Good morning everyone and welcome to this latest webinar on the Building Business Resilience series. I think most of you know me but for those who don't, my name is Linda Grant and I'm a Director of Food Projects at Vic Innovation. So today we're going to be focusing on e-commerce some particularly the financial aspects and how to make it, well make sure it's a profitable route to market and not just another way to spend your hard earned cash. Before we get started I would just like to remind you all that you can join in the fun, you can use the chat function or the Q&A function for any questions. We are recording this webinar so we can send that out plus we do have a slide presentation so it's a slightly different format from what we've used before. We are also going to use the voting function in a moment on this webinar but just to go back and give a little bit of context for those of you who've joined the previous webinars, you might have been expecting to see my colleague John Taylorson chairing this one so we've decided to actually make him do some work this week. So he's going to be presenting and singing for his supper. We also usually have Hugh Thomas from the Food and Drink Wales Industry Board joining us but unfortunately he can't today so again I'll have to sort of give that overall message as to how this webinar program came about but also the investor ready program and that really has been driven by the Food and Drink Wales Industry Board. I think again many of you perhaps have engaged with the investor ready program. We have a team of accountants and Food and Drink Industry Specialists who go out and work with food and drink companies helping them to improve their financial systems, prepare funding applications and so again if you would like to know more about this we're very happy to tell you more. So just moving on to the topic in hand and perhaps it's very relevant to be discussing this today when well certainly where I am it is pouring with rain outside and who would want to go and queue up to do their shopping on the daylight today and whilst I haven't queued to get into a supermarket for a while now probably six or eight weeks we are certainly this week it seems to be we're entering a period of even more uncertainty and concerns COVID cases obviously are rising significantly again and there's almost a sense of deja vu I think on as we're watching what's happening in mainland Europe. We've got localised lockdowns we've got one our first one in Wales and whilst the children have gone back to school we know that some schools have almost immediately had to send large groups of children home where they've had a positive test so there's more ongoing worry for working parents. We know that e-commerce became very important during lockdown and for all the reasons I've just highlighted it remains a very relevant channel for food and drink businesses to engage in but do well we saw what happened in the early days of the pandemic lockdown and panic buying consumers very anxious about going out and buying and putting themselves potentially at risk and then obviously for food and drink businesses they know all too well what happened when food service shut down overnight so the producers who had some sort of e-commerce operation already in place obviously very quickly switched their focus to direct consumers but others then had to start from scratch and I have to say personally speaking I am so pleased that so many Welsh food and drink producers did offer online sales because I think most of my sort of extended family might not have had birthday presents anniversary presents if I couldn't have sent Welsh cream teas beer cider cheese and of course for me Jim so to help us understand what the market opportunity I'm really pleased that Lauren Smith from the drinks cluster is joining us and she's going to walk us through just what has happened to the channel and hopefully sort of point us in the right direction on where the opportunities may be for the future and of course John Taylorson who will talk about the finances and the economics of getting this channel right but just before I hand over to Lauren I'm going to launch the poll and hope it's it is there so for those of you who have got access to this and there's two short questions to answer and then we'll crack on so here goes so if you can answer nobody seems to be I don't know oh yep a few people are answering that's good I think we're nearly there 84 percent have answered so 89 just two more but maybe they don't have access to a screen so there we go I'm going to end that poll now and I'm going to share this so John you're going to be very interested in the relevant results okay can you share can you see the results yeah I can see the results yeah 50 cents online yeah 50 percent think the sales are profitable and then well nearly the same number well one who doesn't but it's interesting right I'm now going to share the presentation and I seem to have gone on to and hopefully you can all see that so over to you then Lauren great more than everyone and thanks for having me as Linda says I'm Lauren Smith I work closely with the drinks cluster as well and I'm just going to put some market context on what we've been talking about I think Linda some lines really nicely what's been happening with online and we've had just an e-commerce boom since March due to safety convenience there's been lots of factors that have contributed to this but what we are seeing now is the online shopping is reaching a record market share so the last four weeks at the beginning of August we saw 1.3 billion of online grocery sales which is a big jump from what we were seeing even eight months ago the Cardo so online specialists also hit a new record in August to register in a market share of 1.8 percent and over the last 12 weeks at the beginning of August saw growth of 45.5 percent so this is really big numbers that we're seeing third the total adult population now are spending more than 50 pounds a week on online grocery shopping and 13 percent are spending 100 pounds weekly so these again are some really big numbers and what we can see here in comparison to the other sales channels these are market shares from 2019 and what the forecast looks for 2022 and we can see the online has increasing seven billion worth of sales by 2022 these are the forecasts and 59.2 percent value growth which is huge and the only ones that we're seeing come close to that are the discounters and that's at 25.4 percent so if this does trend in the way that we expect by 2022 we can see the online market will have nine percent share so this has become a very important channel for us to consider and for us to really develop our activity in as well online shopping habits are changing so we can see now we've seen what the spend is we can see how important it's becoming but really from a consumer's perspective as well since March now 49 percent have had UK households doing a weekly grocery shop online and then since March that's 2.7 million households that have been converted to online shopping so these are big numbers and what I see is half of those as well that have been converted between March and June say they will shop more online in the future so these people that have adapted have adopted shopping online they're really happy with what they're experiencing they they want to continue this it's become part of a habit I think what we do see is it takes 66 days to form a habit and we've definitely seen that of the lockdown periods and interestingly as well we've seen the largest growth in online shopping from 55 plus year olds and this is the group that tend to adopt trends later on so even the groups that were potentially averse to shopping online or were used to it and now adopting that and we're going to see a large group moving forward with online shopping and a different group to the online consumer