Bioenergy PROFITS Principles: “It’s not about you, it’s about the customer”
IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU
We all know it’s about the customer, yet that’s easier said than done.
Today’s topic is Part II of Obtaining Vital Information to alleviate fear and influence your stakeholders. Obtaining Vital Information is one of the seven Bioenergy PROFITS Principles. This series highlights proven principles to running your business more effectively (from the newly released book, Run Your Business Like a Fortune 100: 7 Principles for Boosting PROFITS, by Rosalie Lober, Ph.D.) and illustrates key points of the successful company, PetroAlgae, specializing in advanced technologies to produce oil and animal feed from algae is the company we use as our example for this series.
A few days ago, in the previous column, Accumulate Information and Influence Stakeholders, it was all about you. Many questions were suggested for you to answer about your company. Before a company can become a customer’s solution, it needs to know why its own business exists.
This may sound obvious, yet as time goes by, many business leaders are so overloaded with their day-to-day projects that it is easy to go off into unanticipated directions. (This is why the Bioenergy PROFITS Principle, test and revise (see Amyris Biotechnologies column, October 1, 2009) is so essential to a company’s ability to stay focused.)
What information did you find out as you answered the questions in Part I?
Were you surprised with what you discovered about your company?
Granted, there were many questions to respond to, yet these answers provide the critical information for your company to be your customers’ solution. Your roadmap and direction emerge with the answers.
Identify your challenges
You have challenges to deal with on the journey to fulfilling your customer’s needs.
Once again, imagine that you are a biorefinery.
Think about your customers and your customer’s business over the past year.
- What are your customer’s most challenging issues?
- Are you providing a solution to help them resolve these issues?
- How do your solutions resolve customer issues?
And, as you think about your own company, what are the solutions that you need from other companies – to help you provide solutions for your customers? Who will provide those solutions for you?
This may sound like double-talk, yet it’s reality. All solutions are dependent on other companies and their resources. Quite simply, if we are in business, we are customers and we also have customers.
Your biorefinery needs feedstock. Are algae a potential feedstock that you can use for your customer’s solutions?
Search data to your purpose
With so much data available, it is important to know what you’re looking for.
It’s very easy to type key words on search engines, only to find that two hours have gone by. Though we may have enjoyed our time and learned some interesting information, if we’re honest, we know we’ve not used our time wisely.
One of the most useful goals in searching for solutions is to gain information and insight into how companies operate in the marketplace. How do they interact with their customers? What is their reputation? How does their pricing compare to their competitors? Find out about their priorities and how this may affect working with you.
Let’s take a closer look at PetroAlgae as we explore the PROFITS Principle, Obtaining Vital Information and determine if PetroAlgae is a good solution for your biorefinery.
PetroAlgae is focused on its mission. It offers regional solutions by applying specific proprietary processes to scale from a microorganism to a high output producing micro-crop.
PetroAlgae describes its solution clearly. As a biorefinery, do you need this solution?
Explore your options
For the next few weeks, we will explore PetroAlgae, as a solution to your customer’s feedstock issues. This exploration is about your customers and whether PetroAlgae can be the solution for your customers. (Remember that you’re a biorefinery,.)
Data/datum is generally isolated tidbits. Information results by interpreting the datum or finding sources that interpret the data.
A useful technique for starting this exploration of a potential solution is to learn how the company operates. So, let’s get specific.
- What are the goals of PetroAlgae?
- What does PetroAlgae project to the market in the short term?
An internet search tells us that PetroAlgae has a global strategy. Most of its revenue comes from licensing its technology. The technology includes production systems, micro-crop strains and process controls.
Based on this information we can surmise that PetroAlgae has proven and marketable intellectual property. This includes issued and pending patents and possibly trade secrets. Does this information give you confidence in PetroAlgae?
It should because the business is built on a strong intellectual and scientific foundation.
