Techfino at SuiteWorld 2018: Day 3 - Let's Get Growing

SuiteWorld 2018 came to an end today with the final keynote “Let’s Get Growing” presented by Senior Vice President of Marketing and Strategy, Jason Maynard. Maynard began with a recap of Wednesday night’s gala event and referenced Mark Hoppus’s "facetious" declaration that NetSuite is the “#1 SuiteCommerce Solution of Blink 182!”

Maynard then discussed scalability as a key obstacle to business growth and success in the “Golden Age of Entrepreneurship.” While it is easier than ever before to start a business today, many companies are not able to remain successful and grow to the next level. NetSuite wants to play a pivotal role in helping businesses overcome this obstacle. In this regard, today’s keynote focused on leveraging learnings from peers to help companies grow with the introduction of Growwire and success stories from several companies.


Growwire:

Growwire was unveiled as a new media platform targeted at helping companies overcome the scaling problem by sharing stories, the best way to learn. Suzy Strutner described Growwire as a toolkit of stories shared by a community.

Some of the key components of Growwire include:

• Businesswoman - Stories of women with big ideas and big jobs
• The Grow Lab - A benchmarking tool with key operational metrics for a variety of industries
• A weekly newsletter
• A podcast with Jason Maynard hosting interviews with growth experts across diverse industries
• The Grow Show video series highlighting businesses with big ideas

We got a preview of the pilot episode of the Grow Show which highlighted The Downtown Project, a business at the heart of revitalizing downtown Las Vegas. Kyli Singh encouraged everyone to follow and connect with Growwire via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and You Tube and message the team if you want to be featured.

Aesop:

Next up, we heard from Troy Smith from the Australian company, Aesop. Aesop is a luxury cosmetics business with a network of 320 retail stores across 22 countries, 70 cities, 6 languages and 21 currencies. Aesop is anything but a cookie cutter retailer, with every store being uniquely designed by architects to fit in to the neighborhood in which it is located. The company does not do any traditional advertising and is hyper-focused on in-store customer service.

Maynard asked Smith to describe how a company with so many unique characteristics was able to successfully roll out NetSuite. Smith credited the smooth implementation of NetSuite to maintaining a very tight and consistent core model that was rolled out to all locations and then localized and customized for each store.

Steiner Sports Marketing:

Kelvin Joseph exemplified how companies have to evolve their business model with the times in order to succeed and grow. Steiner was a leader in autographed sports merchandise. In the past, customers purchased autographed merchandise for bragging rights to prove they met a famous athlete or celebrity. In today’s world, if we meet a celebrity, we want to take a selfie for the same purpose. Nowadays, an autographed baseball competes with a social media post of a selfie with the player.

Now, Steiner is using the power of sports to help companies grow. While they still sell autographed memorabilia, they are now also capitalizing on the power of experiences. Joseph referenced SuiteWorld as a great example of the power of experiences. Rather than focusing the conference on just speeches about business and technology, SuiteWorld integrates fun experiences like the gala, rock show and celebrities to drive attendance and enthusiasm. Likewise, Steiner Sports, helps companies achieve objectives by enabling them to use a draw like a famous athlete to drive attendance to meetings and events.

Magic Johnson Enterprises:

The indisputable highlight of today’s keynote was Magic Johnson! The Magic Man, told us how basketball was a platform for launching his “brand”  as it taught him about winning and competing. He shared several stories and key learnings from the journey:

• Your competition can make you better. It forces you to keep striving to be better and grow
• Learning from mentors is invaluable when starting something new
• Discipline builds your personal brand and shows your drive and focus
• Know and speak to “your customer”
• The food and music options in urban Starbucks should differ from suburban locations
• Millenials go to baseball games to socialize more than to watch the game, capitalize on that
• Always make your business about what the customer likes, not about what you like
• Always have an exit strategy. Know how to recognize when your business is at its peak and sell it then
• Over-delivering garners repeat business and new opportunities
• Perform SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) analysis twice a year
• Markets change, you have to be open to change or add strategies to grow

Magic concluded with a few final words of motivation:

1. “Never be satisfied - keep building, keep growing, keep learning”
2. “When someone doesn’t believe in you, you gotta keep going. Go until you get it done.”
3. “Be like Larry Bird and Michael Jordan, make your teammates better”

And so that does it for our coverage of another awesome SuiteWorld! We had a great time, made new friends and took away many teachings.  Stay tuned for upcoming blogs from our team highlighting some of the key sessions!