to buy online.

MeUndies also taps into the growing desire for responsible manufacturing. Products are made from a carbon-neutral process that converts sustainably harvested beechwood pulp into fibres, while capturing excess chemicals. They are manufactured in Los Angeles, Sri Lanka and Turkey.

MeUndies offers a subscription service too, which claims to save customers 33% a month. Consumers select their style, size and plan (‘classic’, ‘bold’ or ‘adventurous’) and receive their order automatically each month.

The company is on track to sell five million units in 2017. Subscribers are located in 37 countries worldwide and account for around 25% of MeUndies’ overall business, which grew by 188% year on year to October 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm6Tkgywbyg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpAea3ejpUM

The Meet Cute is a RomCommentary on how online dating services are changing the way people meet, for better or for worse. So often in a new relationship you are asked, “So how did you two meet?”, and if that answer is “Online”, would you tell the truth?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpW1VEh2kmk

Jonathan Shokrian, founder of y MeUndies is obsessed about designing, marketing, and photographing the best panties. The MeUndies founder talks about his first gig listing products on Ebay, pursuing his entrepreneurial vision, and his biggest piece of advice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc_1k6biMRQ

Watt himself is known for explosive, bombastic proclamations in the press: His press releases include “F**k the rules” announcing the launch of his new business book and an update on BrewDog’s crowdfunding campaign that quotes him as saying: “We’ve not just broken a record, we’ve smashed through it with a monster truck”.

But in person, when we meet to discuss his new entrepreneurial advice book “Business for Punks,” Watt is softly spoken, cheery, and pretty harmless. The closest he gets to swearing is saying “balls.”

Beer for Punks

“I just wanted to outline our off-the-wall, slightly anarchic approach to business so other people could see what we’ve done and realise that you don’t have to do what you’re supposed to do, you don’t have to follow the status quo, and you can do things on your own terms,” he says, explaining his motivation for writing the book.

“Before I set up the business I was captain of a fishing boat. I’d never done a business before, I’d never been involved in business. We didn’t know how things were meant to be done so we went ahead and did things on our own terms, in our own way, and almost inadvertently created a whole new approach to business along the way.”

BrewDog was one of the first breweries in Britain to pioneer a new wave of hoppy, American-style “craft” beers and its Punk IPA is one of the most popular and recognisable brands of British craft beer.

Watt and co-founder Martin Dickie became two of Britain’s most successful entrepreneurs in recent years, building a network of bars across the UK, and and then looking across the world.

Watt likes to talk up his “anarchic” approach and chapters of his book include “Finance for visionary renegades,” “Marketing for postmodern dystopian puppets,” and “Sales for postmodern apocalyptic punks.”

But look past the flowery language and the advice in the book is pretty level-headed stuff — keep an eye on the bottom line, know your customers, and make sure staff are happy.

“The startup phase, finance, the bit about staff, company culture, finding time — all these things can apply to almost anyone in any business,” he says.

While Watt may not have run a business before BrewDog, but he’s clearly been keeping an eye on things, pointing to Apple, Zappos, and Danish restaurant Noma as good businesses based around a “cause” in the book.

BrewDog’s passion is good beer. Watt says: “As a company we focus on two things — our beer and our people. We have done some sort of high-octane, risky, edgy, marketing things but they’ve all been done to increase peoples’ awareness and understanding of good beer.”

But how “risky”, “edgy”, and “anarchic” is BrewDog these days? It’s beer is stocked in huge supermarkets like Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Waitrose.

“Our mission is to make other people as passionate about great beer as we are and we can’t do that if we don’t have the means to get the beer into people’s hands,” Watt says. “We’re about getting people excited about beer and do to that we need to get beer to market by any means possible.”

Equity for punks

BrewDog pioneered the idea of equity crowdfunding in the UK, launching its first “Equity for Punks” campaign on its website in 2009.

Watt recommends crowdfunding to entrepreneurs, saying: “We love the Equity for Punks model. We’ve now raised over £20 million ($30.5 million), we’ve got a community of over 14,000 Equity for Punks investors who are advocates, who are ambassadors, who are principally linked to our business.

