Brad Howarth shares many insights into the future of business and how businesses have to adapt to technology to survive.
He Believes there are many opportunities for small businesses to tap into.
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Franziska: Hi and welcome back to the Basic Bananas radio show. Today I‘ve got with me Brad Howarth who is a freelance journalist, author, and speaker with 16 years‘ experience covering the technology and marketing industries. Brad has held the positions of Information Technology editor and also Marketing Editor for BRW. And he‘s the author of Innovation and Emerging Markets, a study of the paths to commercialization for Australian technology start-ups. Welcome Brad. Thank you so much for being on the call today.
Brad: My pleasure. Thanks for having me on here.
Franziska: So to get into it and just for our listeners to know a little bit more about you. I‘ve already spoken about you a little bit, but just tell us a little bit more about you and also your business.
Brad: Well my primary business is freelance journalism. I‘ve actually been a journalist since the mid-1990s when I started off as a young journalist working in the technology publishing sector in Australia and over the course of the next 10 years, worked my way through various publications so what we would be known as the industry trade press on to a stint at the Australian newspaper, then on to Business Review Weekly. Held a couple of positions there, then I left that magazine in about 2004 and eventually set up my own small business. Initially, primarily as a freelance journalist. Over that period of time, I guess I‘ve added a bunch of different services to what I do so these days I find myself increasingly being asked to write research reports and white papers to research-type assignments. I‘ve also started to, I guess, broaden out a little bit with regard to my delivery as well. So rather than just writing things for people to read, I also find myself out now as a public speaker on a much more active basis now. As you would have mentioned, I published a book together with my wife back in February of last year called, A Faster Future, which is looking into the impact of broadband technology on Australian businesses and society. And since putting that together, that‘s sends me out quite regularly as a speaker on that topic, facilitating workshops and so on.
Franziska: Yeah. We‘ll talk about the book just in a second, too. But one thing I‘m curious about, actually, you said you‘ve been a journalist since the 1990s, now with all the new technology and the changes in the media world, has it dramatically changed how you approach the media and how you work with the media? What‘s changed?
Brad: Yes and no. Fundamentally, in some ways no. The concept of journalism is one of finding that information; being able to sort of draw conclusions of logic and then being able to express that back to a consumer in a meaningful way. And so, the idea of asking questions and then putting together stories is essentially the same practice. But the way that we do is vastly different. We have… Clearly the Internet there is an information resource and status which a huge repository of information journalists can call up on the mechanisms by which we reach out to people through tools such as the web, email, Skype as we‘re talking now is clearly a very useful tool for us, plus many other forms of electronic communication that make it vastly different. The other great impact, of course, is that of publication. The idea of having to wait until your newspaper comes out the next day or your magazine comes out that week until you can get something into the hands of your readers, it‘s gone out the window now. So we‘re finding as journalists that we need to get information out as quickly as we possibly can because the news cycle can be 24 hours a day now.
And the brilliant thing about that is that barriers to entry in journalism have been torn down. Anyone can effectively go out and become a journalist now. They might not make a huge amount of money out of it, but, if you want to set up a blog and start recording events that are happening in your life or your local community or field of interest, the cost of doing that is pretty close to zero. Obviously, it does take time to build up an audience and quality hopefully will rise to the top at the time. There was an awful lot of free content out there. But, in that way, the barriers to entry just aren‘t there anymore.
Franziska: Yeah, and I love that actually. I personally love that about, as you say, that‘s huge when you mentioned the topic about quality. There is so much stuff out there and I‘m a huge believer that usually only the ones that have really good quality stuff, no matter what it is, if they write about something or media content, whatever medium they use, if it‘s good quality, you obviously have a much better chance to get heard and listened to.
Brad: Oh, absolutely. Word of mouth is an incredibly important marketing tool and the great thing about the web is that it amplifies word of mouth through tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. So, me hearing or reading something that I like I can very quickly share that with the people that I‘m linked up to. And so that network effect is just amplified in such a powerful way.
Franziska: And just out of interest, do you use Twitter for research as well when you write about a certain topic?
