What Designing F1 racing Cars that Can Teach You About Corporate Strategy.

Over the years, I have been a great advisor helping businesses and small businesses solve problems in their quest for growth. But before that I began my journey as an engineer in the area, working in research and design for the Renault Formula 1 Team (now Alpine F1 Team) and then at Airbus. When building race cars and planes there is no room for error and accuracy is important. But working in consulting, I find that the authenticity of the research is often not enough due to time and money.

In the counselor-client relationship, the client sees a problem, identifies the culprit, and then seeks out the counselor to help fix the problem. The consultant will then focus on areas of weak performance, collect data, develop hypotheses, develop solutions and analyze the results. But customers don't know exactly what the real problem is, and it may not be what they think it is. For example, a customer may be concerned about low sales and believe the problem is caused by targeting the wrong customers. But in fact, the problem may be that the product itself is damaged or not positioned correctly.

Although consultants recognize that there may be other factors at play, traditional discovery, analysis, and resolution often require a significant investment of time, effort, and money before knowing whether the solution has achieved its goals.

Enable growth and innovation as part of company strategy, starting with problem analysis and problem-solving techniques often used in management products and design ideas. Understanding how to break down large problems into smaller problems can help clarify problems and develop solutions. Although there are many business solutions that can make this process easier, I haven't found a solution that gets to the root of the problem as quickly as I would like.

I know from my experience as a Formula 1 engineer and an aerospace engineer that over the years we have realized there must be a better way of identifying problems and trying to deal with them without having to engage in sex. Using my knowledge and experience, I have developed two methods to identify the root cause and try to solve the problem. It took a little more research at first, but it eventually helped me find a better solution. I call this competitive management and here I'll show you how it works.

Part 1: Identify the source of the current problem

When problems arise in business (poor sales, for example), managers and consultants often ask some big questions: What isn't working for business in our company right now? Can we change the sales price again? Will more features be added to the product? What other customers can we target?

These are good questions, but they are not clear enough to explain the problem. They also often reflect employee biases or intuition rather than a true basis.

The F1 mentality means that instead of wondering where the problem might be, you have to leave no stone unturned to find the problem. The competitive management process begins with a 360-degree investigation of the company's performance. This allows me to see what is causing the problem at the intersection of multiple areas and ultimately helps me provide more effective solutions. Here are eight things I learned:

1. Goals
2. Customers
3. Marketing
4. Resources and Partners
5. Promotion and Outreach Groups
6. Organization and Process
7. Financial Analysis

Competitive Values For each group, I used a survey that asked participants simple questions to determine how they were designed and optimized for those areas and how effective they were. These questions are the same for every company I help.

To ensure outcomes are fair, I discuss each area with stakeholders across the company (not just areas of responsibility). For each of the eight areas, I note whether the issue is affecting the work I'm currently working on, assign a score to measure the improvement needed, and then convert the scores into percentages. An example of the financial analysis section of the survey: After giving the percentage value​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ With the financial analysis section of the questionnaire, I add answers to obtain total percentages with 1 %. Between 100%; 1% indicates high improvement and 100% indicates that the area is underdeveloped and requires significant intervention. Finally, I compiled the results for each area into a table to identify the three areas that needed the most improvement and had the biggest impact on the company.

When the answers can confirm what the customer is thinking, it can reveal, beyond any doubt, undiscovered issues that could be causing the slight edge issue customers are seeing. However, after identifying our main focus areas, I use a number of problem-solving techniques such as the Five Whys. This is my way of working.

Case Study: Find a real problem

I once consulted for a large digital marketing company that was struggling with their performance and goal setting processes. After researching founders, I found that while their processes should be good, their biggest problems are:

1. The founder's role is not clearly defined, leading to overlap or neglect.
2. This team is not flexible enough.
3. There is a bottle.
4. The team price is too high or the general team structure is not good.
5. The organization's operating income decreased.

But not every part of the team works the same way, so the next step is to drive more results: How can we get people to volunteer and improve their performance? For leaders? For leaders? For senior executives?

In this case it is important to classify all responsibilities according to information such as knowledge, frequency of information required, cost and even income for each type of employee. For example, the Marketing Manager will have one of the company's most important skills: the ability to create digital marketing strategies for all new e-learning customers. This role is essential for all new and existing projects, and companies will benefit from investing in retaining this professional.

On the other hand, an accountant can be a good credit scorer. These experts will arrive on short notice to analyze finances, set up all management processes, determine key metrics to track, and even help create strategic business plans. They can then hand over control to a permanent finance manager to oversee day-to-day finances.

Finally, the person responsible for the implementation and follow-up of the social marketing plan focusing on the strategy created by the company may be the person working on a long-term contract, because this role requires the best experience. but is primarily responsible for finalizing ideas and managing information.