“We just love the fact that our business is owned by people who love fantastic beer as much as we do.”

The money BrewDog raises is going to be put towards everything from expanding its network of bars to opening a beer-themed hotel in Scotland and breaking into the “craft” spirits business. But BrewDog is still, and always will be, a beer company, Watt says.

“I don’t think it is more than just beer,” he tells me. “The hotel tacks on to the hospitality side of our business and we’re not looking to open a chain of hotels, we’re just looking to open one hotel up in the north east of Scotland.”

He adds: “I think the spirits tacks on nicely if you look at people like [US craft breweries] Anchor Brewing, Dogfish Head, Rogue, New Holland. With a beer, we’re more than 50% there to making a fantastic tasting spirit and we just want to do some more experimentation in that space. But the company is very, very much about beer.”

Watt says he and co-founder Martin Dickie would never sell the business to one of the big brewing conglomerates.

That’s not to say we wouldn’t exit at some point but there’s no plans at the moment,” he says, “and if we did, instead of selling to a bigger company, it would be a management buyout or to release some more equity to our Equity for Punk holders.”

But then it all went wrong.

In 2020, BrewDog became the world’s first carbon-negative beer company and one year later, the company received its BCorp certification but also came under scrutiny after some employees accused the company of having a toxic work culture. BrewDog responded with an independent culture review and lots of new actions, for example, the creation of an Employee Representative Group.

A new start. A new blueprint.

In 2022, BrewDog released its new BrewDog Blueprint offering a nice glimpse into their new business practices and plans.

It was reported that the company received more than 1,000 job applications in the 10 days after the publication of the blueprint.

Here are some of the initiatives driven by the new blueprint:

People Blueprint

Employee-Ownership Programme

“Our Hop Stock programme will ensure that we are all in this together as we build the future of BrewDog.”

• Founder James Watt is giving away 5% of his BrewDog stake (worth around £100m) to its employees.
• This means, 3.7m shares in BrewDog will be distributed evenly amongst all employees with each team member receiving approximately £30,000 per year in shares over the next 4 years.

Profit-Sharing

“We want to create a radically new business model for hospitality – one that firmly puts the people who make the real difference in our bars, those who look after our customers every day, at the very core of what we do.”

• Each BrewDog Bar is going to share 50% of its profits evenly with team members.
• Profit share allocation is based on hours worked – so General Managers and bar crew share in the profits in the same way.
• Financial details will be shared fully transparent with all team members, every month

Alumni Club

“With the BrewDog Alumni Club we want to formally recognise the contribution that all of our former team members have made and also thank them for their efforts.”

• Free to join alumni club for all former team members.
• Benefits include amongst others a lifetime discount of 10% in all bars and on the online shop, a free 12 pack of beer every December and an invite to a yearly alumni social event

Sabbatical

• Employees get 4 weeks full paid leave – beyond their normal holiday allocation for every 5 years of service.

Salary Cap

• No-one can join the company for a salary higher than 7x of what the lowest full-time salary at Brewdog is.

Mental Health First Aiders

• By the end of 2022, 10% of Brewdog staff will be qualified as mental health first aiders.
• A monthly wellbeing lab covers topics from men’s mental health to menopause.

DEI Forum

• A crew-led Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum meets weekly to drive actions within the company.

Planet Blueprint

Carbon Negative Business

“We believe that our carbon is our problem.”

• In August 2020, BrewDog became the world’s first carbon negative beer business. The company removes twice as much carbon from the air as they emit, every single year.
• BrewDog bought 9,308 acres in the Scottish highlands that will be restored and rewilded (including peatland restoration and native tree planting). The land is capable of pulling up to 1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
• The project was developed in partnership with independent sustainability expert Prof. Mike Berners-Lee.

Carbon Reduction Strategy

“When we count our carbon, we count all of it; this includes all direct emissions which occur at our breweries and bars, the emissions from the electricity we purchase, as well as the emissions of our entire upstream and downstream supply chain, globally.”

