CTRL-Shift-Escape - #11

Social Value

I've recently been on a quick tour of some of our Scottish customers. One of the high spots was dropping in at Lochwinnoch Community Trust, where I presented a 'big cheque' to the Trust for the £1,500 grant we've made to them to help them furnish and power their new Men's Shed. You can read more about it here.

It's really uplifting to see what people can achieve when 'authority' gives a little bit of support but generally keeps out of the way. We pitched in the £1,500 as our 'social value' pledge for our contract to supply our waste management system to Renfrewshire Council.

And here's the controversial bit. I think the whole 'social value' concept is fundamentally nonsense. Here's how it works.

At the time we tender for a contract, we specify how much 'social value' we will provide to the local community. This amounts to 5% of the overall score.

Having won the contract, we are contacted by an officer of the council to ask how we will deliver our 'community benefits'. Our contract is fundamentally to supply software, which we mostly do remotely. We aren't employing people locally, building any infrastructure etc so there isn't much we can actually 'do'.

The council officer sends us a list of 'worthy causes' to support. Each item on that list represents hours of work from the applicant in making their bid. Then, from a distance of 250 miles we are expected to assess which ones we want to support.

We chose Lochwinnoch Community Trust over other very worthy causes because it fits into our overall arc of supporting male mental health. That, fundamentally, is self-serving on our part and not based on any understanding of the real needs of that community.

"But it's extra money going into the community Tim!"

No it isn't. It's a cost of doing business, and it's inevitably factored into the price paid by the council.

What we've done here is replace a system where local councils funded their own good causes with a new one. It's a crazy set up whereby the council pretends it's getting free money and let's a bloke in Barnsley decide which of their charities are worthy of support. This is all managed by expensive administration in the council, and more expensive administration in Barnsley. In the long-term those costs are inevitably carried by all our customers.

So I'm delighted that we've been able to support the Lochwinnoch Community Trust. It's just incredibly ironic that a council which is almost half SNP is happy to see funding for a project in Lochwinnoch decided by an English software developer who couldn't have found it on a map until last week.

Sales is 50% 'showing up'

Whilst in Scotland I met with South Ayrshire Council and our newest client, City of Edinburgh. Both of those sales started from the most old-school and low-tech form of marketing there is.

We asked if we could call in and see them. We were, after all, passing by on a trip to Aberdeen.

In the case of Edinburgh we were genuinely 'passing by'. With South Ayrshire, we made a 2 hour detour to pass by (there's not many places you can be heading to that require you to pass Ayr).

Those cups of tea and very general chat about the waste industry led to two very different procurement paths. South Ayrshire have fully implemented garden subscriptions AND completed their first annual renewals, Edinburgh have just got going.

In each case we got lucky - both councils had problems they needed to solve. We just showed up at the right time and helped them to see what could be done. Crucially we kept on showing up and working with them to figure out what they needed and how they could procure it.

There's a lesson there for all those fools spending time writing LinkedIn Newsletters and filming silly videos of themselves to get noticed. Pick up the phone, get in the car and put the kettle on.

"Nobody wants to buy software"

There's a saying that "when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail". As we are fundamentally a software house I have to keep reminding myself, our sales team, our software developers, even our customers, that we can't solve everything with software.

I spoke with a client this week who has serious issues in getting all their collections done with the resources they have. Their problems are rooted in staff sickness, vehicle unreliability and seasonal factors. At first I was puzzled - why call your software company when you have broken vehicles and absent staff?

The obvious answers of agency staff and spot hire vehicles would only paper over the cracks. Our client didn't want more software, but he did want to make routes more efficient, reduce strain on the service from missed bins and have a faster view of where his resources were needed.

Another DIY-related cliche is that a man buying a drill doesn't want a drill - he wants a hole.

So we set about figuring out how we could very quickly deliver the changes they needed. In this case it was not just software but a set of services which will cut weeks out of the timeline. As Simpler Recycling and the March 31st deadline looms ever-larger we are likely to sell holes at least as quickly as we sell drills.