What to do when business dries up at home

LOW oil prices, shrinking margins (or no margin at all), loss of jobs and perhaps the decline of the industry as a whole – the topic has been hanging around us like a dark cloud for over a year now.

This begs the question – what is the future for the thousands of us working here in Aberdeen?

In the service sector, most businesses follow the instinctive desire to hang in, hope for the local upturn and look further afield for work yet keep our companies based here in the North-east, but is this workable in the long term?

We suggest yes, but not as we know it today, and offer training as an example.

The notion of working globally from North-east Scotland is certainly less fanciful than it would have been a decade or two ago.

What is fanciful is the notion that Aberdeen can simply export Aberdeen to an eagerly waiting world that just wishes to be, well, more like Aberdeen.

The idea of “internationalising” is a simple and obvious one – the tougher question is how to do it well when there are plenty of emerging providers in other regions?

The key would seem to be to avoid simply exporting the North Sea expertise but instead package the same skills in a more tailored way and/or offer unique bespoke products which others simply don’t, or can’t do so well.

In our world of training this is readily apparent.

AGR’s TRACS Training brand has always worked globally, and the brand distinction is the delivery of tailored courses, rather than off-the-shelf products.

These take more time and effort to build and maintain than standard commodity products but they are internationally portable and no one comments on where we’re based.

An extreme example of non-tailoring would be a training organisation known to us who designed a course based around the North Sea environment and exported it wholesale to the Middle East.

The fact that the case study material embedded in the course was based on offshore projects didn’t seem to phase the course designers – driven by a belief in consistency, the lack of relevance of offshore technology for desert countries was comfortably overlooked.

The tailored alternative is of course to drop the marine aspects.

The more subtle but necessary effort is the complete deconstruction of the course to pick out the generic aspects relevant to the Middle East client group, add in the locally specific content which would not have been in the North Sea version of the course and rebuild the event around the interests of the new group.

This all requires effort, and goes far beyond simply cutting out the “bits about the North Sea”, but that effort is necessary to transfer the skills and knowledge of the North Sea-based experts to a new domain.

It is our belief that exporting skills and experience from anywhere requires this type of approach, yet not all companies are doing it. It is easier to simply try to export the standard products and activities, and see if that works.

The question for each of us in our respective businesses is therefore to open up the anatomy of our skills and products – literally take them apart and consider what is special or useful about each piece.

Some things we have done and learned really probably were for the North Sea only; other things are not and therein lies the value.

For sure, it is likely to be different, and “different” can still be based in the North-east.