• Brewdog invests close to £50m to reduce their environmental impact. Their carbon footprint has already been reduced by 20% vs its 2019 baseline, with a 35% reduction being the target for 2023.
• How?
  • A Bioplant was commissioned that will recycle and reuse most of the company’s wastewater. The plant will also generate green gas to power the brewery and delivery trucks.
  • CO2 recovery by capturing the CO2 produced by the bioplant and during beer fermentation is planned.
  • All of BrewDog’s UK business is already wind-powered, and all other global businesses purchase green electricity. Some, like BrewDog’s Australian brewery is solar-power driven.
  • BrewDog is in the process of swapping out all of the company’s delivery vehicles to low-carbon powered alternatives.
  • At BrewDog bars it’s also all about switching to eco-friendly consumables, building local brewing sites to shorten the supply chain, reducing waste, carbon footprint labeling, and 50% vegan and veggie menus, amongst other things.

While it hasn’t been an easy ride, Brewdog is back, still popular, still growing. But seeking to balance its irreverent style with a more responsible one too.

Business for Punks

Watt’s book Business for Punks bottles the essence of Brewdog an accessible, honest mani­festo, including mantras like

• Cash is motherf*cking king … Cash is the lifeblood of your company. Monitor every penny as if your life depends on it—because it does.
• Get people to hate you … You won’t win by try­ing to make everyone happy, so don’t bother. Let haters fuel your fire while you focus on your hard-core fans.
• Steal and bastardise from other fields … Take inspiration freely wherever you find it— except from people in your own industry.
• Job interviews suck … They never reveal if someone will be a good employee, only how good that person is at interviews. Instead, take them for a test drive and see if they’re passionate and a good culture fit.

Here is a longer list of the best moments and messages from the book, delivered in typically provocative yet inspiring style:

• At BrewDog we reject the status quo, we are passionate, we don’t give a damn and we always do something which is true to ourselves. Our approach has been anti-authoritarian and non-conformist from the word go.
• Ultimately for a crew to be effective leadership needs to come from the top down, the bottom up and everywhere in between.
• Michael Jackson led to Martin and I deciding to take the plunge, follow our dreams and start our very own craft brewery. Michael, upon tasting one of our home-brewed concoctions, told us to quit our jobs and start brewing beer. It was the last bit of advice we ever listened to.
• Rip up those stuffy old text books, reject the status quo, tear down the establishment and embrace the dawn of a new era.
• The decisions you make during your business’s formative months will define your place in the world. They will be the most monumental decisions you will ever make, shaping your fledgling business in ways you cannot yet imagine. So you’d better buckle up, hold tight and step up to the challenge. You will need to make sure your ideas, and their realization, are nothing short of awesome.
• Businesses fail. Businesses die. Businesses fade into oblivion. Revolutions never die. So start a revolution, not a business.
• Your biggest challenge from day one is to give people a reason to care, and that reason has got to be your mission.
• The market for something to believe in is infinite. You need to give people something to believe in.
• If money is your motivation then you need to be the greediest, meanest son of a bitch on the planet to make a business work. Solely money-focused businesses do exist, but I don’t like being around them or their people.
• Assume no one will care, assume no one will give a damn, assume no one will want to listen. Then figure out how to make people want to care about what you do. If you can’t, then your business is doomed.

