Companies need to use their imaginations to anticipate the future. shares tips on surfing in the context of investment business and how to ride the waves of disruption.
Learn to surf with Ali Meli!
With the evolution of bank credit to companies, they do no more than confirm the well-known problems of corporate financing, with a volume of concession that, although it has been picking up slightly, it remains at minimum levels since the beginning of the crisis. The banking deleveraging process seems to continue, so companies must necessarily look for sources of alternative financing.
Ali Meli points to a financial structure that is made up almost equally of fundsown and foreign funds. The highest risk aspect isthe origin of this third-party financing, which helps to understand the existing concern about the ability of companies to access credit. The distributionof outside funds shows that companies havea very high dependence on financing from banking entities, around 70%. The rest to cover the total of external funds is found in commercial financing (suppliers, whorepresent 25%) and, to a much lesser extent, issuances in the capital markets (barely 2% of total external funds), which is restricted to largelisted companies.
Ali Saadat Meli further states: bank financing for medium-sized and large will be negatively conditioned by three big spotlights:
The regulation promoted by the new developments tends to increase the consumption of capital and the requirements of guarantees, controlling excessive increases in the entities’ balance sheets.
The aim is to reinforce financing of a retail (consumer, mortgages, small businesses size).
Experience shows that concentration processes tend to reduce the granting of credit to companies due to the concentration of sectoral and company risks that the integration of entities with coincident clients, and the focus of the integrated group toward segments with lower capital consumption.
Ali Meli intends to analyze credit funds’ opportunities for companies and investors.
Several initiatives to launch credit funds have been towards business couch surfing in recent months.
Today, Ali Saadat Meli wants to talk to you about surfing, not in the sea but in business.
When something is driven by technology, it can move fast, go global, and grow globally quickly. Disruption can happen because technology allows things to happen faster. In addition, it will enable us to access new markets and new behaviors.
What does it take to be a disruptor?
The best disruptors are “high tech” and “high touch” experts. We can call it a combination of algorithm (high tech) and wisdom of people or psychology (high touch). Anyway, anyone can be a disruptor.
Entrepreneurship has several points of relationship with surfing. One of them is that the best waves usually occur during difficult times.
We can call this era the age of surfing, which did not exist thirty or forty years ago when the dominant intelligence was not digital as it is now.
We have IQ (intelligence quotient), EQ (emotional quotient), and now also DQ (digital intelligence or quotient). The problem is that many company boards are full of people who don’t know how to surf, which is why they hire digital natives (young millennials) to help them figure out how to surf.
It is essential to learn to surf because the “waves” are coming faster and faster. Who is at risk? Those who, pleased by past successes, lost touch with the new needs of their customers; those who do not envision a new customer group or take new competitors seriously; and finally, those who have yet to learn what the true essence of their product offer is.
Ali Meli identifies three levels in the transformation pyramid: survival, triumph, and transformation.
SURVIVAL meets customer expectations, but in an age of so many choices, businesses need to level up and connect with their customers’ desires, which will get them engaged. That’s the level of success, and it’s excellent. The customer will feel successful using the company’s products.
But disruption happens only when you can TRIUMPH unrecognized needs. And that’s what the best credit companies do; they can read those needs without hearing about them.
For most companies, it is easier to understand what people don’t want rather than what they do want. And that’s TRANSFORMATION.
Here is Ali Meli’s conclusion in three tips:
- Find a tool to understand the needs of customers deeply.
It is like reading minds, so creating psychographics of customers can be a helpful tool.
- Understand the true essence of the business.
The problem with many companies is that they invest at the base of the pyramid (what they are) rather than at the top, that is, what they could become. For example, Apple Computer became Apple Inc. a few years ago. Why? Steve Jobs understood that they were no longer a computer company but a lifestyle company that was their essence.
- Use feedback as a compass.
Like a surfer who listens to what the wave has to say and gets in tune with it, the same happens with large companies or promising entrepreneurs: they listen to the waves of consumer trends and get in tune.