Toast or toaster?

I recently attended a conference where one of the speakers talked about presbyopia, the condition where older people start losing their short distance vision. A similar condition affects most of us when it comes to technology. We overestimate the short-term impact of new technology while vastly underestimating the medium-term impact. And medium-term means five to 10 years. In other words, change is coming quickly and it’s going to affect your industry.

If you’re spending time on day-to-day tasks like managing your email server, planning for your next computer upgrade, and wondering why the internet’s down (again), then you’re not able to focus on what you’re good at - delighting your customers. And what your customers want, how you communicate with them, how they find out about you, and how you deliver what they want will be radically different in 10 years' time so innovation is critical to your survival.

A useful metaphor to illustrate the difference in approach between those that say “I need to control everything” and those that say “I can’t do everything” is toast vs toaster.

It goes like this:

Many people come to us and say “we’re paying too much for our electricity”. Once you talk to them you find out that what they really want is toast.

What they’re used to buying is a toaster, some electricity, bread and labour to create the toast they want. They have relationships with different people to make sure that all works. It sounds very simple but then one day they get a phone call and the toast gets burnt, then they run out of bread, and a thick piece of bread gets stuck in the toaster, and they want to make more slices than there are slots and so on.

We say “we promise we’ll deliver you however much toast you need when you need it, just how you like it. You have a relationship with us and we take care of that service. You don’t need to worry about how many slices your toaster can take, or how thick the bread is or what type of bread to buy. We do all that for you.”

Actually, switch ‘toast’ for ‘telephony’, and you get my drift. Some people still say “we just want to cut our power bill” and we say “OK we can do that too!”

The business with a medium-term future outlook recognises its limitations and trusts someone else to provide that expertise, enabling them to focus on the customer, now and tomorrow. To have a long-term future you need to innovate in the right direction and that’s a whole different topic.

Cameron Beattie is founder and managing director of Conversant