The Just Great People Podcast - Barry Eustance from The Sixsess Consultancy Chats to Chris Fox from StratNavApp

Welcome to The Sixsess Consultancy's "Just Great People" podcast, where Barry Eustance chats to ordinary people who've done extraordinary things.

In this episode, Barry talks to Chris Fox from StratNavApp - learning about Chris's amazing story....from a marketing in FTSE100 company and institutional finance to branching out with his own consulting firm and then developing the amazing StratNavApp.

Spoiler alert!  

We'll be featuring snippets from a much longer discussion we've had, where Chris takes us through and company strategic build from square one, with the help of StratNavApp's AI, to a working business model.    We're going to split it into episodes, but you can view the uncut version on StratNavApp's YouTube channel now.

I hope you really enjoyed our podcast and found it to be inspiring and insightful.

Please remember to LIKE our podcast and please DO SUBSCRIBE !!

I really look forward to reading and replying to your thoughts and comments.

Many thanks

Kindest regards

Barry

Transcript

0:29

Hi everybody. Welcome to The Sixsess Consultancy podcast. We're really excited today to have Chris Fox from StratNav app. Chris is a strategist with a long history in strategic planning and corporate planning for very large financial services organisations. And I'm going to hand over to Chris for him to give you a little bit of background, not only about himself, but also about StratNav app disclosure. The Sixsess Consultancy uses StratNav app as its go -to corporate and organisational planning program. So over to Chris. Thanks very much for joining us, Chris. Thanks, Barry, and thanks for having me on. I'm really pleased to be speaking to you and to share some of the story. So for me, my journey started off, I was originally a technologist and I got into strategy consulting, round about the dot -com boom when, well, I think as we know, if we remember the story, a lot of businesses were created around the dot -com boom that made almost no strategic sense at all and collapsed. And from out of the ashes of that, the... internet industry as we know it was born. But I made the transition at that point into strategy because I became really interested in working out what does it really take for a business to be successful? And what distinguishes the successful businesses from the also rands? And I was working in corporate at the time. I was at one time the head of strategy and branding for FTSE 100. And then I struck out on my own as an independent. And one of the things that I quickly became quite frustrated with was the complete lack of tooling available for doing strategy. So I was, I found I was using technology in two ways. I used to use the product called Evernote, which many people may be familiar with. And it's, it's great as a note taking app because you can capture almost anything. So I was using that extensively for taking meeting notes and working out strategies and things like that. And then the other tool I was using was PowerPoint, whose best virtue I would say is if you come up with a strategy, it makes it look pretty. And it always struck me that, you know, if the tools you're using, if the greatest virtue is that they make your strategies look pretty, they're not really working very hard for you. Did you find, was there a customer demand for anything other than this kind of two dimensional strategy? It wasn't even planning, I guess it's a strategy presentation, wasn't it? A way of recording strategy other than a notepad and a pencil. Well, I mean, my customers, for who I was developing the strategy, they didn't care one way or the other. They wanted someone who could tell them what they needed to do. And they didn't really care how you did it. It was the mechanics, if you like, or the exercise of going through of working that out. So if you like, I was the first customer of the product I'd bought, because I was sitting there as a practicing strategist saying this is really frustrating. ought to have access to better tools than this. But for the most part, the customers were just saying, Chris, that's your problem. My customers were coming to me and saying, you make all of that go away. You figure all that out, and you tell us the answer. Which, of course, if you're a large organization and you can afford to hire resources to do that for you, you can do that. You just make it someone else's problem. If you're a smaller organization and you can't afford, to have consultants taking care of these problems for you, what you can do is you can use technology to help you do it. So in a similar way that if you're a medium organization, you can hire a bookkeeper to do your accounts, or you can use something like Xero or QuickBooks, right? You can have a technology solution to do it for you, which will do it much more cost-effectively and pretty much as well. StratNav App then becomes a tool that either a strategist like myself can use to do the job much more quickly and effectively, or a smaller business that can't afford someone like myself can use to do it themselves, like they would use QuickBooks or Xero to do their accounting. And that journey really reflects how I got into using Stratton. Because it was exactly the same frustration considerably, I