8 Powerful Business Lessons I Brought Home from 5000 Miles Away

I traveled and stayed for almost 3 months in various places throughout the North Island of New Zealand, with a large portion of my time spent doing voluntary works for a private local tourism company in Hawke’s Bay.

[Author’s own photograph —taken from the peak of Te Mata, Hastings]

Over a period of a few months assisting the local tourism company with some specialized and general tasks entrusted to me, I have had the opportunity to enrich my life experiences and expand my skillsets. This was way back in 2017.

From my own observations and partaking of events and activities whilst I was there, here are my takeaways — the 8 powerful lessons I believe are necessary for a business to grow and thrive sustainably:

1. BUILD networking relations with other local businesses

• With a healthy microenvironment comes a conducive support system. Your microenvironment does not have to be restricted to the immediate stakeholders affecting your business routines. Other local businesses within the vicinity of your location which don’t necessarily have a transactional relationship with your business can still add value in one way or another. You just have to figure out what that is.
• The company I volunteered at has built a healthy relationship with the city’s other business entities. Marketing materials were exchanged to promote one another and to coordinate events in order to offer collective values to the tourists. Not only were we not hostile to one another, but we keep everyone happy.
• Even as a volunteer, I felt like I was considered as ‘family’ with certain privileges; I received discounts in certain places, I got a nice treatment at the library, and I got a special deal when renting a bicycle long-term.

[Author’s own photographs — whenever I had free time, I frequented the nearby beach to enjoy fresh air and being in the moment]

2. Learn to UNLEARN

• As human beings, we are prone to search for, interpret, select, and recall information which only confirm or support our existing beliefs. This is known as confirmation bias.
• At that point in time, I came from a social circle and a pure science academic background where business exposure is minimal (except that one time in my pre-university when I took Economics as the elective— even so, it’s still not a business class). Almost everything I knew about business was from my own little observations from when I was a kid, and I’d never viewed business pass the point of mere transactions to buy commodities and non-essentials.
• But over here, I learned that there’s more to business than money changing hands. It’s what’s happening in the background that makes it interesting. It’s the understanding that customers are driven by their inner needs (referring to models like the Maslow’s hierarchy), and figuring out what those needs are can be part art and part science. I learned that a valuable business necessitates one to put on a creative thinking hat in order to uncover those which are otherwise hidden.

3. STRATIFY but never disregard

• It’s common for a business to define its core customers as those who bring in high profitability, sustained relationship, low cost to serve as well as high transaction volume. But subscribing to that notion of core customers without taking into account the business context is a recipe for disaster.
• Taking the example from a seasonal industry like tourism, which, in my case, depends mostly on taking in customers from scheduled cruise ship visits, makes a business prone to over-reliance from a single source. A business always needs to diversify its revenue streams. I observed a lot of local people (primarily from the North Island region of New Zealand) tend to come back bringing new people along with them: friends, family, relatives etc. In hindsight, we would be better off had we leveraged their recruitment power.
• Therefore, it’s important to identify which ones bring in indirect source of income by a whole lot. Disregarding them simply because their direct lifetime value is low can turn a business to a zombie entity who’s barely able to survive through the off-peak seasons.

[Author’s original digital art] An improper customer stratification will result in cherry-picking the right customers at the wrong time, favoring one over the other when in fact both can be valuable, just at different times.

4. IMAGINE the customers’ journey

• Ever heard of the phrase ‘to put yourself in someone’s shoes’?
• Trust me, the shoe isn’t that stinky.
• Create a mental image of what each customer’s journey is like as they’re getting towards their goal.
• Our tour site is located on top of a hill.
• A really steep one.
• Most people come and visit us by walking.
• Imagine if you’re one of them; you would certainly feel tired (and sometimes cranky) by the time you got to the top.
• We therefore always keep track of whether our water and ice cream supplies are replenished, so that these convenience factors are there when the customers need them.
• Getting deep into their point of view will enable your business to see where the opportunity lies to provide value as and when needed. Remember what you learned in Marketing 101? When a perceived value is high, the price follows. People will be willing to pay high for things they value highly of.
• But don’t overcharge, though. 🤑

5. NORMALIZE best practices

• Best practices must be a norm within the company.
• Inconsistency in providing great services to customers lead to perceived unreliability.
• To ensure we’re always at our best state to serve the customers, we ensure that we have a well designed rotation of shifts.
• Our shifts take into account that working hours mustn’t be too long and flexibility is tolerable by allowing the exchange of slots between ourselves when needs arise.
• Speaking of rotation shifts, if your company uses Excel or MS Word to generate templates for duty rosters, use this Employee Rotation Generator instead. I developed this simple tool (and it’s free) so one can automatically obtain the schedule without having to repeat the manual and tedious work every week. All that the tool needs is a list of employee IDs (or unique names) and a list of tasks. As soon as you run the tool, the weekly planner magically appears out of thin air. That’s the beauty of technology.

[Author’s original photograph] — At times when I had my time off, I would walk or cycle down the hill to the city. If I had some things to buy, I’d carry my backpack behind me. The blue outerwear was my ‘friend in need’ for when the chilly breeze from the nearby beach wrapped me up without mercy.

6. EPITOMIZE what the business stands for

• Be the perfect embodiment of the values your company represents.
• At our workplace, we value inclusiveness: People of various nationalities and social backgrounds were all welcomed (At the time of writing, though, I had been informed by a third party that I was one of the last volunteers to be allowed to work there).
• Being an inclusive company not only reflects the diversity of our international customers but also adds flavor to the working environment. As the saying goes, ‘variety is the spice of life’.
• Plus, each one of us brought various skill sets too.
• I’ve got the chance to practice my German reading comprehension skills (nur ein bisschen) during the German-to-English transcription audit process.
• Being an international traveler myself, I can relate to my (international) customers’ wants and needs.

[Original digital art by the author] — Me with some of my lovely colleagues (aka friends) at work on my final hours before leaving the country.

7. SOLIDIFY your sales

• Try out new business models as you see fit.
• Other than D2C, we also pitched in our white-labeled digital products to certain marketing partners.
• That way, we could absorb the hit from competitions in areas where the shark are more direct and head-on in their attacks.
• Knowing when to be offensive, when to be defensive, and when to navigate a bluer ocean is all part of sales strategies.
• Do you remember that one episode on Shark Tank: when Covid hit the travel industry hard and down to its knees, and when all other luggage companies stopped advertising, that one budding company swooped in and kinda monopolized the advertising real estate spaces (temporarily). That unexpected advertising move led to their massive brand exposure and visibility within a short period, allowing them to scale fast.

8. SMARTEN up your business

• Work smarter to cut costs.
• Delegate certain tasks to freelancers.
• Coming from a place where freelancing was unpopular in the job market at the time, I’ve seen how freelancers added value to the company.

And as it stands, today, I’m one of many.

Now, let’s recall the main points:

Build.

Unlearn.

Stratify.

Imagine.

Normalize.

Epitomize.

Solidify.

Smarten-up.

Take all the initials and see what abbreviation you got. 🕵️‍♂️

Which do you relate to the most?