Why Today, Why Now?
By Eoghan Mackie, CEO
Following Jack’s really exciting announcement last week that we have been collaborating together with The Today Agency for the past couple of years and have now entered a formal partnership, the team at Challenges wanted to share some more of our thinking.
Since the late nineties, we have been embedding support into small and growing businesses all over the world. The keystone of our approach is to understand the internal composition of each business we engage with and then to come up with a custom programme of improvements which we can support the people working in the business to take — that can be changing processes, introducing new skills, training, arranging finance, investment or trade links — a broad church. We balance everything we are looking at internally with what we know externally of the business’ context or market.
And throughout our history, we have always innovated around inclusion. The key question is — what do the businesses we are supporting need and how could we provide that in a way that would open up opportunity for those who might otherwise not be considered. It is true that some of the support we provide to businesses does benefit from having someone with 20 or more years of experience, but those tasks are more on an ad hoc project by project basis.
Having conducted longer term on-site analysis across several thousand small and growing businesses around the world, we see patterns in our data which point directly at really important areas which, should they be done a lot better, would be transformational for the business. Where the objective of our intervention is making a business more resilient or driving significant growth, the same opportunities to help businesses leap off the page.
One of those opportunities is sales and marketing. We have seen that the performance of businesses we work with can change significantly when we support this function. So, the question is how. What should our service look like?
Some lessons we’ve picked up along the way have taught us that this is the sort of intervention that we need to look at over the long term. Change and growth takes time, so we need to be in a position to stay with a business. That, however, needs to be done affordably. Lastly, the approach needs structure and discipline — it can’t be slapdash.
The answer, we have found, is to embrace digital tools to underpin the structure and quality side, helping also with affordability. Then, who can we ask to deliver this service? There, we have found a brilliant opportunity to include young people. Digital natives can be shown how to deliver quality digital sales and marketing services quickly and they are also able to perform the work efficiently and, through their own learned experience of channels like social media, they ‘get’ the customer side of the equation and can adapt and improve the message and content a business in putting out in order to drive greater engagement and ultimately conversion.
With Today, we have already proven we have an effective platform to open up genuine career experience to almost 200 young people from a vast spectrum of backgrounds in the UK. Our pilot work so far in Africa has shown the potential to repeat that, but at even larger scale. Today can be a runway for young people to prove not just their skills but their value to any employer — in turn giving them a direct path to productive work. That, especially in a fragmented employment market segment like small and growing business, is priceless.
We dream of being able to look back at this article in 10 years and to be able to show how many thousands of young sales and marketing professionals started their careers at Today and to be able to show the value they have added to small and growing business and in turn to celebrate the economic growth they have grafted, the jobs they have helped to create.
At Challenges, we don’t see a youth bulge, we see opportunity. The challenge for all of us already in the economy is to form pathways for people to be productive and our work with Today is just the beginning. Watch this space for a few more ideas we have coming up and of course work with us and Today for a brighter tomorrow for hundreds, even thousands of young people.
