Lock down has not been a nice time, and no-one in their right mind would wish it on anyone, however it has certainly helped shape and define our business and we have now seen signs that all the hard work is paying off.
When lockdown hit far from shutting down, we took a long look at the market in front of us and redefined our company (we had to), the companies’ direction and it’s routes to market. We have followed two distinct concepts of Kaizen (Continuous Improvement – through small steps) and tried in our small way to be pioneers (so be brave and take the steps into new markets, and learn new business practices).
Your Finance Friend at its most basic level is a young finance broker which entered a market loaded with large old and traditional asset finance companies. It is a market full of banks and funding houses that have always done thinks in a certain way.
We in our small team have the experience from working in and with these organisations but also want to do things a little differently.
The key to Your Finance Friend is in the third word ‘Friend’. We want to be ALWAYS fair, transparent, honest and helpful to our suppliers, customers, and contacts along the path. We design all our contact points, services and behaviours around clarity of information, and good honest consulting to ensure everyone is better off for the exchange.
All the above sounds like a soundbite you would get from any company; it is not. Actually putting the ‘Friend’ into practice in an industry where it has become very impersonal, distant and under resourced with people, we have had to work extremely hard in creating this business.
Taking that into the lockdown environment also meant we needed to adapt again to the new needs of our potential customers.
Our business was built around generating business through direct face-to-face contact, referral and networking with good ultra-local business. . . a strategy that has worked for us for many years and created very close, loyal and committed customers who want a quality service and expert advice. We were focused on assisting company owners making expensive decisions when purchasing machinery and equipment for their businesses; so we had to be at hand when they needed and be able to supply good advice.
HOWEVER, the world changed with the Covid-19 crisis, it shut down. Our normal routes to market closed, and shut down; our existing customers cut back and stopped. Networking went online at best and disappeared at worst. Our customers factories furloughed and closed doors and those still buying as their consultants we advised many, many cases for them to hold back, return their equipment or don’t sign the final documents as they could not provably demonstrate their future affordability and so rather than put them in additional strain advise them to buy later. It was the right thing to do, but within a couple of days we were worried.
Was there a market for us?
What we started to discover was that companies who still needed to upgrade machinery had access to cheap government supported loans and grants, and most who previously were considering were rightfully holding back and letting the world settle down again (often off our advise too!).
We needed to change. We had always used Kaizen approach which is designed for small but continuous business change but we needed a wholesale look at the business. It actually still applied as everything was done through teamwork, personal discipline, testing and training which are all key parts of the process, we just had to do it at quick pace.
First key change was to identify that Furlough was not a wise move for our business, which was young and recognising that most our competitors were much larger and were likely to furlough their marketing teams we actually had a marketing opportunity.
Second key decision was to focus on vehicle finance as opposed to asset/equipment finance. The reason for this change is that we found large assets often meant our competitor was a direct purchase and with a lot of cheap loans and grants out there we were fighting a much more hostile market.
Despite the fact people were hardly driving, they now had more time to choose their car and, in many cases, people needed to change their cars for various reasons due to lock-down.
Your finance friend was about to be put through marketing school.
We put ourselves thoroughly into the online arena, upgraded all landing pages, and made ourselves visible on a broad range of social media and rather than being luke-warm there, we have made sure that all activity is regular, consistent, coordinated, scheduled, well-built and driven by an underlying marketing messages. All the marketing links back to a well built and optimised website. Our messages and routes to action are at the end of every journey through the systems.
It is a massive piece of work and something that we could of looked at and avoided, but if there was ever a time to do it we decided it was now.
Using SEO analysis and monitoring services which we had to learn how to use in a very short space of time we have kept track of activity, interaction, and our growth in the market and how our competitors performances have been in comparison
Results have been quick and we have watched our competitors go into lockdown with their marketing messages shrinking; we have moved our messages into parts of the market we have never been seen before.
Most of our competition has now woken up and although we are now in the run with everyone else there is no doubt that we have grown our position in the market and we are getting opportunities we would never of found before.
The vehicle market has shrunk 90% from this time last year, we have probably lost income to the value of 3 months in the process of lockdown, but we have absolutely grown market share. Our competitors in many cases have 50 to 100 employees. We do not need their market. We just need a small share to serve our focused consultancy and I believe we are very well placed now.
Who knows what is just over the horizon now, but we have weathered the storm and are better for it. A good business adapts. A good business listens to what is happening and what their customers are asking for and identify what they need and want.
The changes were crucial to making success possible and although it would be near impossible to go back to where we were, we would not want to. It has been a journey and we are now a very different business.
Richard Frazer
Director