that we knew before. Sorry Lauren just to interrupt there I think that's really interesting about the age profile and obviously as we head into perhaps a winter season with fear of infection you can see actually that group perhaps is going to be more likely to keep those habits because they don't want to be going out into well certainly queuing up on on days like today but also the fear of infection absolutely yeah and as well I think the second group that it's developed that was adopting online shopping after this was families with households so for children or young children family shoppers so again whether we're having look like lockdowns again potentially as you referred to issues with schools that sort of convenience that online shopping provides will become more and more important as we head into the winter. So these changing habits now are leading the retailers to invest online they can see that it's a trend that is irreversible as the waitrose boss says Tesco, Waitrose, M&S having close ties with Ricardo so this is just going to become more and more important as we go forward we're likely to see more of the retailers now continue to invest in their online channels. So what we know is online is becoming increasingly important this strong consumer adoption of e-commerce and the trend is that it's not going away so the key consideration that we need to be looking at for a good online shopping experience is visibility availability and desirability and when we break these down there's things that you're probably considering anyway but things that we need to bear in mind when we're thinking about the online shopping experience so look at visibility if consumers are shopping trying to find your product we use appropriate product names if they're putting into into the search engine whatever it is whether they want a certain product of gin there's no point in calling it a special a special tonic because that's they're not going to be able to find your product so we just need to make it really simple for the consumer in terms of availability if we're enticing consumers with our promotions then this is a different but provides a difficult order experience this provides an overall poor customer experience and desirability we need to carefully consider the proposition and positioning as well online we need to demonstrate our value and John will go more into depth with the financial implications soon but these really are key considerations to bear in mind for the online shopping experience because it will impact heavily on your return investment as well just hop forward a little bit we can see to really strengthen those availability desirability visibility we need to have these things in place we need to look at the platform that we're using whether these are facebook instagram what's our website look like we need to make our products designable as well it needs to have good supporting graphics good sales messaging good commercial positioning commercial expertise if we need to incentivize consumers of potential promotions and also adapt at pace as well what people doing I know as Linda referred to earlier on in the pandemic that we're seeing people sending a loss of presence to people's gifts to help people that when you're having a hard time during this time so adapting to those consumer behaviors will be important but these things do cost money and they do take time and time is a valuable resource as well so we just need to be really savvy about how we do this so some of the initiatives that we've seen exemplify best practice and I said we're close with drinks cluster and one of the things that we've seen recently is the importance of collaboration as well how effective that can be with wash wine week we had at the end of July this is really to create awareness and drive sales in a really tough period when sales channels had been shut down but by collaborating we strengthened that large group voice we incentivized consumers we provided different events different things that were going on and these were supported by strong communications as well and utilizing the networks of different producers as well that's where the the great aspect of collaboration comes into play because we can we can pull on these levers that we all have as part of the group and I'm sorry to interrupt again Lauren but of course Welsh Government have been supporting the sort of umbrella messaging haven't they with the the Carrie Camry sort of celebration days which have been a great platform for businesses to to share what they've been doing absolutely and I think across social media on the celebration days I think it was almost trending so we can see there how the strength of a collective voice can really make a good cut through with consumers and again as we touched on the events as well we've had producers that have hosted virtual events such as online tastings and this is great because it really connects the consumer potentially a time that we haven't been able to be face-to-face with these people but even outside of that it helps to promote your offer you can develop and own a story and also create community around that as well potentially moving customers or the potential customers along that ladder of loyalty they can become customers of yours become advocates and then that ties all together they've got just a continuous circle of both in consumers that are really sold on your store in your product communications channels to really support our online offer to direct people to our website social media is a fantastic tool but we can ask the question why bother these kind of can look like fantasy metrics sometimes and we look at success but it's an opportunity to start conversations with people what we do know is that consumers generally tend to do business with people people that they like and people that they feel an affinity to so if we can start these conversations with people that's great to put us on the front but we can become front of mind for consumers and engage with our audience so that we want that if they think of a certain product we want then you to be the first people that they think of we can really do that very strengthening our message through social media and we can also raise our brand and business profile we can become familiar within the industry and if you have strength around that but if we think about our communications channels it takes time it takes resource to really invest in what we're doing and if we're going to do it properly a limited time and resource means that we really have to be savvy in our communications as well so we need to consider how much time can we dedicate to these consistency is the key and if we only have a small amount of time then we want to do potentially one channel and potentially do it right if you have a target in mind and you think you can really dedicate an hour to it per week then we just stick with that potentially two two posts a week and I will continue with that but the consumer knows what to expect then and they you're not potentially hurting any expectations and also who is your audience where are they spending their time and that's again ties into our return and investment as well if we know that we want to be targeting our consumers in an efficient way and that's really going to help become how our e-commerce offerings become more profitable and again just to give a small example before John leads on there's a small example of the way that the cost implications on social media we look at the pay downs for tithing aspects I think it can look quite scary on first glance um but this can be a really effective tool into reaching consumers and importantly we can start small one pound per day is a reasonable starting point to really get to grips with this and we can be very targeted as well we can reach a specific demographic that we want to reach so in other ways that