Angela Prentner-Smith will be co-hosting a design session at Friday's Milk Bar with Sarah Drummond, of Snook, on what a working day in the future might look like.

Ahead of the Milk Bar we asked Angela a few questions:
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1. What brings you to the Milk Bar Meet Up?
   
   Well I set up the Milk Bar due to frustrations I was having with events and networking.  I wanted a place where we could talk about what's coming next as opposed to what's happening now.  How can we make things better? Are there better ways of doing things?  What’s coming next for us, what will we have to prepare for next, are there better ways of doing things? I love to hear and learn from other people's thoughts on these issues, and so the Milk Bar was born!
   
   
2. You will be co-hosting a design session that shows what a work day in the future might look like. Can you tell us a bit more about why you chose this topic for the Milk Bar?
   
   Sarah and I designed this topic to get people thinking about what the future might look like.  The great thing about the future is that we are designing it as we go, without even knowing it.  What we as business people need to do is to proactively design it, rather than let it happen to us. 
    
   The exercise draws on the tools of service design and design thinking to get people thinking and doing rather than just listening.
   
   
3. Why do you think it is important for organisations to prepare for the future?
   
   The world is changing so quickly.  Digital and technological advancements have meant even the safest of businesses and industries are threatened by disruptors.  In order to keep up with customer expectations, employee expectations, the changing workplace landscape and competitors, businesses need to be on the front foot.
   
   
4. What do you think the most important trend is going to be for your business in the next 5 years?
   
   For This is Milk – I think the trend towards employee learning is key.  The critical component that will help any business to deal with constant change is constant learning.  If we aren’t learning, we can’t keep up with change, we can’t inform our business strategies with the latest information and we won’t deliver the best to our customers.
    
   So for a business that's all about change and transformation the key to our success will be in constant learning and changing ourselves!  There is data to back this up, but it seems obvious to me!  Don’t stagnate, and keep learning to keep successful.
   
   Meet Angela at the Milk Bar on Friday 5 August 2016, 17:30-19:30 at Snook Interchange Glasgow , 84 Miller Street, Glasgow.

 

More speaker profiles

• Paul Fletcher

Keep an eye out for our next Milk Bar and other events!

A look into the future of This is Milk and our plan to keep it as a business structured around people and projects
Angela Prentner-Smith

​As we near our 1st birthday (!) we've been working on balancing our client work with our own business development and 5-year vision - specifically, what will the structure and culture of This is Milk be like when we've evolved past our start up state to a fully operating business? To figure this out, we've taken into account what we know of business, the demands for innovation and change, adaptability, and the needs and wants of our current and future workforce. We’ve worked with Strathclyde University’s Business Clinic to work out an optimally designed company structure to complement our strategic aims, our culture and our mission.  

So what do we want to achieve? As a business, we are committed to collaboration, continuous learning and an unadulterated focus on customers. We knew straight away that a traditional hierarchy didn't support these aims. On the other end of the spectrum, a holacracy wouldn't support the empowered, quick decision-making that enables nimble project delivery. Ultimately, our business is all about projects. Whatever way you look at it, that's what we do, and those projects need to deliver.

A matrix designed for purpose

The solution we've come to is a variation of a matrix structure.  Everything we do in the business, either internally or for an external client, can be considered a project.  Each project needs a purpose, and everyone on that project needs to be aligned in their objectives and working for the same purpose. The skills needed to deliver those projects can be varied and the individuals that make up the project teams could be any mix of This is Milk employees, suppliers, clients or temporary workforce. Regardless, aligning people to objectives and purposes ensures it doesn't matter who they work for or what their skill set is - they will all work towards a common goal. Too often, I've seen project teams waste time, energy and money working for contradictory purposes. The ‘department’ you work for shouldn't ever stop you delivering for a customer or be at odds with the assignment you have. We deliver collaboratively for customers - not hierarchically for individual gains.

Interdisciplinary working - creating skilled teams

I have a brain that struggles to compartmentalise.  I haven't yet worked out if it's a gift or a curse, but I am forever connecting concepts and things rather than trying to define where they go in a schematic way. I struggle with defining job titles and understanding silos, because to my mind it is reductive.  Yes, there are restrictions to what people can do based on what they have learned and it is harmful to put people in roles they are ill-equipped for, but there is also strength in empathy, in understanding where people are coming from and how skills can complement each other.   To my mind, departments based on perceived skill sets reduce opportunities for learning and empathy and counter-productively create friction and discord.