I can produce solutions when the distribution of symbols is completed. These include:

1. Drafting a Founders Agreement that spells out each founder's responsibilities.
2. Establish a long-term priority strategy and/or a permanent commitment to staying home.
3. Identify short-term roles for critical roles for rework or temporary work and study and outsource these services to freelancers or top-tier agencies as needed.
4. Determine whether outsourcing a department, such as a call center or business analysis team, makes financial and company culture sense.
5. Determine whether outsourcing a department, such as a call center or business analysis team, makes financial and company culture sense.
6. Taking advantage of the key benefits of quality objectives: flexibility, high performance and efficiency. Managing the company culture of the core team and recognizing that the best return on investment may not mean hiring the cheapest employees.

With that in mind, it's time to test this.

Part 2: Perform minimum testing of Corporate Strategy

In business strategies, customers often need immediate solutions. But the process is faster, cheaper and better if you start small.

The F1 team conducts rigorous research to improve the car's performance, using aerodynamic data created mainly through computer simulations and testing of car models. Wind tunnel. I have learned that teams that test their assumptions frequently and effectively (prioritizing meaningful evaluation) get results. The challenge when applying this understanding to other areas is to create a framework that allows you to test more, better, and as cheaply as possible. The best way to achieve this in your marketing strategy is with Minimum Viability Testing (MVT).

Most entrepreneurs are familiar with the concept of minimum viable product (MVP). MVT is a destructive process that breaks a business idea or project into smaller testable pieces before the test version is even tested. Popularized by serial entrepreneur Gagan Biyani, this method requires you to find the core idea of ​​your idea (it needs to be realistic to be successful) and then create the plan. so-called "atomic unit" test - Test each hypothesis separately. and narrowly.

For example, if your idea is a digital toothbrush service, one of your atomic unit tests would be to first determine whether people want to buy toothbrushes online.

The management of the race involves the important thing that F1 has in mind: rather than focusing on finding out which options will work, focusing primarily on finding out which options do not work and can be abandoned. In other words: Don't worry too much about finding the needle in the haystack at first, just get to the haystack so you can throw it away quickly.

Not all tests need to be in the real world; By asking the right questions and isolating one thought at a time, you can quickly eliminate many bad ideas using simple thinking and inference. Sometimes the answer is obvious and it's not. The more nuanced and well-worded the question, the easier it will be to collect your thoughts and narrow them down to find the best answer. This is what I do for a digital marketing company.

Case Study: Finding and using the right tests

Although many consultants will start a new company just for a trial period or choose a team and project based on thoughts and hunches, I like to try it out on a team by carefully selecting a team and project. To identify the features that the group/project portfolio should test the hypothesis on, I first used the MVT method to test the design itself:

1. We need to test a new model with a new team of employees who do not use this feature. Do we really know the company but have not been exposed to the process or should we use a team that has been there for a while?
2. The new model should include people from all levels of the hierarchy; for example, from senior employees to senior employees to the design level, or just a single layer, such as management. Average price?
3. Is it better to test existing projects to check for improvements in important metrics, or to test new projects to make sure they do? Aren't you involved in the old evil?

By breaking down our ideas for the best experiments and questioning them one by one, I quickly realized that if we don't try new teams and new models of the project, we won't know what the outcome will be. to the new model and how much of it is due to practices or injustices left over from the old way of doing business. In other words, if the test is not used correctly, we waste time and money re-isolating these cases. Likewise, we realized that since we could not isolate all jobs at one level of the hierarchy, we needed to test each employee's makeup in front of leadership.

These considerations led us to create a new model with a new team dedicated to specific short-term e-learning products. This gave us real results that we could be more confident about adding to the whole group model and limited the impact of changes to the company's revenue and performance, so I was OK with that.

Given that this testing involves determining the right mix of permanent and contract employees, we chose to start with internal employees. , business idea creator (CEO for small companies), Human Resources Director, dedicated support staff and copywriters. While outsourcing writers is uncontroversial, we find that it makes more sense to keep them full-time because the demand for their skills is long-term and the work they do is good, which is consistent with the company's strategy.

On the other hand, we can outsource many roles in customer support, video production and business analysis. This combination makes it easy for the team to expand and contract as needs change throughout the release cycle; For example, moving from a sales support team to a startup with training and education support as people begin to use e-learning employees, we update, expand and implement new models across the company.

Managing Competition in Corporate Strategy

Competitive management is a combination of scientific methods, tight deadlines and large budgets. To be successful, you need to understand your weaknesses and be rigid in every thought, filtering out failure before implementing new improvements.

Even if nothing else works, startups and small business managers can use this method to evaluate new options (cost changes, new products or features, new customer groups, or a new business strategy). You have to ask yourself: What is the easiest, fastest, cheapest way to try this and still get results that are representative enough to show which option to use to get more work done?

By spending time on the front end to identify the root of the problem and test as many of your hypotheses as possible, you will solve your problem and better develop your company's strategy.