Brad: Sometimes, yeah. If there‘s a topic that I‘m working on and perhaps I‘m looking for a source which isn‘t within my network or I might just want to get some opinions from people, I quite often put questions out on Twitter and say, “Does anyone know anything about…. Blah, blah, blah.” And off we go. And you get mixed responses. Sometimes I‘ve got I think 3000 people following me on Twitter now. Sometimes it‘ll turn up something which is exactly what I want. Other times it might see me being directed onto a couple of other networks and it takes one or two extra steps to get what I want. But it‘s certainly a lot easier than calling 3000 people.
Franziska: Absolutely. Now let‘s chat about your book, A Faster Future. How did you go about writing it? I‘d just love some little stories and tips because our listeners there might be a couple that have thought about writing a book or in the process of writing a book or have written a book. So, how do you go about writing it?
Brad: It was an interesting one for us. The idea originally came about at the announcement of the national broadband network and people started raising their hands in the air saying, “Why do we need it? What are we going to use it for?” And so forth. And that got us thinking, not so much about the NBN but about how technology inevitably evolves. We‘re using tools now on a regular basis that didn‘t exist five years ago. So the idea of the book was to really explore how those tools might evolve and what other tools we might see come into our lives over the next five or 10 years.
In terms of writing the book though, both my wife (and she‘s worked in the digital media industry for a long time as well) and I realized that we knew a little bit about what was happening in the world but we didn‘t know everything. So we effectively set out to talk to people and we ended up interviewing over 100 people around the world. So, once again, we reached out to our networks… We identified who might be interesting and worth talking to from those. We asked people that we knew whether they had opinions of other people that we should speak to. We identified people through the things that we were reading that might be worth speaking to and we just simply sent them introductory messages and asked if they‘d want to contribute some thoughts and we went about interviewing them.
So the time we did 100 of those. Quite a lengthy process of gathering all of that information. In some cases we used some of the tools that are out there like Freelancer.com in order to get the transcriptions of those interviews done so that made the process of going through the information that we‘d gathered much easier. We used another online service called Design Craft to get our book cover done. So we had to get a number of different mock-ups of potential book covers done that we selected. And then the process was really going through that information we gathered. Sitting down, working out a logical order and basically writing the whole thing up. I guess my background in journalism probably helped somewhat in that because it could be looked as writing one, very, very, very, long article. But it was really a very sort of linear process I suppose.
Franziska: Yeah. And one of the guys that you‘ve interviewed is one of my favorite authors in the marketing world which is Seth Scott; and I was very excited when I saw that because he‘s a very busy guy and you got to him and he spoke to you which is awesome.
Brad: Yeah. Seth‘s an incredibly busy guy, he‘s also quite a generous guy and obviously, as anyone who‘s come across him would know, a big thinker and a very intelligent guy. It was simply a situation that case that Janelle and I had both identified Seth as being someone we would be interested in speaking to. And by reaching out to my network it was clear that I actually had a contact in common. So, through that mutual introduction we were able to get some time with Seth. I was actually lucky enough to be in New York around that time which is where Seth lives and we had a little meeting in a cafe on the upper west side. Seth was very generous in sharing his thoughts. And I‘d recommend anyone who wants to get an understanding of how to write a book should probably spend some time looking at what Seth does. Both as a blogger he‘s incredibly prolific; Seth puts out a blog post every day. At least I think it‘s every at least every working day with some thought or insight which is how he builds up his following. So people will see everything that he writes and think this guy‘s amazing. And when he does then get a book out, people are very keen to read it as a result.
Franziska: Yeah. I subscribe to his stuff and I think he‘s fantastic. He‘s one of my favorite authors.
Brad: And certainly for anybody who wants to challenge traditional notions of marketing or product development or really even the socialization then. Seth‘s certainly somebody that should be on your reading list.
Franziska: Now how… The big topic now is how do you market your book?