​What we aim to create is interdisciplinary teams where whether you're a technologist or a marketer, you are working together for that common goal. That doesn't just happen in ‘agile project worlds’ but in everything we do as a business.  We pull teams together around a purpose and find the right mix of skills to deliver that project. Teams or departments don't send ‘representatives’  to the project - rather, the project is created to achieve objectives and purposes to be delivered by skilled people that make up the project team. Each project team will have a lead, ultimately responsible for delivery, resourcing, stakeholder management and all those things that keep a project on track. Project management, and therefore programme management, become critical roles in our future.

Removing Silos and Increasing Learning - The Hub of This is Milk

We have no departments in the future of This is Milk. This led us with the challenge of how to ensure that our people are supported in personal development, that they learn the latest, new ways of doing things. Where do you get the support of a mentor and who do you go for personal and career issues? In the future of This is Milk, you go to ‘The Hub’.  The Hub is a business critical, interdisciplinary team made up of people who have the skills and experience to lead and mentor others in their profession. They are architects, responsible for continuously learning and disseminating new ways of doing things, thought leadership, and ensuring that they share information with their Hub peers, the directors, and those they mentor. As soon as anyone comes into This is Milk, they will be paired with a mentor from the Hub who will be their professional guide while they work with us.

Our future architects will also be the kick-starters for projects, responsible for defining the purpose,  the scope, the methodology, and the required skills to deliver the project. This ensures their project and delivery skills are always kept fresh and they don't fall foul of management roles that remove them from what they were good at it in the first place.  They become champions within and outwith that project, taking learnings from the project and feeding them back to the rest of the Hub and sharing the Hub’s wider learnings with their mentees and their projects.  This way, This is Milk will always remain at the forefront of thought leadership, always embedding the latest thinking and experimentation in the work we deliver. This also makes sure that we always improve from lessons learned, from mistakes and from each other.  We will seek to prevent power based on knowledge hoarding, and instead incentivise the sharing of information for the growth of the organisation as a whole and the delivery of projects to customers.

Personal Development

Without hierarchy, how do we offer personal and career progression? We have three routes.  An individual can move from a project role, to a project management position, to the Hub or horizontally to other disciplines.  As our projects are interdisciplinary, we will learn from each other, opening up opportunities for people to move from one discipline to another.  We also continually challenge our people and offer them development by the project nature of our work.  This month, you could be delivering a process improvement project for a client and next month your project could be implementing a new procedure into This is Milk, meaning continual challenge and motivating work.  

Maintaining the Vision and Governing Change

Lastly, there is our Board of Directors and CEO, who as I see it, are there as custodians and champions of our Vision, our Mission and our Values.  This board sets shared objectives, governs our own business and makes sure that we keep changing, learning  and improving, and that we support our workforce in delivering for our customers.

That’s our vision.  We have a long way to go to get there, but we’ve got our eye on the ball.  It may be idealistic, but the world was built by idealists.

Interested to learn more about us? Click on the button!

Angela discusses what digital transformation has really meant to her

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What a birthday party can teach you about how your customers feel.
Angela Prentner-Smith

​How do your customers feel about your business?

Think about what you remember most about the good, the bad, and the ugly in your experiences as a customer. What stands out the most? The colour of the walls or the website header, the effectiveness or friendliness of the staff, the waiting time? No matter what aspects shaped your experience, what sticks in your mind and defines your overall impression is how it made you feel. Were you annoyed by the cumbersome signup process of the website or were you pleasantly surprised at how happily the restaurant accommodated your dietary requirements?

Emotions are the key to customer experience. A study by Forrester showed that emotions had a bigger influence for customer loyalty than effectiveness or ease. Emotional experience trumps functional experience. Yet, many businesses feel daunted in the face of this – emotions are too unpredictable to control! And who in the world has enough emotional intelligence to be able to understand every possible way that your customers could be feeling about your business? However, that doesn't mean that there aren't many little things you can do to influence the emotional experiences of your customers and make sure it is as positive as possible. It's often just a matter of keeping the emotional perspective in mind and not just focusing on the technical or functional details.