• Twenty-first-century consumers increasingly want to align themselves with companies and organizations whose missions and beliefs are compatible with, and enhance, their own belief systems.
• Advice is for freaks and clowns. The thing about being driven is you need to know your own way.
• The only thing you learn from mistakes is that you are not good enough and that you need to get better.
• Don’t follow when you can lead.
• Be a selfish bastard. Seriously, you have to be. If you’re not 110% up for it, no one else is going to give a damn. So dance to your own tune and do it your way. Make crafted products you love, create environments you want to hang out in and give the kind of service you’d love to receive yourself.
• Choose a business partner as wisely as you would choose a spouse.
• The power of any brand is inversely proportional to its scope.
• Planning is merely glorified guesswork. Long-term planning is a vain, self-indulgent fantasy. Don’t waste your time.
• Act, don’t plan.
• Constraints are just advantages in disguise and opportunities to be innovative and imaginative. Cherish constraints. Embrace them.
• Be very wary of external agencies and partners. They all speak a good game and promise the earth but at the end of the day they have no reason to care as much as you.
• Living the punk DIY ethic means not relying on existing systems, processes or advisers as this would foster dependence on the system.
• You need to be an independent, an outsider, a nomad, a libertine. You need to be completely self-sufficient and not rely on anyone for anything. If a skill set is important to your business, then you better learn it and learn it fast.
• You need to create pull to be sustainable. And you don’t create pull through sales.
• Everything you do is sales and all of your employees are selling all the time. Act accordingly.
• Pretty much all you need to do for people to hate you is to be successful doing something that you love.
• When you manage to get the Holy Grail of other businesses copying you, whilst others are hating you, you know you have hit a home run.
• Eighty per cent of all new businesses fail. And they always fail for financial reasons. The more you understand the numbers the less likely they are to crush you and your dreams.
• Comfort zones are places where average people do mediocre things. If you are even the tiniest bit comfortable then you need to push harder.
• The lifeblood of your business is cash. If you can’t manage a cash flow, then you can’t run a business.
• Spend every last dime as if it actually was your last and ensure that your team spend every single cent as if it were their own.
• It was about empowering the change-makers, the misfits, the libertines, the community, the frustrated, the independents, the punks. Together we can, and will, change anything.
• There is a huge difference between making a sale and actually being paid for that sale.
• If you price down you down-sell everything, and there’s no going back.
• You need to defend your price point like a junkyard Rottweiler.
• The best way to decide how to allocate your cash and resources is to fully comprehend the opportunity-cost implications of every possible decision you could make in any situation.
• Everything you and your business does is marketing. Modern brands don’t belong to companies, they belong to the customer.
• Anything that you do, anywhere in your business, which is not completely aligned with your mission and your values is like a tiny little suicide.
• Today the only way to build a brand is to live that brand. People want to feel like they are buying into something bigger than themselves. Your brand must give them that opportunity.
• For a stunt to really work then it needs to be intrinsically linked to your mission and you already need to have a really strong following and a credible brand.
• Whatever type of business you are in you need to start building a community and start turning customers into fans.
• The biggest mistake you can make is actually caring what people think. To hell with opinions, conventions and consequences. It is all just a game.
• We hate bad beer so much that we are on a permanent campaign to destroy as much of it as we possibly can.
• Chasing someone else’s perception of cool is one of the stupidest mistakes it is possible to make.
• Having a target market and explicitly marketing to them is a sure-fire way to patronize and alienate pretty much all of the intelligent population.
• There are only three very simple things you need to know about sales.
  • Focus on the product.
  • Be open and honest.
  • Don’t compete on price.
• Sales are merely the by-product of being great elsewhere.
• If you can’t get your staff to fall in love with your business, you haven’t got a chance in hell of a customer to even consider liking it.
• Any great business today is built on these simple yet enduring and all encapsulating pillars. The three pillars are:
  • Company culture
  • The quality of your core offering
  • Gross margin
• Studies show that employees working in a company with a strong company culture are more than twice as effective as employees working in a company with a weak culture.
• The things that apply to your business externally are just as important, if not even more so, inside it.
• People mimic the behavior and beliefs of their leaders so make sure that you, and the people leading your business, live and breathe the behavior you want to perpetuate.
• It isn’t enough for people to know what their business is doing. They have to know why it is doing it.