Brad: Marketing I guess is something that we did a little bit through trial and error. I was lucky enough to have some experience as marketing editor at BRW so, I had a few concepts around marketing that we were able to use. And I guess we put together something which is a fairly traditional sort of marketing program. Firstly, we were able to go out and contact a number of people within the media who we thought might be interested in reviewing the book and we found that simply by approaching people that might be interested there and saying, “We‘ve written this book. Would you be interested in sending out copies?” We were able to get quite a solid response. We publicized it through a lot of the resources that are available online so we set up a blog around the book and we put little snippets and excerpts and various news items related to the book out that way. We tweeted a lot. We set up an account for the book. So A Faster Future has its own Twitter address. So if I was attending conferences or doing other things of interest I‘d be Tweeting from that address in the hope of people seeing those posts and being drawn back to the website.
We put a little bit of information out through LinkedIn. And we set up a Facebook page for it; so those tools were I guess the primary ones. And then, of course, going out and speaking publicly so the book provided a platform for going out and talking about these issues and by going out and talking about these issues, we were then also able to bring people back to the website which is where we sell the book from.
Interestingly in this case, we decided to circumvent the regular book publishing model. We had spoken to a publisher about going through a traditional publishing arrangement and in the end we just weren‘t certain that that was where we wanted to go to. The traditional publishing model does do a lot for you in terms of covering many of the costs involved in getting a book in production, but in the end we just weren’t quite 100% satisfied that they would give our book the attention that clearly we wanted to be able to give to it.
So we ended up self-publishing. Which meant that we set ourselves up as a publisher. We found a printer and they‘re basically doing a print on demand service ever since then.
Franziska: Fantastic. And the one thing that I saw you do really well is leveraging your book through that is speaking and then selling it as you mentioned. When you get speaking gigs, do people come to you and ask you, “Hey, we‘d like you to talk about the topic to our group of people?” Or do you actually send out the book to different events people and ask to be invited?
Brad: It‘s a little bit of both. Often what happens in speaking is you go out and deliver one presentation and if people like it, they‘ll come up to you afterwards and you might sell a book or two which is great. But what often happens is they‘ll come up to you and say, “I really enjoyed your speech. Would you be interested in coming and speaking at our next event?” And as you come up to speak to me afterwards in order to ask me to come on this program. It‘s often very much through a human network sort of relationship.
I also then work with a speaking bureau and they are out looking at various events being held around Australia and sort of asking the question, “Would Brad be well-suited for that? So they will often put me forward for events that are coming up as well. So, it goes a little bit in two directions.
Franziska: And is your book available on Amazon and iTunes as well for our listeners to go and have a look?
Brad: For the current version, and I‘ll explain what I mean by that in a moment, we decided to keep that within our own sales channel initially. So currently is only available from afasterfuture.com. So the first version as well we decided against going with a full e-publishing model. At that point in time, which is 18 months back, we looked a lot at the different models that were out there. We just didn‘t quite find one that we thought gave sufficient reward to us as authors as well as maintaining security and being able to allow us to do what we wanted to do with the content. That said, we are looking at doing a second version at some time in the not too distant future. We haven‘t quite set a date on that one yet. When we come to do a second version, we will be looking at pushing it out through broader channels such as perhaps Amazon or through iTunes or some of the electronic publishing models that are out there.
This space is evolving very, very quickly. And what we found wasn‘t quite suitable to us 18 months ago I think we‘re already finding it‘s got more options which are better suited to what we want to be able to do. So, the other thing that we found as well, we had a few people asking us if we wanted to… If we had an e-book version for the first version of A Faster Future. Probably only five or six of them, five or six requests really came in. Now those people are becoming more familiar with using iPads to read books or Amazon Kindle‘s or various other devices. We‘re finding that the audience for an electronic version is going much bigger second time around.
Franziska: Yeah, yeah, I agree. Because ever since I got my iPad about a year ago, that‘s how I consume books now on my iPad. And it‘s a bit sad because I try and find a book in iTunes and if it’s not there I hardly go to the store and buy it. I just kind of… If it‘s not a necessary book that I really, really want to read, I just don‘t read it, I guess.