A disappointing experience

Recently, I went through a rather unpleasant experience as a customer, which showed that the business had not given enough thought to the details that shaped how I felt when I interacted with their business. I took my two-year old son to a kids' birthday party at a local soft play. My son happens to have a milk allergy (as 1 in 10 children do), but this has generally not been a problem at most places where catering is an issue. This time, sadly, that was not the case.

When we signed in and they took his name, I told them about his allergy. I was looked at blankly. I went on to say that this means that he can't have cheese, ice cream, or anything else like that. The girl just said OK, but she didn't write it down, didn't get the menu, or ask what he could have. I assumed this meant it wasn't a problem.

Once it's time for the meal, it turns out that food on offer in the party room is pizza, sandwiches, and cheesy crisps. My boy can't eat sandwiches with margarine on, obviously can't eat pizza, and can only recently tolerate cheese powder type crisps. Still, he's two years old and wants to sit with all the other kids and eat pizza.

​I find the girl who I initially told and who was serving the food. I told her he can't eat anything here. She goes to the kitchen and says that we can make him a dry ham sandwich. I wasn't pleased.  Who wants to eat a dry ham sandwich when everyone else is eating pizza?

So how could my experience have been improved?

Here's a run-through of the emotions I (or any parent) would typically feel at a kids' birthday party: firstly, I want my kid to enjoy it. I don't want him left out, singled out, or left hungry. I don't want to be seen as annoying. I feel guilty for having to raise an issue with the staff, the other parents, and for telling him he can't have the pizza or the cakes, or the chocolates that all the other kids have. I feel sad for him, I feel overbearing and scared that I might take my eyes off him and he could nab a bit of cheese or chocolate.

All it would have taken was for the staff to ask me when we came in what he could have, take me through the menu, or tell me some options so it wasn't just the quickest thing they could get out. Basic staff training.

Imagine how many customer experiences like mine could be transformed if the businesses took the time to put themselves in the customer's shoes and consider how the experience must feel from their perspective!

Be ready for emotions

The consequence of neglecting the emotional experience of your customers can be severe. We recently wrote about the Balgonie Castle incident, which shows the importance of listening in on social media to see how your customers are talking about your business. When customers turn to social media to give reviews, feedback, or just vent, they tend to either be furious or ecstatic – the extreme ends of the emotional experience. You can miss a lot of the middle if you only look at these explicit reviews, and the middle of the emotional spectrum is probably going to be where most of your customers are.

You need to consider emotions before the actual experience happens. What are the hopes of a typical customer who are choosing your business? What is the last thing they want to happen? Are there any small ways you can make your customers' experience extra special? Think about what role your customers are going be in when engaging with your business and what goals that role entails. As a mother at a birthday party for kids, I want my child to have an enjoyable and problem-free time having fun with the other kids. I do not want him to have to eat a dry ham sandwich while everyone else has pizza – or worse, start vomiting because he's eaten something he's allergic to.

It's true that the situations that will make or break the emotional experience of your customers will mostly be unplanned and unpredictable. Particularly for customer service situations, this comes down to staff training and a readiness among your employees to be responsive and perhaps stray from standard processes if it's the right thing to do. An outstanding example  would be the time United Airlines signaled the connecting flight of a man who was flying to say his goodbyes to his dying mother to wait for him, even if it caused a delay.

Take your customer experience to the next level by thinking about the emotions you want to encourage!

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A simple tool to help you make the right choices for your business
Angela Prentner-Smith

A few weeks ago I took a look at the very first GANTT chart I did back in March, when it was just me sitting at my coffee table thinking 'right, what are all the things I need to do to get This is Milk off the ground?' This was just after I’d been having a slight melt down thinking ‘there’s so much to do, how on earth am I possibly going to do this?!'

I put everything down on paper that was in my head, gave them indicative timeframes and sequences and then almost unintentionally didn't really look back at it. I did it, wrote it all down, and set it aside. It was an exercise of catharsis more than anything else.

A couple of months later, I pulled this GANTT back out, surprisingly I realised that all but one thing had been done - and that one thing will be, it just hasn't yet proved important. I think that’s because I knew why I was going into business and what I wanted to achieve by this point. For me it wasn’t about going back and checking that plan or following the steps to the letter, because they will always change. It was about staying true to the ideals of the business and what we were trying to achieve. If you know where you want to go and why, how you get there is pretty irrelevant, but you will get there.