potential um radio adverts or tv adverts even though they're very expensive can you can reach a large number of consumers but they may not necessarily be a lot of them the consumers that you want to reach but the good thing about the social advertising is that we can be very specific about these demographics helpfully we can measure the analytics as well we want to know the objectives that we want to set the measures that we want to measure by and then we can keep on top of that as well and if we keep on top of it and we can see success from it then we can increase our spend if that's effective and this pay for advertising now can work in parallel with our communications and our commercial offers so we can promote our commercial offers reach consumers and grow awareness by starting very small with a reasonable price point so the tip there is obviously um for any welsh gin producers they need to make sure i'm in their demographic please okay i think we're moving on to john then so um loren's done all the hard work there obviously of setting the scene and it's really easy for you now john because surely it's just well amazon's there isn't it that's the solution absolutely absolutely thank you linda yeah and amazon is potentially part of the solution i think um yeah um just to explain um why i'm i mean go back to 2007 i started a food and drink business from scratch and i had a couple of nice retailers by 2008 by the end of 2008 one of those had gone bang thanks to the financial crisis so in january 2009 i noticed that the prepacked um from administration retailer was now selling products online um that um had come out of the administration and we thought well if they can go online perhaps we can so january 2009 we went online with amazon and uh started looking at other retailers and by december 2009 we were out bid for our url by um amazon because they were directing people to go to amazon to buy our products um so i've got a screenshot of it i can show it to people if they want to see it just to prove it the point being that um like this crisis um it was an opportunity for something to go online which at the time for food and drink online wasn't really what people expected so why go online and it is intimidating if you haven't done it before and even if you are doing it it might be intimidating the compelling reason i always give to people is cash up front or pretty soon afterwards i think amazon pays out weekly i think when we were doing it it was literally fortnightly unless you press the button to get that money passed back to you the great thing about this is that you're the category manager as loren's just been explaining you can decide who what the product is what the price is what the promotion is that it's going to be about you're positioning it via the um the different communication channels so you're doing the who wear when and why for for the products now if you're selling to a retailer you don't get to do that so much so it does put you in control and it does mean that positioning using those various channels is within your grip it also means you can do new product development literally in half an hour and i mean you know this has happened where you say somebody has an idea for a product or a gift set or something for a food and drink products you effectively put it together make sure you've got a cardboard box that it can all go in take a nice picture of it and food photography is really important and stick it up online see what people think of it if somebody says that's terrible what are you doing you say well take it down never happened but that is part of the problem with the internet because it is very noisy and you want as loren put it you want to be able to cut through so positioning being consistent and having a planned budget for promotional activity and measuring um how that goes is really key to learning what works and what doesn't we can go to the next slide please so as i was like to say the internet is all about aggregation or disintermediation what do you mean by that john amazon is an aggregator amazon is really good at getting a lot of people together in one place so that your product potentially consists of alongside other people's products and go into their shopping basket as people go by so they are very much more effective at getting those people together for you whereas if people come and deal with you directly that's disintermediation but they've got to know to come to you directly and that's the key issue for um the difference between the two strategies and there is not a binary choice you don't have to say or i'm going to go one or the other you can start with one and move to the other or move between them with products the key thing here is knowing what the costs are of those of going down those various channels on what is appropriate for you so if we can move to the next slide um now is understanding the costs of those channels so for example you think well that's all right we've got a website we can we can make that e-commerce there is these days a lot of work to be done around ensuring that you've got the right platform for selling your products that it's secure um so there are some sunk costs and some maintenance costs for your own website to consider and those sunk costs you know the money that you bury into that website that you can't get back again is only going to be defrayed over the number of products that you sell through there so you need to be confident that you can attract enough people to get rid of those costs versus those aggregators British corner shop Amazon Ocado not on the high streets now these may not be the first place that some people might go for some food and drink products so it's got to be appropriate but equally it could be that you can use a blend of the two or as is happening now some of the wholesalers who are out there who will take your stuff to the jet the fine food retail market might also offer you what they call dropship which means that they'll do some of that fulfillment for you they'll even put your products up on on Amazon and some of these other sites as well so there isn't one simple choice there are many choices and it's really choosing which one gives you the best margin so coming back to this theme of aggregation and disintermediation the real cost here is how do we tell the difference between what costs we have via either channel so if we just slip on one one slide think of it like this if we build a palette we put 400 items on it and we put it into Amazon because we're fulfilled by Amazon Amazon FBA that aggregator is going to do two things one they're going to get enough people coming past all those people who've got Amazon Prime who will just slip things into their into their cart on the other side you might have to employ people or you might have to stand around print off 400 individual orders do the postage for them pick them out put them together and so on and so forth lots of time that you know not always going to anticipate doing particularly if it's something seasonal and it's a run up to Christmas and of course remember Amazon's got a lot of practice they've got systems that do all this whereas on the other hand there are potentially 400 opportunities for you to get it wrong so when we're thinking about the cost we need to think about the real cost of people's time and effort when we go in when we go in going to doing these things now let's just slide onto the next channel that is no different of course to the sort of work that goes into selling on other channels and the key thing here is treating online as a cost center as a separate enterprise in the same way as you might do with something like van sales now we know van sales work for some people and don't work for others mainly because you don't have enough business sometimes to cover the fixed costs of running that van and online might be exactly the same so