the founding truth

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A tale that defines Exceed Online as a company, and explains why our philosophy and convictions are so deeply rooted.

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Page 1: The Founding Truth
Page 2: The Founding Truth
Page 3: The Founding Truth

I WANT TO TELL YOU A STORY

It’s a tale that defines Exceed Online as a company, and explains why our philosophy and convictions are so deeply rooted. This has a profound impact for you, because it demonstrates what you can expect in a relationship with us.

Ready? Thanks for allowing me to explain…

Page 4: The Founding Truth

THE HISTORY

San Diego 1998…It’s 1998, and I’m on the other side of the Pacific, in San Diego California, a young and enthusiastic kiwi entrepreneur ready to take on the world, and that’s exactly what I was doing.

There were so many ‘opportunities’, and I was a professional opportunity seeker. (Remember those words). I had the drive and enthusiasm to burn. I was out to conquer the world.

The Internet was a delicious smorgasbord of possibility for someone like me. I made it my business to develop an understanding of the huge possibilities of online marketing, and with little other expertise around, and armed with an extensive network of contacts in the San Diego area, I was quickly in huge demand as an online strategic marketing consultant for major brands. I sold dreams of soaring profits, and I did it well.

On the back of that boom, my three businesses made more money than I ever thought possible. I was raking it in and enjoying a fantastic lifestyle. Nice house, expensive car, lavish holidays, life was good, or so I thought.

But if life teaches you anything, it’s that great times don’t always last forever. On that terrible day in September 2001 when the twin towers were levelled, the impact was felt not only in the USA, but also around the world. I certainly felt it; it rocked me to the core.

Page 5: The Founding Truth

OR SO I

THOUGHT

Page 6: The Founding Truth

As you can imagine, I was at a crossroads.

Page 7: The Founding Truth

Over the next few months, my ‘dreams based’ businesses went from boom to bust. The stock market plummeted and tech stocks in particular crashed. Consulting and marketing budgets were frozen; these were the very areas where I had centred my efforts, so my income streams disappeared. I went from a $US300 per hour consultant, to unemployment.

This was devastating and the effects rippled over into my personal life, where the pressure and financial strain lead to my wife filing for divorce, leaving my personal life in tatters. It couldn’t have been any worse.

As you can imagine, I was at a crossroads. After many sleepless nights, I decided to sell everything, settle with the banks and come home to New Zealand.

I returned with a year’s worth of living expenses. After that, I would run out of money.

Back in New Zealand I took the first opportunity that matched my experience; a sales position with a small web company of only 4 people.

It suited me perfectly, or so it seemed, and I was excited. I was selling this company’s custom website platform to small-to-medium sized businesses. The opportunist in me was thrilled by the chase and the buzz of success; it felt like the old days.

THE CATALYST

Page 8: The Founding Truth

I WA S P R E Y I N G O N E N T R E P R E N E U R S

W H O D I D N ’ T K N O W

OR EVEN WHAT THEY WERE

ACTUALLYDOING

Page 9: The Founding Truth

THE EPIPHANY

But I became uncomfortable. I couldn’t shake the creeping feeling that I was a sleazy used-car salesman, preying on ignorance and a lack of knowledge.

I was having huge success, but I was selling to customers who focussed only on the cosmetic trappings; the look of their site, the flashy but ancillary functionality. I spent 12 months selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of websites like this, but the entire process felt wrong. I was preying on entrepreneurs who didn’t know what they wanted, what they needed or even what they were actually doing. We’d take a brief, spit out a price to fulfil it, and away we’d go - we’d deliver what they thought they wanted, but not necessarily what they needed, because they didn’t have the knowledge to ask the right questions. My customers were opportunists, looking for massive results, overnight sales, and the next way to make a quick dollar for the least investment, and I was taking them right along that path because it was easy.

One night as I was lying awake thinking about why it was I was unhappy, I realized what was wrong, and it was this; I knew my customers were easy to sell to, because I understood them all to well. I was a professional opportunity seeker too! Always looking for the next sale, the next big payday. I wasn’t interested in how what I did made a lasting impact on my customers’ business. I was in it for myself. It was a harsh truth, but then some truths are. At that point I knew I could and should do better, for my customers, for myself. It was time to starting building something of value, a business with integrity.