Brad: Yeah and that‘s becoming a common behavior. I guess it‘s not really sad, it‘s just different to what we were used to before. Now, I think over time you‘re going to find that more and more books will become available through that channel and I suspect eventually it will become the primary channel for book distributions. More people own electronic reading devices. More authors and more publishers will work to get their titles onto those devices and that‘s either new titles or old titles. So if the book that you really, really love and would love to read isn‘t quite there yet and it‘s most likely only going to be a matter of time.
Franziska: That‘s right. You also mention that quote that I wrote down when I saw you speak. Which was by William Gibson, a science fiction author in 1993, he said, “The future is already here. It‘s just not very evenly distributed.” Can we chat about that?
Brad: Absolutely. I‘ve grown up reading science fiction as a kid and I guess that‘s probably partially why I‘m so interested in what‘s happening in technology because a lot of the things I was reading about, perhaps not space exploration to the same extent, but certainly with regard to information flow and the way that we connect and communicate and some of the more interesting tools out there like 3-D printing and so on. Very much the stuff that science fiction, sort of 10, 15, 20 years back. A lot of the science fiction authors I guess used their imaginations to picture what would be great to create but now science is starting to deliver that. Hence people like Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov and William Gibson and a host of others really imagining the future decades ago. The great thing about being a science fiction author I suspect is that you aren‘t constrained by reality. You can pretty much invent whatever you want. The William Gibson quote though is an interesting one.
William Gibson was the chap who invented or came up with the term cyberspace, well over 20 years ago now. And he imagined this world of people being able to interact and sort of hang out and communicate as 3-D online characters which is a little bit like what we saw with Second Life or some of the 3-D games that are out there today. And he really did sort of postulate that this would become something that people would do on a regular basis and increasingly now it is. His quote though, “The future is already here, it‘s just not very evenly distributed,” refers to the idea that often what some people will take as being cutting edge, other people have already been doing it for a year. And you and I are talking to each other using Skype right now and a very large percentage of the world already is, but there‘s another percentage of people out there that have never used Skype. For them Skype would be a new technology. So, what we consider to be normal, they would consider to be their future. And that idea, I guess, is very applicable to business because you might look at some of the technologies that were discussed in A Faster Future like augmented reality or 3-D printing or machine-to-machine communication. You might think, gee, that‘s really futuristic. But, it‘s actually quite often already here. Other people using it have adapted it for their particular industries.
The crucial thing then is looking around and trying to figure out how can I adapt that to what I‘m doing? And especially if you‘re the first in your industry to do something then you can have a massive competitive advantage. And often it‘s no more difficult than seeing what people are doing in other industries, perhaps unrelated to you with technology and adapting that technology to your own situation.
Franziska: Yeah. And that was probably one of my favourite parts when I saw you speak and I‘ve got two questions here. One is how do you make sure you stay at the forefront of what‘s going on with technology? And then the second one is, how can you and other businesses leverage that? And you spoke about a couple of examples when I saw you speak and I‘d love to share some stuff with our audience. So maybe we can get started with how do you stay at the forefront of technology?
Brad: Yeah. I read a lot. I‘m lucky in some ways to be in a job where reading is mandatory. If I‘m not reading and consuming information, then I can‘t sort of keep the position that I‘m building and trying to be on the leading edge of what‘s happening out there. So, and my sources are incredibly varied. I actually get a lot of really good information through Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter from people that I know that are posting up notes saying, “Hey, here‘s an interesting article about something.” I don‘t subscribe to a lot of different newsletters both locally and internationally and I don‘t check RSS feeds coming off blogs, so, I do spend a good part of each day just simply consuming what‘s coming through. And that helps a lot because often an article will spark an idea. It will introduce you to a new concept or a new technology or a new product. And therefore I guess consuming is the best way that I know. And then once I find an idea that I think, “Hey that‘s something I‘ve heard of before.” I‘ll go off and I‘ll research it. I‘ll go to a search engine and start looking around and see what other articles have been written trying to understand, is this something new or is it just something old that I wasn‘t aware of previously.