the point is is you've got to be able to attribute the costs that are associated with a channel of sale and ensure that your pricing and the way that you structure your pricing reflects the real costs associated with that channel and of course one way of doing that is to ensure that in the same way as you have ledger codes the cost of sales that will be in your hopefully electronic zero quick book sage system you should have ledger codes for the individual channels of distribution so a code that says this is going to the retailers this is the code for stuff that's on van sales this is the code for the cost of sales for online so that when it comes to adding up what is working what's not working you can attribute the sales and the cost of sales to see what your gross margin is for that channel we'll move to the next slide what do we mean by that and I'm sure you're all very well aware of what a gross margin is but it's really important to particularly when you do individual products online to sit down and go what are the real costs of doing this and there are three sorts of costs for putting a new product up online because nine times out of ten you end up having to do a fresh new piece of cardboard that's going to merchandise or protect this product as it's going to go down that distribution channel so there's some costs immediately for that the key thing here is to ensure that you know what costs are attributable to to online and that you pick up those hidden costs the transaction charges it may well be that you've had to pay an additional service to payment sense or whoever it is so that you can do online transactions I do all those costs together and making sure that your sales price still leaves you with a gross margin but also then whether or not you pitch that in the right position and sometimes people set out online to make sure that it's not easily compared with what else is out in the market just in the same way as you want to ensure that you're not undermining your clients your customers out there in the market so pricing which is the next slide is critical and I know the temptation sometimes of the people is to cut the price because they think and even the consumer thinks well if I'm dealing with the supplier directly perhaps I should be getting a discount no and I think one of the things and Lauren's mentioned this as well I think that we've learned from this year is people will pay a premium for the convenience or for you to put together combinations assortments if you like that they can't buy anywhere else so it's much more difficult for people to to compare and the key thing here is to ensure that you can identify online as that separate enterprise so that you know if it can stand in its own two feet and sometimes you've got to ensure that the products that you sell don't confuse the customer I often talk about one of the few years ago we had an array of gift sets that we were selling online and we chopped them back from about seven to about three or four I think and everybody was concerned that we chopped sales back at the same level the reverse happened we simplified our offer the consumer had less choice but they actually had some definite choices sales were 150 percent from the previous year so it actually a confused consumer very often doesn't buy so back to Lauren's message about being clear and precise about what your offer is equally don't want to upset your other trade customers so the key thing there is to ensure that your trade customers when they go online they don't find that you're undercutting them in the market if anything this is a this is something that can support them in the market and goes delivery costs that value proposition that we'll talk about later making sure that a customer when they buy online feels that actually if they pay over a certain amount they really rather expect the postage to be flung in as well so it's working out what your costs are and at what point you feel that you can afford to absorb the cost of the distribution because somebody has got to pay for it okay next slide please thanks Linda so what drives the costs well it's not going to come as a surprise that ambience is very easy to do it doesn't require chill or frozen but then that comes back to this point about direct or indirect a car door will be a lot better at delivering frozen food than you might be if you're going to set up from scratch and having something that can cope with a yodel driver all others drop kicking it over the hedge would be really very helpful and you know you know a um you can convert your your your sponge cake into an eaten mess very quickly if it's not packaged correctly and shelf life of course is important as well and one of the things to notice one of the costs that people worry about with people like amazon is if stuff's hanging around on shelves too long because they they can start to stray into the territory where you get an additional cost so having a shelf life is important making sure that shelf life means that that product when it arrives at the the customer the consumer has got enough code left on it is important too but you don't just have to sell physical product subscriptions look at people like the coffee companies where they've signed people up on subscriptions i think the wine guys are a good example as well the great thing about this is you start to write a revenue line because once you've sold a subscription you pretty much can rely on that for a while vouchers pre-sell i mean it's even more money up front in a way so you've got the either the voucher for the gift or the experience or the learning if it's a cookery school or something so online sales got a lot wider than for food and drink than just the physical product okay thanks can we go on to the next slide please linda there we go now at the risk of repeating ourselves some of the things here that that are really important is that allocating time to the sort of things that london was talking about and okay we're talking about the difference between fixed and variable costs you have the fixed costs within the business for doing promotional stuff anyway but chances are online requires additional time somebody's sit there and do the update to the website for search engine optimization updating and checking the prices on the online and ensuring that the descriptions are up to date and that any seasonal promotions have been finished and new ones put in place ensuring that the code the amount of shelf life left on stuff that's in fulfillment centers making sure that anything is getting close to the end that might be incurring cost there are all sorts of hidden costs here for people's time and effort that you have to make time for but most of all it's planning promotions and being able to set them up and run them for a while be they social media channels or even the price promotions that you want to run on your own website or some of the aggregator websites those can be set up weeks in advance but they need measurement and literally the first thing I used to do every day was sit down and look at what the sales were every day and compare them with well we've been previously year on year month you know month on month season on season and that's critical also for deciding when you can put prices up one of the things I used to upset myself every november was because it was the run up to christmas we had a very seasonal product great time to put the price up but I would watch the line to see if it deflected as a result of putting the price up I'd always be upset because the line didn't deflect which may not could have put the price up higher perhaps so can we go to the next slide please these recommendations treat the e-commerce business as a separate cost center make sure that pricing is right because it is a key way of describing what your product is and where it sits in the market and make sure that it's