Page 10: The Founding Truth

THE QUEST

Building Exceed Online – a values-based business. I knew I had to go back to building my own company, not one based on selling opportunist pipe dreams, but something far more real. A company underpinned with exemplary business ethics, values and a philosophy I could believe in, and one from which my customers could truly benefit.

I took the plunge, quit my job, and founded Exceed Online.

It felt great at the time, and it still does.

I was energized. Now I was building something I truly believed in. I stopped being that opportunist I had come to despise, chasing the quick fix with the promise of overnight success.

I began to focus entirely on building value for my clients. I made it my mission to help business owners create strategic, sustainable businesses.

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THE DELIVERY

This focus on sustainable business became the Exceed Online blueprint and the cornerstone of our culture. (I say ‘our’ because now there are 15 of us).

Customer by customer, we became the business I always wanted us to be, guiding entrepreneurs who knew they needed a plan to be successful, but required help putting that plan together.

Over time, we developed a thorough methodology; before we embarked on any website building we made very sure we understood our clients’ business, their products, their customers, and the industry in which they operated. We took responsibility for their online success.

Opportunist fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants quick fixes? We just wouldn’t do them, and won’t ever do them. Every website we build now starts with the question “what do you really want to achieve?” As we got deeper into their business, clients started to treat us as an extension of their organization, giving us the opportunity to recommend, guide and grow with them. They began to embrace our proactive suggestions, because they were based on sound planning and intelligent responses borne of in-depth knowledge of their industry, which we’d made it our business to glean.

As we developed this approach further, we start to help our clients create their strategic business “bible”. We took into account functionality, market research, financial modelling and their online marketing plans. We developed (and continue to develop) a water-tight process detailing how their website should be built and how their commitment to online could show a significant return on investment.

Our business blueprint guided many of our clients’ early website development, and still they turn to it frequently. Exceed Online was now genuinely making a difference for our customers and I was happy.

Page 13: The Founding Truth

THE CHALLENGES

Refining Exceed Online….The more success we had developing strategic services for our clients, the more we focused on refining our Exceed Online blueprint. We noticed over the course of several projects, that our clients’ experienced similar problems in different ways.

Some would come to us exasperated. Typically, they’d had a site built by another provider who then didn’t have the bandwidth or desire to support the solution they had tailored for their own client. Those clients felt trapped, because their vendor had designed a custom-built solution only that vendor could support – and when it came to providing ongoing service, that vendor walked away. These clients were not in control of their own key strategic business asset!

With others, it was clear they often didn’t have the time, expertise or personnel to maintain their site(s), with perhaps only one or two people in the business being web focussed. Maintaining an effective eCommerce site is a very complex business, it requires a myriad of skills and disciplines and dedicated expertise. Most companies don’t have people with an abundance of this knowledge and skills in house, and why should they? It’s not their core business – and to maintain it in-house is expensive and inefficient.

The problem was this ‘knowledge/skills gap’ was slowing our clients’ growth. They weren’t setting online KPI’s because they didn’t know the sort of targets they should be aiming for or how to meet them. Without expert knowledge, skills and time, their ability to increase traffic to their site, convert that traffic to sales, and improve the frequency and average spend of their customers, was limited.

The challenge was clear, in addition to the strategic firepower we were adding to our clients’ businesses, we needed to take our service to the next level. Our customers needed expertise, flexibility and skilled resource on their own terms. They needed to be able to tap into that as required and not carry it as an overhead to their business.

Page 14: The Founding Truth

THE ANSWER

...... was the Mentored Success Programme.Our solution was to offer our clients choice, tailoring a full suite of online expertise and resource the way they wanted it. If we tailored a service agreement that offered the key resources, skills sets and expertise they required, when they needed it, and at a level and cost that suited them, wouldn’t that be better?

So we developed the Mentored Success Programme (MSP). MSP is a proactive, consultative partnership with our clients, designed to increase online performance through best practice acquisition and retention of customers.

