Fennobiz — Page 3

As time goes by

19/06/2016 By Fennobiz

This June we are celebrating five years in business.

Like with any start-up business, it has taken a lot of hard work and – yes, also good luck – to get our company to the point it is in now.

So where are we? It has been a great learning experience and we know a lot more about the way business is done in this region. It is one thing to sell products and solutions of companies that are household names and in good demand. And a whole another thing to build your own strategy and offering from scratch.

How do you do it? Without an existing network of good business contacts and friends it would be downright impossible. People, who have been kind enough to recommend us or point us to the right direction.

Finding business partners with value adding solutions is another thing. With RELEX Solutions we have been able to work with one of the best rising stars in Nordic – and also European solution developers.

While working with RELEX Solutions we have been able to reach an exceptionally high success rate in organising meetings with customer top management and also getting customer projects started in Switzerland. You can find out more about the first customer already in production, Galexis AG in the RELEX Galexis AG press release.

It has also been really interesting to learn in practice many new things about the financial side of running a business. From the very beginning we decided to outsource this area and were lucky to find an excellent company to work with. We cannot stress enough the importance of such cooperation, when operating in a foreign environment and culture.

We are currently in the process of moving a great deal of our IT infrastructure to the Apple® world – for several reasons. Another rewarding learning process in itself and an excellent source of fresh new thinking and creativity.

It also takes a great level of SITUATIONAL AWARENESS in multiple areas. Like understanding people behaviour in a multicultural environment. That is a topic worth a separate blog post coming up soon.

And, over the years it has become more and more clear to us that we are on a mission to help companies get to new markets in Western Europe, finding fresh new opportunities – daily!

If you sell in euro, your prices are effectively 15% lower in Switzerland now – what have you done about it?

31/03/2015 By Fennobiz

The Swiss National Bank dropped the bomb in the morning of January the 15th 2015: they announced that they would stop to artificially support the euro through buying on the market. This had a massive impact on many things – including improving your competitive positioning in Switzerland, if you are selling to Switzerland from the euro area. So – what have you done about it?

Many companies and people have felt the pain, though. Including all of us here in Switzerland, who had euros on their bank accounts or companies that had receivables from their export business activities in euros. The Swiss Market Index was hit by the news too and went down by 14.9%.

There had been talk that the pressure on the Swiss Franc was mounting, but few expected the SNB to make such a major move all of a sudden. The euro went down massively within literally minutes from the announcement, recovering then slowly from costing less than one Swiss Franc to parity.

For quite some time now the exchange rate EUR/CHF has been close to about 1.05.

Did you know that according to the Informatikverband ICT Switzerland the Swiss ICT exports in 2011 were about 9 billion Swiss Francs – a whopping six times more than the combined exports of cheese and chocolate combined?

The impact to any company having their costs in Swiss Francs and their export sales made in euros is of course significant. But that’s not all: all of a sudden the Swiss tourism industry is suffering from the lack of tourists, too. And the Swiss living anywhere close to the borders – and in a small country like Switzerland there are plenty of those – started shopping in the supermarkets in Germany, France and Italy more eagerly than ever before!

In fact, very soon after the announcement the local media reported on queues several kilometres long on the roads heading towards the German town of Konstanz in the north-eastern corner of Switzerland, by the Lake Constance!

The Swiss businesses have started to cope with the situation in different ways. The large retail chains are lowering their prices to keep their customers. As an example, Coop announced on the 22. of January that they would reduce prices on a thousand products from the euro area and again on the 3. of February reductions on 3.200 further products by up to 17% were announced. Migros soon followed with their own similar announcement.

As another development, some manufacturers are asking their employees to work longer weeks – according to Handelszeitung 43 – 45 working hours per week are being requested from the employees in an attempt to improve productivity.

A good question is, why the SNB did not do this gradually by announcing the capping to say, 1.10?

Well, be that as it may, your euro area business now has an advantage on the Swiss market of around 15% in comparison to the time before the January 15th announcement. We are experiencing many Swiss businesses using this opportunity to buy investment goods and consumables from the eurozone in higher volume than before and there is no reason why you should not take advantage of this new situation.

If you are not yet on the Swiss market, you should seriously consider the entry. Either way, we at Fennobiz would be happy to discuss the market situation and how your hi-tech offering would fit on it in more detail. Give us a call and we’ll discuss your particular situation without any obligation.

Giving a technical presentation? Improve your results by at least 200%!