not undercutting any retail offers we talked about the value proposition where is it worth putting free postage to encourage this transaction values to be higher and keep it simple a confused consumer doesn't buy and it is genuinely less is sometimes more a nice clear easy or proposition for people to get remembering it needs to tell them what it's for and when it's for and why it's for very important to integrate sales into the bank feeds if you like on your accounting system so that the reconciliation for the vat particularly sales commission on places like not on the high street even though your product may not be vatable the sales commission the charges for that you need to be able to identify and recoup those those those costs as well so systems like zero that will allow you to have bank feeds from the various channels like the aggregators so that you can have the feed of the sales that you've done sorted out in zero and reconciled as if it's a bank account will make your life very much more simple it also means that it's very much more measurable and then you start to get the confidence you know where online sales are working for you and where the levers and buttons are to drive it because you want to do those sums what does it cost to sell online so having ledger codes as in your cost of sales identified with an individual ledger code for things that you know are online sales so that you can sit and do that gross margin but do those other metrics average transaction value either for the comparison with last month or more importantly if you've got a seasonal product year on year are you making incremental progress and are you sure that you're not cannibalizing sales from other channels either as in robbing peter to pay paul if you like because you've just taken sales out of one channel and switched them to the online now you may need to do that anyway because as part of your resilience plan online may be the only way to maintain sales as we've all discovered for some people this year do a forecast and budget and allocate time because that is a real time and cost towards this but also it helps you forecast what are we going to sell this year if against the run up to christmas if you're not sure what that budget might be and you've been going for a year or two go and ask some of your suppliers the people who sell you cardboard probably know more about your business than you realize so doing that forecast is critical to make sure you've got the materials in place so that you can sell successfully online particularly if sales blossom at seasonal peaks don't forget customer care i haven't talked about this as well but you know we used to have a saying if it goes wrong we have to put it way past right and anybody in marketing will tell you that customer satisfaction equals profitability and it's not to be afraid of a bad review particularly if things have gone wrong and you have put them way past right because if that's reflected in a review that will give your potential consumers confidence that you are serious about online so i think that pretty much sums up the finance side yeah okay thank you john um i just really wanted to uh put in a final slide there um as it says there word about risks and regulations obviously online selling is covered by a number of regulations plus the food standards agency has published guides on selling food or drink online so i would urge people to take a look at those um i as i um said earlier we i think we have some drinks producers listening into this if you're not part of the drinks cluster then please do i would urge you there's been lots of support that the drinks cluster have been able to to give members um so yes i would definitely urge people to get in contact with loren if people don't have her details i'll happily share those um i've stopped sharing my screen now um i also want to give a shout out to uh mentor a business i think we've got somebody um online uh who's joined us for a mentor a business um if they have if they can raise their hand and um i can point out who it is at least um but i know mentor a business through things like the trade engagement program have also um done some training how to get started on amazon for example so again if any of the businesses who are online haven't um access that support by all means contact me and i will introduce you to the relevant people um in mentor a business because there is great support there so i think the overall message is there is lots of support out there to do this and hopefully do it well um and and please access that support um we haven't had any questions come through in the q and a or chat so it's sort of a a short opportunity if anybody does have any burning questions to um post those and i'm sure loren and john will be happy to answer that um i think one of the areas i just wanted to go back to um as i'll say being a a frequent user now of um wash food and drink that i bought online i have uh been very impressed particularly with the businesses who have made use of the box that needs to you know go through the yodel test but how much provenance they've included on that box and really bought the story of the Welsh food and drink to life and you know i am a surprised and delighted customer uh with that i knew the quality of the actual product was fantastic that the whole packaging experience i mean the family were surrounding this particular uh item just unwrapping it and the whole experience worked so well so i think it's it's those types of areas but obviously there's cost to that as well in thinking about that um uh john we had a um a webinar a couple of weeks ago on managing risk um so what are the risks do you think of uh online um i think that the risks are not as bad as some people perceive and i think this is something loren was saying that a lot of people think um they're put off by uh online because they think that there's that it's a potential minefield i think some basic simple principles are worth remembering um distance selling regulation as long as you as a consumer can see pretty much exactly what you would have seen if you were looking at a shelf so that um you can see the size price the nutritional statement and any allergens then from that point of view you should be safe um having appropriate packaging and ensuring that that is robust that i mean that is probably your single biggest other cost in terms of the wastage figure i know we we spent years trying to get some product wrapped in such a way that it would when it was open do you expect the outer box to be fairly sacrificial but the internal needs to be something that if somebody opens it up on christmas day they're going to be delighted so the trick is the thinking of it as what it will look like by the time it's arrived and just with any other food and drink business i know we've done this in in other lives put a pallet and and send it to a customer to get them to send it back to see if the pallet the box is still stuck up do exactly the same with your products put it in the post to a family friend or something see what turns up see if that's how you'd like it to arrive if you're the brand owner yeah good good advice there um i suppose we really ought to mention the b word and bracket yes i mean amazon have already stated that they won't be doing um uh fulfillment across europe so immediately um there's issues about where you can and can't sell online i think that the trick here is is that it's online is no magical mystical world is exactly the same as you know taking a telephone call having an order her coping with the currency difference and then posting it out with a customs declaration to wherever it is in the world that you want to send it the difference is that there will be and we don't know yet what that will be there will be potentially paperwork to cover these things one of the things that you maybe want to think about