Clients benefit from MSP by purchasing our specialist skills in ‘time blocks’ – anything from 10 to 200 hours per month.

Clients love it.

They get an experienced, dedicated Account Manager as a single point of contact, who works hand in hand with the in-house eCommerce expert. Our account manager knows the clients’ industry and business inside out, and they plug the client into any additional specialist Exceed Online service needed. That might be an eCommerce Strategist, Business Analyst, Designer, Developer, Copywriter, whatever specialist skill is required. Clients can purchase that expertise in periods of time to suit their budget.

MSP takes Exceed Online service to another level for our clients. For those using it, we’ve found that over the course of 6-8 months we can deliver big results with small incremental increases in the key metrics of traffic, conversion rate, average order value and purchase frequency, all with no additional overhead, and they enjoy better returns.

They only pay for the programme hours they wish to commit to, and they can see the results versus spend (and therefore determine how effective it is), when we run an analysis for them on their sites eCommerce activity.

We continue to refine MSP as I write, adding more value wherever we can. It continues to be a ‘Eureka’ solution for our clients, who can focus on what they do best, confident in the knowledge together we are making the most of every possible opportunity to drive traffic, sales and purchase behaviour in a planned and strategic way.

Page 15: The Founding Truth

THE CHALLENGE CONTINUED – PART TWO

With the success of the MSP (which continues), we still had challenges to resolve. We had tried working with our client’s technology partners in the past, to deliver the sort of functionality and methodologies we knew our clients needed, but we’d found their platforms not nearly flexible enough, and they were “wedded” to their technology, with no follow-up customer service. Our clients’ needs were almost irrelevant to them.

Our philosophy had always been, and remains, people and processes should come first and technology a distant second.

So we thought we could build the technology ourselves and deliver a better result. We created a team of internal production staff and began building the web architecture ourselves. We scoured the globe for a suitable platform for the type of work Exceed Online wanted to do, and we found it. Magento was perfect, and still is; an open source platform that offers Enterprise level functionality and the ability to extend indefinitely - we were excited.

However, our ‘anything’s possible’ approach was compromised by our need to constantly manage distracting technical issues of our own making, with technical staff who found it hard to share our vision. Exceed Online should be a place where our clients’ web development experience is unique, where dreams could happen, and where we could custom-build fantastic solutions - and yet we were in danger of getting bogged down in the technical details, and rolling off ‘same-looking’ sites from a production line because they were easier to build. That was not the Exceed Online I wanted, and it never will be.

Page 16: The Founding Truth

THE ANSWER – PART TWO

We had to face a hard truth. We weren’t living up to our values and we were struggling to deliver on our strategy-first approach. We had a great platform, we simply needed the right platform partner, one that was passionate about delivering technology that put customers first. After an exhaustive vetting process we found one.

Zeon.

One of the fastest growing companies in North America, Zeon are certified Magento partners ( as are we) with a huge team worldwide and unrivalled technical experience. They also offer 24/7 response and have the critical mass to put a large team on a project to help us deliver on any deadline. They can even have someone on our clients’ premises if necessary.

Whilst all this was perfect for our needs, it was how our respective philosophies aligned that thrilled us most. Zeon’s love for learning and constant improvement on already high standards; their passion for keeping up with the best and newest proven technologies; their quality communication and their innovation, made them the only choice.

We have completed more than 20 projects with Zeon in the last year alone, and our relationship goes from strength to strength, which is great for our clients, as we can hold true to the Exceed Online values whilst partnering with a world-class web technology provider.

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THE VALUES

Exceed Online was founded on fundamental beliefs. I wanted it to be real, honest and to stand for something. These things are important to us:

PASSION: we love creating online success. Everything involved in growing, building, marketing, and systemising an online business is our passion – we live and breathe it.

PERFECTION: we aspire to flawless execution – that’s not easy and we don’t always succeed, but we don’t take shortcuts on quality, we don’t make excuses, and we extract every piece of learning we can from our mistakes. The entire Exceed Online team shares the responsibility to over-deliver on our clients’ expectations.