• Companies need to wise up and max out. Smart companies realize, rather than minimizing wages, it is infinitely more productive and profitable in the long term to look to maximize engagement, loyalty, retention and productivity.
• Culture has to be a priority from the get-go and it has to start with the founders and then flow from the early employees.
• Working on your company culture is actually a much more effective form of marketing than pretty much all traditional marketing mediums combined. Culture is marketing. Culture is brand. Culture now resonates much more with consumers than advertising does.
• We have two simple rules for hiring:
  • They have to be as passionate about our mission as we are.
  • They have to be the right cultural fit.
• If you want your team to really rumble you’ll need to recognize their efforts. Explicitly and frequently. Leave your heartfelt praise and encouragement ringing in their ears and the impact can be off the charts.
• Unless you add amazing people to your team, you are going to spend a hell of a lot of time trying to get average people to consistently make great decisions.
• Teams tend to operate at, or close to, the ability level of the weakest team member.
• Whatever happens, good, bad or ugly, it is a direct consequence of your leadership.
• Leaders are rare inspirational beings. Managers are ten a penny; the world is full of adequately competent middle managers trapped in corporate hell.
• Work harder, think smarter and focus with laser-like efficiency.
• At BrewDog we have a fifty-fifty rule for our five directors. I and the other four people who lead our business are only allowed to spend half of our time working on the day-to-day operations of the company, on solving current challenges and dealing with existing issues and we have to spend at least half of our time working on ways to improve, grow and develop our business, on ways to drive us towards our next phase of growth.
• Look for inspiration everywhere. The only place you should never look is within your own industry. Screw what all the other clowns are doing. Ignore it, blank it out; it is of no relevance or significance whatsoever.
• Comfort zones are places where average people do mediocre things.
• You will not always get it right. But every time you move, every time you make a bold decision, it will take you one step closer to finding the path you are searching for.
• Your actions will determine your destiny.
• The more action you take, the more opportunities open themselves up to you.
• Your team should be governed by your values and your culture and not by policies and rules.
• Keep the team as well informed as possible so they can buy into the excitement of what the business is both planning and currently achieving, both of which act as a great motivator.
• Put systems in place before, as opposed to after, they are needed and put an infrastructure in place for where you want to be in two years’ time.
• Write down your five biggest problems, sit down in a room with your team, and solve them. Then on to the next five.
• Attitude is the difference between a setback and an adventure.
• So whilst the fools, rats and wannabes are massaging each other’s egos you need to be plotting your revenge. Not on them specifically, but on the system that bred such morons. You need to be quietly planning how to blow the status quo to pieces and create a whole new world order.
• You should always imagine the communication from the other party’s perspective. Put thought into what you say and how you say it.
• Don’t shout too often, so that you can make sure it truly counts when you want to roar.
• It is paramount you track at least ten of the most important performance indicators of your business monthly.
• When it comes to your management accounts you should definitely be tracking sales, cost of sales, overheads, gross margin, EBITDA and net margin. You will also need to monitor items on your balance sheet at regular and short intervals, such as debtors, creditors and, most importantly, your cash position. In addition you should track certain other KPIs (key performance indicators), depending on what is important in your business and your current focus. For instance, you should consider tracking things like: average spend per transaction, staff turnover, customer complaints, referrals, shipment accuracy, sales mix, refunds, wastage, sales growth, additional customers, online engagement or staff happiness (to name but a few). In determining which items you need to keep close tabs on it really depends on your business and your objectives.
• No measurement = no reporting = no visibility = no one cares = your ultimate demise.
• Always do your negotiation homework. Find out about the other party, what makes them tick, their likes and dislikes. Ultimately think about what’s in it for them. Then build your argument around how the deal helps them, because at the end of the day they care much more about what is in their interests than yours.
• Find a solution, structure and deal they feel comfortable with, and positive about. But one that is ultimately engineered around what you want.
• You need to provide the vision, strategy and tools to help your team achieve your goals.
• Whatever goals you’ve set, you should have a list of pint-sized systems, things which you rigorously adhere to without fail, that if consistently applied will help ensure you both achieve your goals and strengthen your brand and company in the long run too.
• Committees are breeding grounds for compromise as the tyranny of conformity rules the roost. Conformity is no place for risk and compromise is no place for innovation.
• Individual vision is always the force behind truly remarkable ideas and concepts.