is who is taking title to this so in a way if you've got a wholesaler who is buying it from you and they are taking title and they are going off to export it great as long as you're covered from product liability and that your labeling is compliant with that market otherwise the pallet might be on its way back or the product might be on its way back so there are there are the sort of normal common sense things that you would do for any sort of export that are exactly the same with online making sure that you put in particularly online proper sales conditions and terms terms conditions on your website to cover off some of those risks is always a good idea and that's something we've talked about on other webinars is making sure that you've got those things in place which you should have anyway whether it's export or just selling online in in the domestic market make sure you've got you know your sales and additions aren't for a ferry firm that doesn't exist in Folkestone. Okay well I think we are probably going to draw this to a close now there's been no questions so hopefully people have got a lot out of that I'm going to turn the tables on on you John because obviously you always ask our panelists about their top tip so I'm going to do the same to you and to Lauren but as Lauren hasn't had to join one of these before we'll start with John so what for e-commerce then what is your top tip? I think my top tip is almost for selling anything if you want to sell something try buying it so before you before you plunge and stick a new product online try buying it see what the competition is if there isn't anything comparable then ask yourself is there actually a market for it if there is something comparable make sure that you use your pricing and the way that you describe your products as a positioning statement to make sure that people understand why they should choose your product and what value looks like okay good thank you Lauren over to you what's your top tip? At the risk of repeating things that have been said before but essentially to reiterate strongly start small I think that's the best thing that you can do start small manageable and then measure it as well so you can see what's working what's not and adapt and then that'll be the way but you can see what's working grow it into something that's really successful okay well thank you both just before we finish I will also flag up that we are doing another resilience webinar next week same time same day Wednesday we are talking about taxing legal and I deliberately took an intake of breath there thinking oh here we go I've just watched everybody drop off now here but no I don't mean to put you off we we know that many sadly or unfortunately many food and drink businesses actually weren't eligible for government support because perhaps they weren't a registered company they weren't registered for that they didn't pay themselves through PAYE now some of that support has flexed to allow some but initially it looked really quite grim so actually we are going to be arguing that those attributes of you know registering for that all of those types of things are not things to be worried about scared of they actually will help make your business more resilient so we've got we're back to our usual format I think next week John with a panel hopefully John in the driving chair so I can sit back and have a cup of tea but essentially if you're worried about that rules how to apply them if you're not a net beneficiary of the AT this is this is the webinar for you so please don't be put off by tax and legal but we'll be getting that information out hopefully later today or tomorrow so again hopefully we'll we'll catch up with some of you again next week um and thank you all for joining i think chris there's one for us yeah who's that sorry i'm just trying to see who that is chris chris charters ah sorry chris chris um okay i'll allow you to talk if you have a question any comes off mute basically i'm the chair of welsh perry and cyda society and our members have been having problems with what you've just mentioned they've quite a few of them have fallen through the cracks of getting any financial help so what you just mentioned now could be an advantage which i'd like more information on to see if we can actually help them out over a difficult period okay fine well we'll certainly chris you're on our mailing list so you'll get the information and um feel free then to circulate it to your members um and hopefully some of them will join next week um and um uh i'm sure john will be uh his excellent self talking about um tax and vat but with some experts as well right thanks very much look forward to that okay good just chris okay well thank you all for joining


Great presentation. Thank you for sharing about your great journey with our faculty colleagues and students at Purdue. One question I had was if you have had interactions with or how do you see the role of professional societies such as IEEE, such as AICHE, such as ASME and other professional societies, not just in engineering but across the profession. Yeah, it's a great question. We have not, the honest truth that we've done, we haven't done as much as we can and should with professional societies to date. We've got communities that we've, you know, or associations. There's a group called Mission Link for example in D.C. that we're actively collaborating with. You know, it's a community of eight hundred entrepreneurs that have built over 10 years. You know, they have a cohort based model. They bring in 80 every year, but these are now 800 entrepreneurs that have built mission-oriented companies, right? And so how are we looking to collaborate with them? And this could be how we collaborate with an IEEE or others. As we are looking at these innovations that we spin out from DARPA and NSF, you know, again, our theory on the cases, it's less about the technology. It's about the talent you put around it, right? And so being able to pulse those communities to say, are there folks that, you know, are experts in this space? That either as advisors or entrepreneurs or, you know, maybe even chairman, depending on where they are in their life stage, want to be involved. And I think that would be a way that we could really plug into the associations. We're also collaborating on an effort with Georgetown at CSET, which is the Center of Security and Emerging Technology, where we're creating the first of its kind national, like an entrepreneur network across each domain. So that if you know a certain breakthrough or technology is getting developed, you can start thinking about like who are the people, not just within the region, because having been a VC, this is what we do. We just work our personal networks.  