And I‘ve got to say, the rate of technology change can make it quite daunting because I‘ve come across a new really interesting idea or a great new website or a great new business at least several times a week if not on a daily basis. So, it can seem a little bit daunting but the more you delve into this world, the more quickly you‘re able to filter out the things that are relevant and interesting from the stuff that is of no value.
But if you‘re not out there looking for information, then, in some regards maybe it will find you through people bringing information to you, but the more often you‘re out there actively looking the more likely you are to be hearing the things that you want to be hearing.
Franziska: Yeah. And so how do you and how can businesses leverage that knowledge?
Brad: It‘s the businesses my advice would be go out and look at what other people are doing. And this doesn‘t need to be your direct competitor down the street or even competitors within your own industry. Look at what other people are doing which is interesting in terms of spreading information or reaching out to consumers or… One example that I talk about in the presentation is a company called ecruising.travel. And the chap who started that up runs a cruising business. So he books cruise holidays all around the world and he found that… His business was doing okay, but he always had a bit of difficulty selling out those last few seats on a cruise. And by talking to his audience, he would find responses such as, maybe he‘d be organizing a trip to the Galapagos Islands. A lot of people talk about wanting to go there but when it costs several thousand dollars to get on a boat and go, people can be a little bit wary about it. Because they don‘t really know a lot about what they‘re going to be seeing once they get there.
So he took a video camera and started filming the cruises. And put his video footage up through YouTube onto his website. And after a while, those final seats would start selling and eventually it got to the point where he stopped doing paper brochures. Everything he does now is through his website and through video because he found it to be a much more powerful tool. And the cost of a High-Def video camera is really only a couple hundred dollars. There‘s free software editing out there. And if you‘re any kind of business whereby being able to show people what you do, if you consider that to be something that might be advantageous, then there‘s really no reason not to be out experimenting with video and creating little short movies and ecruising.travel has basically set itself up now as like a little e-cruising TV channel. Because he‘s just got all of his footage and all of his interviews up there. And I think it‘s just a really good example about how trying something, very, very cheap, very simple, didn‘t take up a huge amount of time wasn‘t too far related from what he was doing already because it‘s basically his marketing activity proved to have huge benefit.
I guess the message from that is go out, look around, see what other companies are doing and try it. The technology out there that is available to us today to do some of this stuff is incredibly cheap, if not free. The cost of setting up a website. We‘re talking dollars in a month here and for hosting. You can get a lot of free packages out there from various providers or you can set up a WordPress blog or something you can set this stuff and if it doesn‘t work, it‘s cost you a bit of time, but it hasn‘t really cost you… You‘re not going to go broke as a result from doing it. So just urge people to get out there and try things. Set up a Facebook page. Set up a Twitter account. Update your information on LinkedIn. Look for some of the other tools out there like Pinterest and others which are emerging and just try them out. Because the barrier‘s for doing so are incredibly large.
Franziska: Yeah. I agree and one of the things that I always talk about when I talk to our guys in our courses is exactly that. Look at other industries and one of my examples that I use is when I went to the U.S, probably two years ago, I was at a wedding in Washington, DC and we… I saw banks that have drive-thru. We don‘t even have to get out of the car… and I‘m Swiss so I think we‘re maybe a little bit more behind sometimes. So I don‘t think you have that in Australia. But I was saying, wow, you know… You have drive-thru banks. You just drive in, you put your stuff into a little pipe and you don‘t have to get out of the car and that‘s something that these guys probably took from looking at other industries. Food industries, obviously.
Brad: Yeah. Actually the drive-thru bank concept I think is at least 30 years old in the U.S. if not older. But that was taken directly from the fast food industry and the notion that people are more likely to go to the bank if they don‘t have to park their car, get out of the car, walk across the car park and stand in a queue. I guess it‘s just never really taken off down here. No one‘s necessarily seen the reasoning for it and maybe it‘s more of a drive-thru culture in the U.S. So, in that case maybe that worked for the banking industry over there. Perhaps it wouldn‘t have worked for the banking industry down here. I don‘t know whether anyone tried it or not. But setting up drive-thru banks are an awful lot more expensive than setting up a website.