With this is mind, we developed a tool for businesses to help guide that thought process and presented it to Business Gateway’s Women into Business

Here we explain each step in the tool in a little more detail:

1. WHAT is it you’re trying to achieve?

Too often we are tempted to jump straight to the solution, but this isn’t your aim. Your aim is something along the lines of ‘I want to increase my brand presence in the Scottish Market by X’ or ‘I want to make £100,000 profit this year. Your aim isn’t "I need a website".  That's a solution to a problem – a tool to help you get to your aim. A website can facilitate you making money or your brand awareness but it is not what you’re trying to achieve.

By focusing on developing a website without thinking about ‘why’ you need one and what you want to achieve, you’re going to miss a whole bunch of stuff you need to think about before you design that site. You have to take it back to your core objectives.

2. WHY do you want to do this?

Don’t underestimate the power of stopping for a moment and asking yourself why? It’s something you probably asked yourself and everyone around you dozens of times a day as a child, and it’s a lesson we often forget as adults. But why?!

Your why is the embodiment of your business, it’s your brand, your ethics, it’s the reason you are in business in the first place.

There’s a really interesting TED talk by Simon Sinek called ‘Start with Why? He takes it right back to the biology that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. So take the time to think about why you’re in business.

For This is Milk, our why is ‘we want to make businesses better’ and everything we do has to come back to that point. If we aren’t doing that, we’ve gone off-track. And that’s not about failing to follow the steps of a plan, it’s about us coming away from our ‘why’.

So now you’ve got ‘what you need to achieve’ and ‘why you’re doing it’ – these are the checkpoints to come back to for every decision you make. OK, if I go down that route - does it keep me on track for your aims and does it still support ‘why’ I’m here? But there’s one more key point to think about – who?

3. WHO is this change designed for?

Think about who your audience is, who will benefit from this decision or change I’m about to make? This will help you design all the elements that are then going to help you on your way to achieving what it is you’ve set out to achieve in the first place (in step one). It will also help you create the messaging around the change you want to make and select the right communication channels to reach your audience.

Let’s say you're designing something for your employees, you have to think about who they are and what they need to know. Communicating the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ to your audience will also help them to understand and appreciate the change you’re trying to make.

Now you can get to the ‘how’!

​Once you’ve answered these three key questions, you can then start to think about how to get to where you want to go. So if I take the example again of ‘increasing brand presence’ there’s lot of ways to do that, we can create a website, advertise on TV, paid search, networking, speak at events…the list is endless.

But this is when you look at all these options and start to assess each one: what will it cost? Is it in the right place? Is the timing right? What are the routes to entry? What are my barriers? All of these kinds of things. You have options, but what you are assessing them against is always what you’re trying to achieve, why you’re trying to achieve it and who it’s for.

Then once you’ve put these things in place, you need to measure and test. How you do that is by going back to your what, why and who again. Do my audience like it? Does it embody why I’m here and am I achieving my goal? Chances are, if you answered the ‘what’ ‘why’ and ‘who’ to begin with, the answers will be yes!

If you have a business problem to solve or changes to deliver, get in touch today. We can help!
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Email us at hello@thisismilk.co.uk or complete our online form

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Why I chose to start a business and have a baby in the same year
Angela Prentner-Smith

Between March 2014 and March 2015, three major life milestones happened.  I had a baby, passed my driving test and started a business – in that order. Ironically, passing my driving test took the longest – but that’s another story.

On the one hand, I look back and think, gosh what an achievement, and on the other I think, like many others, I must be mad! But in many ways this has just been a natural next chapter in my particular story. I was ready and willing to take it all on. 

What I wasn’t prepared for was the pressure of competing expectations on me,  not only as a woman, but suddenly as a mother. I wasn’t ready for how hard it would be to lose the mental and social activity of a workplace. I wasn’t ready to lose all the spontaneity in life, and I certainly wasn’t ready for the guilt and judgement I would feel when I decided to start a business.

For some women, their goal in life is to be a wife and a mum, but I was never one of those women. That said - I love being married and being a mum. My little family is what motivates me, supports me, and where I get all the security I never had in my early life and don’t have in my chosen career path. My home is the place where I have nothing to prove, no deadlines or pressures, and where I have solace. It’s a happy place – most of the time, bar the odd (ever-increasing) toddler tantrum…. enough said.