And how do we do that, right? And technology is there today to be able to do that. We just need to spend a little bit of capital to invest in that. I don't know if anyone else wants to add anything to, okay. First of all, it was really nice to listen to the talk that you had. And of course, I think everyone here probably has at some point thought about that what I can do to make the world better while at and do it at scale. And I think the only solution that humanity has come close to figuring this out is capitalism. And how to implement that in such a way so that it actually does good is a very difficult problem as you properly address. And I think the main takeaway from today's talk when I was listening to you said that government's role is, you get the example of contracts. So government can provide contracts to individuals who are willing to take up the challenges. And that can help start a wheel of progress that can ultimately like create a dominant effect when more capital comes in and that can have a positive impact. But what I was also expecting to hear was like, so what we're talking about here is how to speed up the progress. But here's another part that maybe we are moving too fast. For example, if you take about artificial intelligence, right? Yeah. So what is happening is while definitely after artificial intelligence has to be like developed at a very fast pace, not only because of the interesting problems that it can solve, but also because here's like a global incentive in terms of politics, like there are adversaries which are also working on it and you need to like figure it out fast. But there's another counter, there's another problem here that is that the impact that will have, it will have on the public affairs, right? So for example, like automation will, in any kind of automation will in general over a course of decade, will lead to like removal of jobs and these kinds of things while at the same time creating jobs. So what I was also hoping to hear was that how do you collaborate with the government to make sure not only that the wheel of progress moves faster, but also it makes, it moves in a way so that there's no collateral damage. Yeah. I know it's a good question. Look, I think it's, you know, on that point, you know, again, part of the theory on the case here is talent, right?  Let's take your AI example, right? If you really want government to be engaged and think about collateral damage, you need people inside of government that really understand AI. They're not there. So it's easy to sit here and go, hey, government needs to regulate, they need to do ABC. But if the people don't understand the technology that they're regulating, you're going to potentially have more unintended consequences, right?  You know, every agency should have a chief AI officer. Every agency should have at least 100 people that are, you know, AI-versus. But let's then look at where we are today. Like those jobs are still empty. So this is why, again, I think the theory on the case of how it reconciles with what we're trying to do at Noble Reach is we need to create that pipeline. We need to create that infrastructure where when we have these surges happen, there's a way to get these people in, right? It's not just young people coming from Purdue or, you know, top engineering schools. It's mid-career folks and, you know, senior folks being able to take a one-year thing from Google or Facebook or, you know, Microsoft or Amazon and being able to come in. And there's some of that thinking going on, but we don't have enough of those. We don't have the infrastructure set up yet. That, I think, is more the breakdown, right? Because I think the only way you really, you know, start to regulate collateral damage when it comes to technological advancement is getting more technological, versant people in on the policy side. Because without that, you know, people can feel good that they just did something, but we don't know if it's the right thing, right? In many of these cases you don't know anyways for time, but you'd feel better if they were at least much more versant on the technology. So again, I always default back to talent being the critical element here. Of how we do this. You go ahead, Tony. I'll just say one other thing. You know, the exchange of people between industry and government has not been a trusted facility for a few years. And so putting this trust in place so that there's an entity like a noble reach or even other entities that can help facilitate that creates the talent exchange that needs to occur, but does it at a way in which each best interests are at heart? And I think that's really important. I think Simon, you know, it's a point is, you know, we need more people that are kind of tri-sector athletes, right? Ideally you don't want to just have somebody that's in the private sector and someone is in government. And like, you know, the word I would use, a word that was shared with me, the CTO with the CIA is a gentleman named Nand Mulchandani. And Nand is a four-times Valley CEO founder. And now he finds himself inside the CIA, you know, previously with a DOD. And he likes to say, I'm a dual citizen. And it's actually a really powerful way to think about what he does, right? Because he's like, I'm a Valley citizen and I'm a government citizen. And when you're a dual citizen, you know, it's not like I just came in to your, when you say like we're just going to get these people from the private sector to come in and swoop in, it's an implied trust right away, right? But when you have dual citizens, as many of us, you know, may have been or associate ourselves with, you know, two countries, you know, when you're in this country, you know, your friends from your other country come visit you and you're able to show them around and show them a more personalized experience based on the trust and goodwill you have with your folks here. And when you go back to your home country and you're visiting friends come and visit you there, you show them a more personalized, but it's all built on trust. We need more dual citizens. Right? And that's the idea of starting this through this. I'm not saying this is the end solution by any stretch. We were pointing to a good one, but you know, I think that's what you need more of. So expanding upon that point of dual citizens, let me put it this way. So at least in Europe and in other parts of, let's say Japan and more advanced countries, which may not have had as much economic AI success, but whether you're talking about large language models like Mistral or the team behind Lama, which was based out of Mehta's office in Paris, you can see that those countries have started influencing their policies geared towards getting the top talent, which is you, as you mentioned, is the key part by considering the kind of institutes and universities they've been part of. So I was just looking at, so like Simon is from Melbourne, right? Linda is from Berlin, right? So you have top academicians, top people from across the world in the top universities. I know for a fact that Japan, UK, like trusted partners have started considering the kind of background that people have to influence, let's say, immigration policies. You being so close to, let's say, power corridors, have you thought about making sure that the US immigration system, which a lot of Valley CEOs also struggle with, has something on the lines of its European partners where let's say somebody coming from top universities in Europe, Japan or UK get an easier access rather than making it all gun for hell leather. Yeah, no, it's a good question. The short answer is no, we haven't. And for no other reason than there's only so much we can do and we have to prioritize. You know, there's a lot of other issues that we can take on, but we've got to get this program off. You know, we've got to get what we're doing going. We have to have this partnership with Purdue working. So is that something we would consider down the road? Yes. But you know, look, if there's one thing I learned in being a VC for 20 years is that entrepreneurs that don't focus fail, right? And we view ourselves as right now, you know, in a pretty entrepreneurial endeavor. So we have to focus, but that's the only reason I'm not saying your point, not an accurate point. It's just not something we can take on right now. I'll ask a question so I have a mic. So if I'm a first year engineering student here, I have lots of opportunities and I might be trying to figure out how I'm going to make my impact. So how do I go about figuring out what my purpose is? And if my purpose is aligned with going into government maybe later on, what skills should I try to develop to make an impact right away? You know, look, I think if it is to go into, look, we've got folks that have spent more time in government than I have and I'll let them add to it. But, you know, my initial thought on that would be from a skills perspective is the diversity of experiences you have, right? I actually think that is a skill, right? You know, when people go in and do the same thing over and over and over again for their internships, they're not really getting, that's helping you kind of get the next job, but it's not setting yourself up for the longer term, right? And so you have to think about how you're using your internships in this context. It's why I think doing something in government and doing something outside or doing something with a startup gives you a different pulse. Because I think it's hard for students in a vacuum to think about what really is their purpose. Until they put themselves actually in those ecosystems and see, do these peeps resonate with me? Do I resonate with them, right? Or are they speaking my language? As we were chatting with students earlier, you know, we even said, look, even if you go into government for a year, we're not saying, we're not suggesting someone needs to be having a career in government.  