It’s never what you expect.
I was lucky to have a great break over Easter which, as well as allowing me to spend a fortnight with the children, allowed me lots of thinking and processing time. Working with (broadly speaking) startup ecommerce businesses as a consultant is very rarely what I expect it to be, even having done this now for most of 3 years in my career. The most continually surprising aspect has to be that small businesses think their bigger competitors can show them how to grow i.e. it’s simply a case of surveillance and reverse engineering as much as possible and that will help them bridge the gap. They will conquer the world, they calculate, if they can only replicate ~80% of what they are doing in terms of technology, media, marketing. I’m not going to say there is 0 value in the above theory, obviously we all want to see over the fence, but the reality is a lot more enlightening. In my experience the majority of the established long-in-the-tooth competition have actually lost track of...