Hi Everyone,
This is the first of a two-part letter about Tahzoo and our plan forward. I see the next six months as a pivotal time for Tahzoo and for each of you. We have a lot of opportunity to grow and be profitable, however that is dependent on how well we execute. We are a team; everyone has a role to play contributing to the success of Tahzoo. We talk often about how we are smart and happy people who are passionate about improving the quality of the customer experience for our clients. Those traits need to shine bright in the coming months for us to achieve our goals.
A strong, healthy, growing business creates opportunities for Tahzoo. It will allow us to expand into new practice areas and start adjacent businesses. The market is ripe for disruption, a new way of doing business and we are in the enviable position of leading the change in the marketplace. We are only limited by our ambition and our ability to work together as a team. Growth will provide career opportunities and financial rewards for each of you.
A golf tournament takes place over four days and 72 holes. The third day is called moving day. With only 36 holes left to play if you’re not one of the leaders by the end of the third day, you’re not going to win the event. Unless the tournament is a Tiger Woods style blow out, about 10 or so strokes separate the contenders from the leaders. If you don’t play well on moving day, you run out of time and you cannot make up enough strokes to win.
My swim coach Mike Troy used to say something similar “all races are won or lost in the third lap”. His point was that everyone has extra adrenaline as they finish a race but in the third lap you can make up ground or extend your lead. All his emphasis for conditioning and race strategy was focused on being at your strongest in the 3rd leg of the race.
With July just around the corner, Tahzoo is about to enter the third leg of the race or in golf parlance, Q3 is our moving day. Given the circumstances we have had a decent first two quarters, not great but we’ve set the stage for real growth and success for the remainder of the year. As I mentioned at the beginning, it’s all going to come down to execution over the next three months.
We have some ambitious plans to address the needs of the market. We are going to expand into three areas: growing our consulting business, launching our software business, and launching our Zoodio business.
Our market opportunity –
The pandemic has changed everything. Our value proposition is more in demand today than it’s ever been. Improving the quality of the customer and employee experience is being mandated by every CEO and Board of Directors within the Global 1000 companies. The sudden shift in consumer and business-to-business behavior is threatening the empires that our clients have built. For example, one of our clients were happy to have Amazon and big box retailers manage sales distribution of their products into the US markets. A marriage of convivence, that’s not looking like a good strategy these days as big box retailers are going out of business and Amazon is increasing their cut on every transaction. Left unchecked, their margins will be eroded and the connection between their customers and the brand will be diminished. While this may not be an immediate problem, over time this is how business fail. They lose touch with their customers and a cheaper or more efficient competitor takes away revenue and profit. There are so many examples of companies not responding quickly enough only to see their empires crumble. We create experiences that just work and drive increases in revenue and customer loyalty.
Our business-to-business clients need to educate their customers, so they can win the hearts and minds of potential customers. They typically have large sales forces and distribution models that are predicated on human-to-human interaction. Well as we all know, it will be a long time before the number of conferences, seminars and in-person sales meetings, get back to pre-pandemic levels. Our clients need to be excellent at sequencing content to prospects in a way that accelerates the sales process. A one-size-fits model doesn’t work, if your goals is to persuade all of your customers. Let’s take BCG for example, how do they communicate their thought leadership and eminence in a way that drives engagement and ultimately sales? It’s going to be through providing experiences that are tailored to the unique business needs of each potential client. We help our clients drive engagement which drive revenue and repeat business.
Often overlooked, but just as important – empires are built and managed on operational efficiencies. COVID broke many of the systems for how information is communicated within a company. We are fortunate to have digitally savvy employees who can easily navigate content systems to collaborate and find the information that they need. Most companies do not have this expertise embedded within their workforce. They are primarily built on specialization and more specifically, specialization within a domain of knowledge. Let’s take our client Deloitte, they are trained accountants and auditors who use technology, but technology is not their core competency, it’s accounting. When you’re not all in an office together, how do you share knowledge efficiently? We are much better at asking questions than we are at writing search queries. Deloitte has 80K auditors globally, that is a huge number of people who need the right information at the right time and in the context of the task they are performing. They can’t just walk down the hall and ask a more senior person a question about an accounting regulation. These are huge problems that all of our clients need to solve. Improving the operational efficiency of your staff by 10% is worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of additional profit each year. What do we do for a living … we help our clients get the right information in a contextually appropriate way, we drive additional profit.
To put a fine point on my examples, we help our clients, grow, be more profitable and build loyalty by providing experiences that make millions of people a little happier every day. We could not be in a better position to meet the demands of the market. Sometimes you just have to be in the right place at the right time, that is Tahzoo.
Next week I am going to dive into each of the three businesses, our goals for the next six months, and how we will drive synergy and growth for Tahzoo. These are exciting times for us and I want each of you to remember that in business there are windows of opportunity that come along every now and then, the winners are not the ones that can see the opportunities, they are the ones who can execute against the opportunity.
I’ll leave you with my all-time favorite quote by William Shakespeare – From Julius Cesar:
“There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”
Let’s go be great!
Brad
December 27, 2019