And you'll be surprised that if on the other side you're dealing with someone that's in government, it means something. There's an implicit trust there, right? So creating those multiple avenues where you've had a diversity experience, where you can build trust, I think is really helpful when you're, you know, younger in your career.  I don't believe in the 10,000 hours thing, right? You know, and we talked about this with students, I think our big problems are going to get solved by folks that know how to play at the intersections, right? That know how to speak the language of different parties and, you know, be the translator. And then implicit in that is have shared trust. And I, you know, especially in a world of AI, look, I think, you know, individuals that build trust in their career is going to be invaluable, but they'll let others add to it. You know, I started my career, early on in my, you know, after I graduated from college, I went into government and I was recruited by the intelligence community. And I think the reason why that attracted me and why I was attractive to them is, as Arun had said, it's really building the relationships. And it's really getting out there. And, you know, that's why one of the major reasons, while Noble Reach and Purdue have come together with this certificate program, it provides you the opportunity to develop those relationships. And that's in the course that's being taught right now, bringing in Purdue alumni, talking about their great careers that they're having right now in public service, and other people that are coming in and talking about that.  And that network of trust, as Arun had talked about, is truly essential. And I think that that's why I was so motivated to go into public service and had a great career and continue to have that great career. And again, it's building that trust and developing those networks and relationships. So if you haven't signed up yet for the certificate program, do it. There are so many classes and so many opportunities and so many internships that you can get into that is not offered anywhere else in the U.S., which is why we're taking that effort to do this together to be extremely successful, extremely successful for you. So that's, I think, that's a great opportunity for you. Yeah, I'll jump in real quick here, too.  I, you know, as a postdoc at Georgetown, got the opportunity to work on a book project. And, you know, at least in my field, working on a book project pre-tenure is kind of like the kiss of death for trying to get tenure. But it opened a world to me and unlocked a passion in me for something that I had nothing, I had no knowledge of. And so I would really encourage you guys to think about opportunities horizontally, right, in kind of adjacent areas and things just to see, you know, what other skills you can develop, what other experiences you can have. And I think that embracing that type of career can unlock a lot of really fascinating opportunities for you guys. Just to complete the foursome. You know, you're not gonna find anything unless you go and seek it out. You can't make up the mission without the experience. And one of the things we talked about upstairs with the students was some of our own individual discoveries of that mission. Encourage your peers, go into new opportunities. I feel like this is almost risk-free in lots of respects because if you think of what Arun talked about on the Teach for America side, those people have expanded in multiple directions. We think the same thing can happen here. You have an opportunity to try new things without penalty. And that doesn't happen very often in careers. I know I've gone down the wrong path different times, but coming back to mission, coming back to a purpose, you'll really, you'll find that very rewarding. You know, the one thing I'll just circle back on is looking at an age that we're entering into with AI, what are people most concerned about? They're concerned about disinformation. They're concerned about trust. How do you make yourself valuable? If there's a trust deficit, you become the trust broker. Right? If you're the person people trust, that means something. And that value is actually going to go up, not down, given everything else that's happening around us. Right?  If you don't just build trust saying, I trust you, like it means you're putting yourself in different ecosystems, building relationships with different networks, not the same network. Right? I think that's, this is going to be incredibly valuable going forward. Sure. Oh, there is. Oh, back there in the corner. I regret pointing to it a little bit, but go ahead. Yeah. Ali here. I'm a first year PhD students. And I heard you talk about, it's a very specific point. I heard you talk about the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program at Stanford. And I'd like you to compare and contrast your Scholar Program to theirs if you just can't give us a glimpse. Yeah, yeah. It's more structural comparison than program. The Knight-Hennessy Program basically was running by John Hennessy, former president of Stanford, and Phil Knight, the funder, hence Knight-Hennessy. Their theory on the case was, we need leaders, we need to teach leadership across all disciplines. Right. And so, but they're only doing it at Stanford, so that's one difference. We're trying to create a national more program movement. So, but their thing was, if you're a chem PhD, if you're a material science PhD, or an English major grad student, or med school, or law school, you know, we should have cohorts to think about leadership across disciplines. And so, everyone's got their own program that they're running in, but they're part of this cohort. And that's where the examples come in. And in that cohort, each person gets some level of mentorship, that necessarily someone from their domain. They bring in speakers. So you'll have kind of Lisa Rice come and talk to you about leadership.  But across different domains, what does it mean? And again, their idea that we really need to build leaders across disciplines, not just being tied at business school and, you know, a couple of places. And then they, you know, have programming. You know, they create quarterly, kind of make sure you get together. So there's a cohort-based experience so that even though you're grinding in your masters or graduate or PhD program, you know, you feel a sense of connection to these groups.  Right? And that's where, that's where, again, structurally what we're trying to do with this, right, is that you're a noble reach scholar, but it's not only about being part of this cohort or the next cohort, but you're part of a community that, you know, in five or 10 years, hopefully there's, you know, worth a thousand of the scholars around. And then maybe you now are a mentor to a new scholar, right? And it becomes so free-enforcing and it says something about you. So that's, that's the structural parallels.