RESPECT: we have total respect for our customers and we never forget that they engage with us by choice. We seek to continually strengthen the loyalty and trust clients place in us. We also respect each other and our skill sets.

INGENUITY: we thrive on creativity and innovation. Everyone at Exceed Online is continuously learning and seeking out innovations and ideas that can change the face of business. This continuing hunger means we often anticipate trends within our marketplace and we’re not afraid to take calculated risks.

FUN: humour is essential to success! We celebrate achievement, and because we love what we do, we have a good time doing good work.

CANDOUR: We’re honest with one another – it’s important to help make our team stronger and our client relationships richer.

NURTURE: We recruit the most talented people and rigorously promote their professional and personal development.

Exceed Online rewards and motivates the people who work there, and that happens because they can see the results of their efforts; and as a result our clients’ businesses are flourishing.

I want Exceed Online to have a huge positive impact on the lives of the staff, and their families. I want it to be a place my colleagues are proud to call ‘theirs’ – a place they want to be, beyond simply collecting a pay cheque each week – a place where they make the difference. I think Exceed Online is such a place.

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THE ADVERSARY

Holding true to our values means we battle Opportunity Seeking everyday. We fight against the unprofessional online consultants, and web development/ internet companies who perpetuate and profit from this ‘mind virus’.

When you recognise them, please walk away; they lack vision and any deep eCommerce knowledge. These Opportunity Seekers lock clients into inflexible solutions with out of date, inflexible or proprietary software.

They perpetuate the problems the industry is criticised for; no on-going support once the site is live, no after sales consultation or true desire to help clients grow their business. No real desire to engage in an on going relationship with the client, because they know they can’t deliver. All they seek are on-going licensing and hosting fees, and in return they offer little or no service.

Exceed Online refuses to accept this industry ‘status quo’. We know there is a better way.

Page 21: The Founding Truth

THE EXCEED ONLINE POINT OF VIEW

Effective websites are critical to business surviving in today’s economy, but owning a business that utilises online should be a rewarding process, not a life sentence. Every online business has profitability locked within it, and often it is never released because most online business owners or managers settle for mediocrity, working way too hard for way too little. While this frustrates them, they can’t seem to change.

They’ve never been taught, coached or mentored by the right people. Exceed Online starts with strategy and tailors a strategic approach for every client, which we support to the hilt. We stay right alongside our clients, every step of the way.

And that doesn’t mean it’s all about profits. We do not exist solely to maximize these, but we understand that return on investment must be a result of our contribution – especially because our own profitability is an indication of the effectiveness of our unique business approach.

When we help improve a business we set off a chain reaction that has a positive impact on the business owner and their family, the business’s employees and their families, the customers who rely on the business, the vendors who sell to the business and their owners, employees, and vendors and their families.

Providing reliable and satisfying employment to New Zealanders and Australians contributes to their families and to our society.

Page 22: The Founding Truth

THE PAYOFF

… it’s not just the money We’ve gone from a fledgling three-person outfit, to a full-service team of 15, delivering end-to-end strategic, powerful eCommerce solutions and service for our clients.

That’s great, but what is backing it is even better; the belief and resolve to do things the right way, to guide clients with an uncompromising focus first and foremost on great strategy followed by a mentored programme to compounding growth.

I know only too well how easy it is to jump on the opportunist bandwagon – or rush for the latest technology and chase overnight success. I cast off that mentality a long time ago.

Well thought-out strategy gives you real control over your destiny. Strategic thinking widens your goal posts, and gives you every chance of converting your hopes and dreams into profit, in every sense.

That’s the road we travel.

Let’s go down it together.

Best wishes, Kyle Aspinall, CEO Exceed Online.

Page 23: The Founding Truth

Delivering end-to-end strategic, powerful eCommerce solutions and service for our clients

2012

To a full-service team of 15

2005

From a fledgling three-person

THAT’S THE ROAD WE TRAVEL.

LET’S GO DOWN IT TOGETHER.

Page 24: The Founding Truth

www.exceedecommerce.com