Franziska: Exactly. And especially nowadays, you don‘t even need to go the bank anymore with online banking. Now what are some of the most amazing and useful inventions you‘ve come across?
Brad: One of the ones that I‘m really excited about is 3-D printing, I mentioned that a moment ago. What 3-D printing is just as we‘re used to the idea of printing out a document line by line, this technology can print out a solid object layer by layer. And the technology is becoming quite cheap now. These machines used to cost many tens of thousands of dollars, but the cheapest machine out there… Or one of the cheapest machines is called a MakerBot, M-A-K-E-R-B-O-T, and they sell for about $2000 now. So, you take a 3-D design, maybe it‘s for a figurine or a statue or a chess piece or a piece of jewelry or even a part for… Maybe it‘s a lens cap or anything you can pretty much think of and you take the 3-D design and it basically will print this object, layer by layer. And the cheaper machines will print in plastics and polymers. There are machines out there that can print objects in glass and ceramics. There are machines out there that are just a little bit more expensive but can print objects out of metal. And the quality of the products being printed out is improving all the time. So you‘ve got objects that you can print pretty close to the quality of forged metal now. So, we‘re talking about solid objects being printed out basically to the quality that might be required to go into an engine.
I find that particularly interesting. Another one that I‘m really fascinated by is this notion of machine-to-machine communication. The fact that technology has got so cheap now that computers can be embedded into a lot of household items. We‘re starting to see… I saw one example recently of an oven in the UK that had been developed which had a computer built into it. You could actually check what was happening inside your oven from the Internet. So if you‘ve been slow roasting all day, you could actually check on what was happening. And that applies to home security systems and all sorts of other devices out there and you can do a remote recording on your cable TV I guess is another example of that in action. But we‘re extending that further and further still and I found one example of people having created these tiny little computer transmitters that could be fitted into the ear tags on cattle so you could actually track what your cattle were doing throughout the day if you run a cattle farm. So rather than having to go look for your cattle when they went missing, you could actually just use a triangulation system in real-time you could see exactly where your cattle were. So that, I find really interesting because that notion of being able to embed intelligence into a wider range of devices is really going to change the way that we interact.
The third one. There are plenty more, but the third one off of that is augmented reality. Augmented reality is it‘s a concept that some of us might be familiar with because it‘s available on mobile phones today. But let‘s say you‘re a tourist and you‘re standing at a plaza in Italy and you‘re looking at a building and you‘d like to know what it is, but the information on the building is written in Italian and you maybe don‘t speak Italian. This technology, you hold up your mobile phone as you would if you were taking a photo of the building, but you load up your augmented reality application and what happens is because your phone has a GPS unit, most phones will do that now, it can figure out where it is. Your phone has a compass in it so it can figure out what direction you‘re facing in. And it could draw information from the Internet and actually tell you what you‘re looking at.
So, as a tourist you can now, I guess, have the world explained to you by looking at it through the screen of your mobile phone because whether it‘s getting a menu for a restaurant or trying to figure out where the newest underground railway station is or whatever it might be, there are all these applications and tools out there that use augmented reality. And I can overlay this information on what you‘re looking at. And those of you who find looking at maps a little bit too difficult, this is great because you just hold up your phone and you turn around in a circle until you find yourself pointing at the thing that you want to be pointing at. Now at the moment, holding up the mobile phone like that I guess is a little bit of a natural activity and maybe not something suited to every situation, particularly if it‘s raining, but we‘re looking at taking that sort of technology and embedding that into more regular devices and I‘m particularly interested in a couple of projects at the moment which is putting that kind of technology into sunglasses so you can actually get a heads up display on the inside of your glasses lens that will give you information about the world around you.
Franziska: That‘s very fascinating. One other one that I came across recently. I was quite fascinated by was you can, I think it‘s coming or it‘s already here somewhere, you can watch a movie and the lady in the movie‘s wearing a handbag that you love, you want to buy it, you can stop, click on the thing and then it goes to a website where you can buy that exact handbag for example or whatever she‘s wearing.
