Do Something Different was covered in the Times today. Well done Ray and Chandni.
After selling his digital marketing agency in 2007, Ray Richards faced a dilemma common among entrepreneurs: what would he do next? Any new project would need to tick four boxes: it had to be “innovative”, have “recurring revenues”, be based on technology “because that makes it much easier to scale” and lastly, it had to be “making the world a better place.”
Richards, 49, from Brighton, managed to satisfy all of his criteria with the blueprint for Do Something Different, the business he founded in 2010 with Ben Fletcher and Karen Pine, professors at the University of Hertfordshire. The basic premise of its app is that it encourages people to make small, incremental changes.
Cyclists and sports fans may have read about the approach of Sir Dave Brailsford: when he became performance director of British Cycling, he set about breaking down the objective of winning races into its component parts. He believed that if it was possible to make a 1 per cent improvement in a wide range of areas, the cumulative gains would be significant. Do Something Different has a similar goal: Richards and his team are trying to find the “sweet spot between something that stretches your comfort zone but at the same time is doable,” he says.
Users begin by completing a 10-minute diagnostic assessment. “If that reveals that they are the sort of person who does not share problems, the algorithm takes a note of that and there’s a good chance that two weeks later you might receive a text message, which we call a ‘do’, a micro-action, which says, ‘Today is share a problem day’ and encourages you to share a problem that’s been troubling you for some time with someone you trust,” he explains.
The company is in its sixth year and counts Cisco, PwC and TUI as clients, and so far 125,000 people have ‘done something different’. But success doesn’t mean there’s no room for improvement or growth. Richards has been a mentor for many businesses in the past and so his interest was piqued when he saw the Ready Business Mentor campaign launch last autumn.
Read more from the full article here…
