This is the first in a series of interviews with some very interesting and successful people who are actively using social media, and as expected focuses on Change:-

Name: Andy Preston                                       Twitter name: @AndyPreston

What is your main Change challenge at present?

Andy: With my company and my clients, it’s adapting to the change in market conditions down to the economy, and also coping with growth of my business.

What is your strategy for dealing with it?

Andy:  Like I’m advising all my clients – time to re-look and possibly re-engineer their businesses to cope with the change in economic conditions. There may well be less demand for a previously best-selling product or service, and it might mean ‘tweaking’ that, or launching a new product or service, specifically targeting opportunities that the change in market conditions have brought.

It’s a good time for companies to look at what’s working in their business, and what’s not – and put a strategy in place for dealing with it. For us, it’s meant more of a focus on working closer with a smaller number of clients than in the past – to focus on generating substantial results for them, rather than small pieces of training with lots of clients. That way, we’ve been able to quantify ROI very quickly and each piece of training is paying for itself immediately – giving a budget to pay for further work with the same client.

It also should be a time for many people to focus on ‘new business’, and many know they ‘should’ be doing so, but lack the knowledge, skills or motivation to do so.

As far as the ‘growth’ challenge goes, we doubled in turnover in the past 12 months, and also went from mainly a 1 person business with support to a small business of 4 people. It’s meant that processes and procedures have had to be put into place that weren’t needed before. It’s been important to get everyone to buy into the vision of the company, to understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what we’re trying to achieve. It’s meant a lot more focus on strategic objectives and driving those through with individual staff members.

Are you using social media as part of that strategy, if so, how?

Andy:  Yes! When I brought my new marketing person on-board, their first task was to put together a social media strategy and implementation plan. I felt we weren’t taking enough advantage of our website, blogs, twitter, facebook, linkedin, ecademy et al.

We’re now looking a putting a mix of messages out there via these methods, some social, some business and some a mix of both, to help raise awareness of what we do and how we can help people. We’re already seeing a return on the time invested in that.

What is your top Change tip?

Andy:  In the current climate, it’s the more flexible organisations that are doing the best. Sometimes that means the smaller ones, sometimes it means larger ones that are willing to ‘pioneer’ the necessary changes, to stay ahead of their competitors.

Therefore the more nimble and flexible you can be as an organisation, the better your chances of adapting to the changing market conditions you find yourself in.

What role does emotion / intuition play when you dealing with Change?

Andy:  Sometimes you have to take risks. At best some decisions to change are ‘educated guesses’ which have a lot to do with intuition and emotional intelligence, plus the ability to watch closely at the direction you’re taking and make adjustments as you go along. This is far more prevalent for organisations now than in the past.

Do you ever find Change brings unexpected gifts?

Andy:  Yes! The change in market conditions has brought more enquiries and more work for us than ever. By changing some of our offering, we’ve been able to maximise the opportunities presented to us, and we’re already up 20% on last year’s figures – which were double what we’d achieved previously, so I’m pleased with how things are going.

What thing best symbolises Change for you and why?

Andy:  The book ‘Who Moved My Cheese’ – I recommend to a lot of my clients going through a process of change. Fantastic read and short enough to make the point but ensures it gets read.