My struggle as a new mum

Saying I love having a child, is true, but it certainly isn’t easy. Not because having a baby is mentally taxing - quite the opposite. When you’ve had a baby after building a career, an education and a busy social life – it can be a massive change to lose the buzz and sense of achievement you get from those parts of your life. Getting stakeholder buy-in or solving a complex business problem is worlds apart from the achievements you get as a new mum. Having a shower, sleeping for more than 2 hours at a time or eating a hot meal – that’s your new milestones for the day. How about getting through the day without crying? Or getting dressed – maybe?

Then your partner goes to work, and you’re jealous. He got to sleep all night, and then go and do something he knows how to do. He gets to talk to adults, to shower, put on clothes, eat lunch at the usual time. And you have no effing clue what you are doing with this tiny creature that is totally dependent on you. You’re literally left holding the baby.

The first 9 or 10 months of my maternity leave were a blur of getting through days. I loved watching my little boy learn new things, and have his personality develop – these are the achievements that can never be matched. I loved not having the constraints of an office work place. I loved meeting other mums and developing new friendships, but honestly I was bored, tired, frustrated, and really felt like a failure most days.

Staying on top of the housework, getting dinner on the table and looking presentable became daily battles. I struggled with all of the things that were sold to me as being the most essential female qualities, the things that make a happy family. Not only could I not keep up with them, I didn’t love them. Coupled with the guilt I felt for not loving being at home with my baby - it became a constant mental struggle.

I got asked by well-meaning individuals whether I loved home life. I couldn’t even fake an answer that would please them. When I would respond – no – I would watch their faces fall, as if how could you not love being a homemaker and a mum to that beautiful baby?
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To work or not to work?

Some stay-at-home mums seemed to be insulted when I would say that being a full-time mum wasn’t for me. Then there were the questions from my working friends, “When are you going back to work?”. That question equally burned, because going back to work felt like I was abandoning my baby - leaving him with strangers, the dreaded nursery, and missing all the moments that I would never get back with him.  Going back to work meant giving up both my vision of starting my own business, and the pleasures of being a mum and watching my little boy grow up. I was unhappy at work, yet being a stay-at-home mum was equally uninspiring. It was the wrong choice for me personally, from both angles.

It’s worth mentioning that the concept for This is Milk, was already born and underway before I fell pregnant, however due to various life happenings it had been shelved, its future undecided, but never far from my mind. I’d also grown tired of the inflexibility of 9-5 office life.

Finding my balance

For many parents, choosing self-employment is a way to achieve more balance between parenting and work. In some respects this was a motivation for me. The truth is, for the moment it hasn’t worked out that way - I’m building a business, working onsite with a client, plus being a mum and maintaining a social life.  However, instead of feeling like a failure, I feel like I’m achieving again, at being a mum, a wife, and an entrepreneur.

What I am building is a life of balance that works for me – a happy place where I can build a future for my family and the team I work with.

I’ve started to ignore the negativity from those who doubt my ability or judge me for wanting a career outside of my family. I now focus on the looks of pride from my family and friends at what I have achieved in a short space of time.
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For me, choosing to start a business and have a baby in the same year was the right decision.  There have been sacrifices of course but I certainly haven’t had to choose between a career and a family. I’ve made the choices I have in order to build both.
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Most importantly what is right for one woman, isn't always right for the next. My choices, whilst unconventional, were the right ones for me. What I hope for is that we all judge less, and have more belief in our ability to create the futures we desire.

We've moved in to Orkney Street Enterprise Centre
Angela Prentner-Smith

My first blog post as MD of This is Milk!  So far I am loving this foray into entrepreneurship.  Every single thing feels positive and such an achievement.  Now that we have digs it feels all the more real.  The building itself is the Old Govan Jailhouse and it has been lovingly converted from jail cells to small offices for microbusinesses.  We're on site with some other businesses such as Thegither, Mirelle Activewear and Jobs and Business Glasgow.  The space really does fit with the nature of This is Milk.  It's quirky, versatile, has certainly changed and lets us collaborate.

We are planning a launch for the Autumn and arranging a very special guest, some quirky drinks and canapes.  This is an ideal opportunity for anyone to come and visit the offices, meet the team and find out more about This is Milk. If you would like an invite, make sure you sign up for our newsletters.

I intend to start using this blog for both news and thought pieces, to let you know what we are doing, learning and thinking. I hope you enjoy it.

Bye for now, 
Angela 

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