[Video Tip] Put a shark in your business

Dr Patrick White from SME Academy explains how a little-known Japanese fishing technique can be applied to your business in a recession to improve results.

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Transcript

Hello. Today I would like to talk about:

‘Putting A Shark In Your Business’

You might think this is a really odd topic but I’m relating it to the recession that we are currently having; because one of the things I have learned, being old enough and having been through a few recessions is that it gives you an opportunity to really examine what is going on in your business and make some steps that will improve your business ready for the future.

I’d like to tell you a story that relates to this which I read not that long ago and it’s to do with a Japanese fishing fleet.

The Japanese, over recent times, had fished out all the fish around their own islands and therefore had to send their fleet much further afield to get the fish. Obviously they couldn’t keep the fish alive to get back to the market unless they did something about it.

So initially what they did was they put big freezers on their ships and froze the fish and then took it back to Japan.

However this presented a problem because the Japanese consumer noted that the fish did not taste as fresh as they were used to eating. So what were they to do about this?

So they took their fleet, took all the freezers off and replaced them with big tanks. When they caught the fish they would put the fish in the tanks, fin-to-fin, and let them wriggle around and try and keep them alive so when they got back to Japan they would have the fresh taste.

However after a while the fish stopped wriggling and would just go into a sort of state of frigidity. So when they got back to Japan the same problem happened; the local consumers in Japan said the fish still tasted like it wasn’t fresh. It still tasted like it had been frozen under the previous way of doing things.

So then someone came up with a bright idea of: “Why don’t we put a small shark in each tank? And the shark will swim around; he might eat a few fish but because the shark’s there the fish keep wriggling around.”

And when they got back to Japan it tasted still like fresh fish. So you’ve got to treat the recession like someone has put a shark in your business. And let it wriggle around until you find out ways to do things better and get the results you want.

Thank you. For more video tips and articles go to: www.smeacademy.co.uk

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