Inside My Business #5

Hi Reader

“

I take you behind the scenes of a real system, meeting, decision or process we use inside our company because I believe the best way to learn is to see how real businesses actually operate

— Ruth

I had a call this week with an old commissioning colleague that I hadn't spoken to in a couple of years.

I wasn't just catching up. I was digging for something specific.

Earlier this year, we got our TDDI registration for complex care. Then life got busy, other priorities took over, and it sat on the back burner for a while.

We're only now picking it back up properly.

When we were going through the registration process, I'd spoken to people already working in complex care and heard the same advice more than once:

Wait for the tenders. When the right ones come up, bid for them.

So that became the plan in our heads even when we were distracted.

Keep an eye out for the right opportunity, ideally something local or within a sensible travelling distance, and put in a strong bid when it appeared.

Simple enough.

...Except this week, that assumption quietly fell apart.

First during that conversation with my old commissioning colleague.

Then again at a local providers' networking meeting, where I heard much the same thing from a completely different source.

It turns out the route into complex care locally is far less straightforward than we'd assumed.

And perhaps more importantly, some of the people we'd been busy building relationships with aren't actually the people making the referrals.

That happens further down the chain, with people such as social workers and discharge coordinators.

People whose names we don't even have yet.

So suddenly, the question has changed.

It's no longer:

"When is the next tender coming out?"

It's:

"Who actually makes the decision about which provider gets the referral, and how do we get in front of them?"

That's a very different approach that takes me right back to our early days setting up when we had to do this repeatedly...

This Week's Lesson

The lesson for me isn't really about complex care.

It's about what happens when we build a strategy around information that is correct, but incomplete.

The people who told us about tenders weren't giving us bad advice. They'd genuinely been through the process themselves.

But their experience was one part of a much bigger picture.

It took two completely separate conversations this week to challenge what we'd assumed and get us closer to understanding how things actually work.

And we're still not fully there.

There are more conversations to have and more dots to join.

That's also reminded me what good networking is really about.

It isn't just turning up at events, staying visible and handing out business cards.

It's access to information.

It's being able to say, "This is what I'm hearing. Is that what you're seeing too?"

It's testing what you think you know against the experience of other people on the ground.

Because one source, however credible, rarely gives you the whole picture.

So next week is going to look remarkably similar to the earliest days in our care company

Picking up the phone....

Finding the right people....

Asking questions....

Following one conversation into another....

And slowly joining the dots.

Funny how you can spend years building a business and still find yourself right back at the beginning when you enter a new market.

Some lessons you just have to relearn.

Three things I would suggest:

1. Treat good advice as a starting point, not the finished answer.

Listen to people with experience, but keep testing what you're hearing against other sources.

2. Find out who actually makes the decision.

The person managing a contract, overseeing a service or attending a meeting isn't necessarily the person deciding where the work goes. Map the whole decision-making chain.

3. Don't wait for a confusing system to become clearer.

Pick up the phone. Ask another question. Find another person. Sometimes the only way to understand how a market really works is one conversation at a time.