“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones” – Confucius.
Though that particular nugget of wisdom is thousands of years old, it’s pretty apt advice for businesses wondering how they can boost results without massive organisational changes. If you’re a global brand, a tiny change in your business processes can save millions, while the ripple effect of small, inefficient business processes can bleed the money out of your marketing budget.
Most organisations don’t want to change the way they do business, but they want the profits to change. They make their employees work long hours without implementing better processes. The bigger the organisation, the bigger the costs of inefficient operations.
But significant results are not always obtained by making large changes. Even minor, strategic modifications can produce tremendous results.
Take Netflix.
Netflix used to pay millions in licensing fees to use the Gotham font across its media channels. The business looked for ways to reduce this expense and created their own custom typeface: Netflix Sans. The organisation’s Brand Design Lead explained: “Developing this typeface not only created an ownable and unique element for the brand’s aesthetic… but saves the company millions of dollars a year as foundries move towards impression-based licensing for their typefaces in many digital advertising spaces.”
Those millions saved enabled Netflix to prioritise more of their spending on creating original content, marketing campaigns and improving customer experience, all of which brought far more tangible rewards for the streaming service than somebody else’s font.
The compound effect can apply to smaller companies as well, and help them grow exponentially. Back in the mid-nineties, the then unknown Jeff Bezos found himself on his hands and knees in his cement floored garage, packing books for his month-old internet delivery service. When one of his 10 employees suggested that having packing tables might be a good idea, Bezos says it soon doubled their productivity and was “the most brilliant idea I ever had”. Within two years, Amazon’s number of employees had grown to over 600, and was well on its way to becoming the Goliath it is today.
Not all changes are obvious though. Walmart were bright enough to check how much costs could be reduced simply by changing their light bulbs. In 2018, the company estimated annual savings of $200 million in energy costs just by switching to LED lights across all its premises. How many men does it take to change a light bulb? Who cares when it’s saving you that much!
And Walmart has good form when it comes to looking for a compound effect, having previously saved millions by making simple changes like using a longer-lasting floor wax and buying lighter stepping stools for its employees. Another $100 million per year was saved by centralising their equipment maintenance to be more energy efficient, which just goes to show how opportunities for cost reduction and growth are ample if, like Walmart, you’re savvy enough.
It’s not just giants who have reaped the rewards of small changes.
ReMake can be your small change
The internet is full of supposed gurus telling you that your business can’t grow if you don’t slog for hours. We’re all in for hard work. After all, we didn’t build Think Jam, an award-winning marketing agency for entertainment brands, by sitting on the couch all day. But slogging for hours without improving efficiency can bury a business in operational costs.
Our journey began with a discussion between our founder, Daniel, and a client at Fox - they were in a repetitive loop, creating multiple versions of digital assets for regional audiences. The client was frustrated because time, money, and energy were being wasted in manual processes rather than creative endeavours. So Daniel came up with an idea to develop a software solution that could help make the content localisation process more efficient, scalable, and affordable.
Ta-da! ReMake was born — a platform-agnostic creative tech solution that enables global brands to version their content in minutes. And it’s so simple that even your not-so-techie CEO could use it. Manual effort out, creativity in.
We’re already saving our clients up to 70% of their versioning budget. Deniz Yamanel, marketing director at Unilever Professional has said: “My team is telling me that ReMake is user friendly and enables us to localize content quickly and efficiently.”
Large-scale versioning doesn’t need to take up a large slice of the marketing budget anymore. ReMake streamlines the content and video localisation process and reduces the cost of content versioning for global campaigns. That way, you get to reap the rewards of a fully scaled campaign whilst still having change in your pocket.
It’s more exciting than a change in lightbulbs, and more substantive than a new font, but crucially, Remake has proven just as effective at being a small change that makes a big impact.
ReMake can help you carry the small stones that let you move a mountain. If you want to learn more on how, book a demo.