13/10/2014 By Fennobiz

Giving a technical presentation?

You have loads of interesting technical material that you need to show and explain to your colleagues – your customers – or your business partners – or <fill in the blank>?

You have heard all this talk about having only a few words on your slides? How the heck can you convey all this information to your audience, if you are not supposed to use at least ten bullet points per slide? What about all these details on the contents of the new software/hardware release? No way!

You are not alone and this definitely is not a new issue for presenters of technical material. I have seen literally hundreds – if not thousands – of presentations during my career that are technically “complete” and deliver a LOT of content. Ever since Microsoft® introduced PowerPoint® this has been really simple. And that was not even the first tool to create slides. That tool just made it really easy for everyone to create and deliver presentations, much easier and cheaper than when they still were either 35mm film slides or plotted on overhead transparencies…

If you really believe your audience will be able to, not to mention excited to grasp all the material you plan to present, you are kidding yourself. But there are simple ways, in which you can improve your chances of getting your messages through, keeping your audience awake even after the lunch break and yes, in general making an interesting presentation.

Just follow these steps:

Make that presentation ready just the way you are used to do. Use bullet points. Try to keep it to a max of 10 bullet points per slide. Add images in sizes that are still clear and any text in them is readable. Do not exaggerate with the quantity of slides, but do put the information on the slides that you believe your audience will appreciate and need. Make sure you have at least one image on every slide that helps understand the topic. Save and close the file.
Now, open that same file again and do a “Save as…”. Give the file a new name with the word “presentation V1” in the file name.
This is the hard part. Remove all the text from all the slides – except a few (no more than five or six) key words that describe the gist of what is discussed on each slide. Resize the image on the slide to full size and see that the keywords fit nicely on the slide and are easily readable. They should be in a font size of at least 30. Do not use wild or multiple colours. Choose a simple font (sans serif preferred).
Rename the original file with all the details as “Handout…”. Have enough of them printed or copied on some digital media so that you can hand them out at the event.
Go through your new presentation and practice it. To be able to present the material without all the nitty gritty detail will require you to go through it out loud at least five times. Trust me – you will feel much more comfortable in front of your audience, when you have done it. If you can do the practicing in the actual meeting room in advance, so much the better. If not, even going into the meeting room well in advance to have a good look at it will make the upcoming event a more relaxed one for you – you can imagine yourself presenting to the audience in that room. While at it, check the obvious things like connectivity to the beamer and that your slides actually do look good on the screen. You do not want to let any technical problems to ruin your presenting mood in front of the audience!
It is up to you, if you wish to give out the handouts in advance. It really also depends on your audience, but you do realize that there is always the risk people will start flipping through your material rather than be listening to you. But then again, if you are interesting to listen to – they will more likely not.

So there you have it. You probably need to deliver the detailed material, but you do not need to present all of it. But you have done your homework and you can deliver the details and your essential points to your audience with confidence.

One more thing…

And finally, as a small bonus tip: think of a way to surprise your audience a bit in the middle of the more intense part of your presentation. Way back, when presentations were given using 35mm film slides with projectors, one presenter was going through his material, when his audience of about a hundred people suddenly started to look at each other and smile. He seemed to notice this, stopped and looked back at the big screen behind him and realized the slide was upside down. Guess what he did? He pressed the button and the slide showed up correctly! It took a few seconds, before the audience realised they had been fooled and gave him a big applause. And I can still remember his presentation.

Critical Sales Tools

20/09/2014 By Fennobiz

The Japanese author and philosopher Soetsu Yanagi once wrote that “Man is most free, when his tools are proportionate to their needs” (The Unknown Craftsman: An Insight Into Beauty).

I upgraded to a (at the time, now almost two years ago) new smartphone, the Nokia® Lumia™ 920. Now, I’ve been using mobile phones since the mid-eighties, when they were still meant to be installed in cars rather than carried around. Not very practical on the go, but it certainly improved customers’ ability to reach me while I was on the road.

For the most part of the time using the Lumia I was actually not sure, whom this phone was designed for. I spend a lot of time talking on the phone and it actually seems fair to me to say that it was originally not designed specifically for that – although I’m sure the folks at Nokia had designed an excellent piece of electronics with fantastic specs!