mean, years later, looking throughout the internet as I did wondering how all this breadth of modeling could be brought together. And none seemed to exist other than in PowerPoint. In fact, I still get emails from organisations often to sell me PowerPoint decks for $1,200 a year. And actually that's all they are. They're just, as you say, the ways of making it pretty and with no kind of dimensionality to it. There's no time component. There's no three dimensional element. Yeah, that's absolutely right. I sometimes say to people, you might as well be using a wax tablet, right? Because PowerPoint knows as much about the job of creating and executing strategy as a wax tablet that they were using sort of pre -Roman times, if you like. And for me, the frustrating thing was I was working with clients, as you mentioned, a lot of them in the financial services sector and, you know, we were having strategic conversations about how you use technology to better enable their businesses, CRM systems and policy administration systems and marketing automation systems and financial systems. That's obviously a big drive in most organisations is to use technology to do things better, more effectively and more efficiently. And yet as the advisor, I was doing... You know, I was doing things exactly the same way as people had been doing them for the last 20 or 30 years. It just wasn't moving on. So tell me the story of how you then decided to reinvent the wheel and actually provide something that turned and was able to take the cart along with it. How did you get into that? It's presumably not, wasn't part of your original plan, was it? Well, I mean, yes and no. In a sense, I'm a strategic thinker. I can't help it. So I spend time worrying about these things, right? What ought the future of strategic thinking and strategic planning be and how could we use technology? So I had those sort of things going on always in the back of my head as I was working. And... But at the same time, I won't say I came up with this grand master plan and vision and epiphany all in one go. And honestly, strategy probably doesn't happen like that very often. It evolved. And as it turns out, I was doing a lot of work away. And I'm not the kind of person who can go, you know, there's a lot of consultants when they're on away projects, they're just drinking every night. I just, my liver can't handle that. So I found myself spending quite a lot of time alone in hotel rooms and fiddling and trying to come up with better solutions. And Stratton have literally started with me trying to see if I could come up with almost some personal productivity tools in a hotel room late at night. And it sort of evolved to the point where I said actually. you, Chris, how would you now describe after all the iterations and all the development of StratNav app? If I was sitting at the other end of a Google search, what is it that StratNav app is gonna bring to me as a new business owner or as a consultant or as a strategic strategy professional? What is it? What is StratNav app? Tell me what it is. Yeah, so I think the best way to describe it is if you start, let's pick a small to medium business owner and you start with, what's the problem I'm trying to solve? The problem I'm trying to solve is I need to know what do I need to do to grow my business and make sure it's going to be successful in the future? That's the fundamental challenge that all small business owners or managers face. And StratNav app gives you an end -to -end toolkit for doing that. And it'll take you all the way through thinking through what the challenges and opportunities are to mapping out how you should prioritize and focus your activities, to helping and guiding you through the execution of those, and then tracking the results to make sure that it's working for you. And it does all of that. providing you with sort of constant guidance and AI support to help you do that. I think an accounting system is a good parallel for this. So if you're a business leader, you know at the end of, you know you need to keep a good set of books and be able to file your financial statements every year, right? You know that's the problem that you're trying to solve. So you need some technology that's going to help you and show you how to do that. as effectively as possible with as little extra effort from your part. So Strut and Have App will take you through that whole process. It'll help you work out, as I said, what the challenges and opportunities are, what you should be prioritizing and focusing on, help you manage through the process of executing, budgeting, allocating resources, et cetera, and will help you track whether it's achieving those results. and feed that back into the process so that you can be continually adapting your focus and your planning as things evolve. Terrific. Now what we're going to do folks, Chris is now going to take us next time we come up with our podcast. Chris is going to take us through whether it's difficult to do what he's just suggested or in fact, whether it's easy and the processes and stages that can be applied to your business and organization using StratNav app. So Chris, thank you very much. I look forward to seeing you again on The Sixsess Consultancy podcast again very, very soon. Thanks Barry, it's great, I look forward to it. See you then.