Brad: Yeah. That technology I guess is an interesting one in some ways because that has actually been available to us for well over 10 years now. I actually remember seeing a demonstration of a system that would be able to do that. I think as far back as… It must have been 1997 perhaps. So, 15 years ago that concept‘s been there. Often what happens with technology is that it‘s difficult to bring a concept to reality not because it‘s technically difficult, but because often the supply chain and the integration is. So certainly that‘s something that people have been toying with for a while and I think we will get there but I guess a couple of things have stood in the way.
One is being able to link the video that you‘re watching to the content provider. So being able to actually set up the video in such a way that you can pause it, click, and make the purchase. And this is I guess what we call in some ways an extension of this notion of embedded active content within video.
The second thing is if you‘re watching a movie, do you really want to stop the movie in order to be able to purchase that item? And that behavior is one that I guess some people struggle with a little bit in terms of… A lot of people when they‘re consuming content don‘t necessarily want to break that experience up. A little bit like how people don‘t like being interrupted by advertising. Particularly if you‘re watching something with a second person. If you‘re stopping that movie on a regular basis in order to click on the dress or the handbag that you want, then your partner may not necessarily appreciate that unless, of course, they‘re doing it in something that you‘re watching with them. So, sometimes these things they can be there but they take a little bit of time to come back again. So maybe another example. You‘d watch something twice and therefore on the second time through you‘d stop and click because you‘ve already seen it. But no one‘s quite put the supply chain or the economics around that one yet.
Franziska: Yeah. Yeah. Now to finish up. We‘re coming to a close here. If you had one tip for other small business owners, what would it be?
Brad: Read. Get out there and read as much as you can. I get people coming up to me after presentations saying, “I find this very overwhelming.” It‘s not, really. You just need to be open to consuming more information which means looking at what people are putting out there on their blogs and Twitter and Facebook and you don‘t need to boil the ocean. You can just start with the things that you think might be most relevant and start by maybe looking at what people like Seth Scott and various others are writing out there. They will lead you to topics that you‘re interested in. And it really is just a question of exploration and in some ways it‘s, I guess, an extension of this concept of lifelong learning. If you‘re in business today, you know that the business environment is changing around you and the competitive landscape you face today is very different to what you faced 10 years back.
So therefore, your willingness to be able to go and do this. It should be second nature to you because you should hopefully be able to make that decision that this is something which is going to vital to survival of your business and if you really want your business to thrive, then it means maintaining a bit of a competitive edge over other players and competitors in the marketplace. The best way to do that I know is to go out and consume information. So get onto the web, start searching for things, start searching for people, start looking for the different concepts, start looking at what other companies are doing and consume and digest that information. Once you‘ve done that, get out and try a few things. As I‘ve said earlier, the barriers to trying stuff online are pretty low. It‘s just a matter of being able to set aside some time to be able to do it.
Franziska: And I absolutely agree with that. And sometimes I‘m quite fascinated by some of the more motivational speakers that sometimes suggest that they don‘t watch or read anything. And I‘m always like, really, because nowadays we do have, if you own a business or even if you don‘t, if you work for somebody else, to keep that edge and to be at the forefront we do need to know what‘s going on not only with technology but what are the trends. What are people talking about? What are they doing? What‘s happening? Because maybe there‘s stuff that we need to adjust in the business. So I‘m glad that you talk about that.
Brad: Absolutely. I definitely encourage people to go out after they listen to this and start looking around.
Franziska: Now where can people find out more about you and your business? One of the websites is afasterfuture.com. Where else can they connect?
Brad: That website was set up for the book. The second one that we‘ve got or which is just for me which is bradhowarth.com. B-R-A-D-H-O-W-A-R-T-H.com. And that‘s just a bit of an update on the sort of things that I‘m looking at and working on. Yeah. And you can start there and I guess maybe I can help maybe lead you to some of the stuff that you might be interested in.
Franziska: Awesome. And then obviously they can find you on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.
Brad: Absolutely.
Franziska: Thank you so much Brad.
Brad: Thank you Franziska.