So, it had to do with the user interface of the phone, in other words, mainly the operating system. This defines many key features – simple ones like volume settings (listen to a podcast with your earphones and miss the next incoming phone call, because the ringtone volume was then set to be too low to hear it!) – and in this case also apps like the calendar. I can’t believe someone had designed a calendar function without a weekly view! Yes, this could be obtained with a 3rd party app, but why would I need to pay extra for and trust such an app with my critical business information? Do you really know, what all these apps do in the background? With this calendar looking for a free slot on your phone calendar was a pain. Not worth even trying, when on the phone with someone – you’d just get frustrated.

The one single volume control that affects the volume of everything is in my view a really bad idea. At least I’m not the only one that has answered the phone in the car using the Bluetooth hands-free function, only to realize that pushing the car volume setting to the full will not help you hear the person who called you – because the phone’s volume setting for Bluetooth is all of a sudden at the lowest level!

Things are getting better

However, some things changed, when Microsoft® recently introduced the Windows® Phone 8.1 update to the phone. I had been seriously thinking about getting a new phone with some other operating system, but now I have decided to give its creators another chance. But not all is well yet.

It seems the only way this device can be professionally used is by connecting it with Microsoft Exchange™. In that way you can – among other things – avoid the very slow process of adding your new business contacts to the “People” application. In that application, a good example of what I mean is that when you want to add one of the most important pieces of information on your new business contact, their job title, you have to go to the last option in the menu down below called “Other” to add it… Not to mention that the default value for email is “Private”, not “Work”.

The calendar function is now much better and it includes a weekly view that is actually quite snappy. On the other hand, it seems absolutely impossible for Microsoft to synchronize the categories set on tasks in Outlook® so that they could be used for maintaining category-based lists on the mobile phone as well. This functionality is really needed by anyone using the GTD® system (“Getting Things Done®”) developed by David Allen. This functionality would – as an example – allow you to view your @CALLS list on the phone while on the go and having extra time to make those calls…

The volume control issue also got a solution in the new release, although setting the various notification tones got a little more complex. Well, from the productivity point of view it is actually a better idea not to turn the notification for incoming emails on during the day – and this setting got a bit further down in the menu structure of the phone anyway.

Well, what about the other platforms then? More often than I care to mention I have seen people struggle with their handsets, trying to get a phone call answered, but with the touchscreen ignoring their intense efforts! I have been using the original iPad® since it was made available and it works well for the kind of applications that it has been designed for. For some time now it has, however started to show severe signs of instability and some new apps will not even run on it – the newer version of the Microsoft OneNote® being one of them. Now that Apple® introduced their new software release for the iPhone®, many have noticed their phones have started to work much slower… Which is nothing new in this business of course, although – I have to admit – in the case of the Lumia 920 the upgrade to the newest release did to my amazement not slow down the phone too much.

So what now?

Coming back to Mr Yanagi, I should have thought about this at the store and not let my weakness for flashy, high-end gadgets get the better of me. A third of the functionality of that phone would be sufficient to help get my job done efficiently. And yet, the phone itself is not on a functionality level to totally replace my notebook to create, edit and review presentations, proposal or contract documents or work with project planning tools. Worse, the large touchscreen makes it hard to use the phone with a single hand or without looking at it.

So, for the time being, my old collection of mobile phones will stay as backup and one of those might well come back to action one day. Who knows – perhaps getting a second SIM would be a good idea, splitting the functionality between two devices… But then again, I still would need my trusted notebook with me, too…

The team that was not supposed to win

25/05/2014 By Fennobiz

The Finnish team preparing for their game in the 2009 World Championships. Photo copyright Fennobiz.

Yesterday I was watching the Finnish ice hockey team play against the Czechs in the World Championships. The winner would go to finals. To my satisfaction we Finns won and it just got me thinking how a team should be built up. In Finnish social media both the readers and so-called professional journalists doomed our team – the discussion about who should be in and who out, was continuous and destructive.

To everybody’s surprise our players exceeded themselves and now they are playing for gold.

How should you form a team at work? Make sure you get the best individuals assigned and that is it? Unfortunately it is not that simple. Most successful teams do not normally have the brightest and best people – what they have is team spirit. “All for one and one for all”.

One or two prima donnas can destroy everything by expecting special treatment and continuous praises about their excellence. So it is vital to understand what kind of a team you are building be it at work or in the ice hockey ring. Don’t get the best – get the most suitable ones and the rest is history.

So what I am going to do this evening – watch how far the Finnish team can get with their admirable attitude – maybe they are the winning team.