PetroAlgae’s global strategy is focused on diesel manufactures and biofuel refineries as well as energy companies, utility providers, chemical companies and food processors. There are potential clients and government entities in China, India, Japan, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany, England, Singapore, Finland and the United States. There is a licensing agreement with GRB Power to construct and operate ten facilities for growth and production of oil and biomass in China and its regions.
From this information, we can surmise that PetroAlgae is aware and probably knowledgeable of geopolitics and environmental issues globally. This may include regulatory, lobbying and public relations.
Evaluate your options with information
- What have you learned that would make you choose the solutions you’ve researched?
- Have you learned how the companies operate, in addition to their solutions?
- How have you weighed the strengths and weaknesses of the solution and the company?
- Did you find any deal breakers – things you cannot go along with?
Again, wear your biorefinery hat. Did you know that PetroAlgae may be completing a working demonstration of a micro crop algae oil solution before other competitors? The company’s micro crop production is scalable and highly prolific – more than double the industry norm. These micro crops are not competing with the food supply and use a small fraction of available land.
Learn the science and technology
As a consumer of a complex technology, even without having a degree in science and/or engineering, it is important to understand the processes. You will want to compare and contrast what competitors have to offer – both in terms of processing steps and cost effectiveness.
PetroAlgae’s production process absorbs and consumes CO2.
Micro crops consume double their weight in CO2, leaving no toxic waste. When PetroAlgae feedstock is burned, the CO2 released was the CO2 that was absorbed during its growth.
When you compare macro-crops (corn, soybeans, jatropha) with micro-crops, you learn that the micro-crops produced by PetroAlgae take two weeks to the first harvest and can later be harvested daily. The macro-crop jatropha, for example can take three to five years from germination to maturity. Quick algae production is the result of optimizing the right amount of light at the right time. Production output can be increased with scientific and engineering expertise based on bioreactors, hydrodynamics and PetroAlgae’s other proprietary processes. Examples of micro-crops include: macro and micro algae, diatoms, micro-angiosperms and cyanobacters.
Competitors of PetroAlgae (which as a biorefinery you should be checking out) include Joule Biotechnologies in Massachusetts, which may be using a modified version of watermeal, the smallest flowering plant and a renewable fuel feedstock. Joule estimates that, at full-scale production, we have the potential to deliver 20,000+ gallons ethanol and 13,000+ gallons of diesel per acre per year. Joule’s lead product in development, ethanol, is slated for commercial-scale development in 2012. They will begin pilot plant operations in 2010. Joule uses a modified photosynthetic microorganism, housed in a closed photobioreactor with brackish water, using only CO2 and sunlight as sources of reproductive energy.
North Carolina State University reported that it can use duckweed, a microscopic aquatic plant, using hog farm waste water to grow an average to six times that of corn starch. One of the advantages of tiny aquatic plants is that very little of their biomass is needed to support their structures since they float on water instead of standing freely. Up to 95% of its substance is a mix of proteins, carbohydrates and lipids.
Avoid analysis paralysis
With so much information available, it is natural to think there is still more to learn and that you are not ready to find your solutions – or be the solution to other companies.
Learn what you can about both the solution a company offers and how the company operates. Learn about their relationships with suppliers and customers and learn why these suppliers and customers chose them.
Then ask yourself the same question about your customers? What are you offering that results in utilization of your solution?
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Joelle Brink | Oct 8, 2009 | Reply
Probably the best example of growth fueled by customer focus is Praj Industries. Everyone talks about customer focus, but the principals at Praj genuinely seem to thrive on the challenge of solving their customers problems, the more difficult the better.
Probably the best example is the company’s global feedstock information base, which was compiled by the principals literally going into the field for months at a time with their clients and analyzing not only feedstock species, but local variations by subspecies, geography and climate. The information was used to fine tune mash and wastewater treatment specifications.
Similarly, in Colombia they had to work under unprecedented sustainability guidelines and provide a zero-waste processing solution that could be operated by local engineers. The result is an international model of sustainable ethanol production.
You won’t find any “No, we don’t do cassava” at Praj. The company has turned the difficulty of its clients’ problems into an industry-leading range of competencies.