An Artist with a Passion - and a Focus

Rob Kinsey is an artist with a passion for the sport of motocross, defining himself on his website as ‘motocross racer, fan and award-winning artist’.

Art and sport have been important to Rob for many years. He qualified as a technical illustrator in the 1970’s and his artwork has developed in parallel with his participation in motocross. He competed in the British Motocross Championships from 1977 to 1981 and still rides in Vintage Motocross events.

He specialises in painting with acrylic on canvas and produces high quality prints using the Giclée process, which ensures that the colours do not fade over time.

Photo: Rob Kinsey with one of his motocross paintings.

“They are all painted with a passion,” says Rob, and he combines his passions for art and motocross with business acumen. He sells pen and ink drawings, prints and original artworks through his e-commerce website to a world-wide customer base of riders, fans and motocross businesses.

To help make his creative enterprise even more successful, Rob attended a business development course close to his home in Derbyshire, England. The ‘Focusing Creativity’ workshops helped Rob and other creative entrepreneurs to devise business strategies which combine their creative talents with smart business thinking.

“I went on the course feeling that I should diversify my range of artwork away from just motocross because I felt vulnerable by having all my eggs in one basket,” said Rob. However, by the end of the course, after having considered a range of factors such as his competitive advantage, market segmentation and pricing strategies, Rob decided that his best option was to play to his strengths and focus on motocross art. “The course encouraged me to focus on what I’m passionate about and to capitalise on my position in the world of motocross” said Rob. “The message I came away with was ‘Believe in yourself and don’t worry about only working in a niche market – simply become the best motocross artist in the world!’ from the aptly named Focusing Creativity course” said Rob.

Despite being a one-person enterprise, Rob’s business strategy is similar to that of some of the biggest corporations. Jim Collins identified that the most consistently successful companies use the ‘Hedgehog Concept’. (The hedgehog is supremely good at one defensive position, and it survives by sticking to its winning strategy.) Businesses using the Hedgehog Strategy have identified the one thing at which they can be world-beaters. This results from an objective understanding of what you can be best in the world at combined with the thing you are deeply passionate about.

This focused strategy worked. Within a year he was appointed as the ‘Official Artist to the 2007 Motocross de Nations’ in Maryland, USA. This accolade will give him the opportunity to exhibit and sell his works of art in the VIP and Press buildings at the event, which is the ideal marketplace at the very heart of this international sport.

Rob Kinsey has achieved world-class status by focusing on his niche market, concentrating on his specialist creativity and being driven by his passion.

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More about Rob Kinsey 

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Let me know about other creative entrepreneurs who have focused on a specialist niche to achieve world-beating success.

Your world-class 'Hedgehog Strategy'

Many creative enterprises offer a range of goods or services and regard this as a way of maximising their options and income-generating potential. I understand what they are trying to do. They say it's a case of 'keeping your options open' and 'casting the net widely' in order to increase the chances of winning new customers.

One of the problems with this approach is that you also increase the number of your competitors. And in each market you are competing in, the chances are that somebody is better than you at that particular thing. So you end up being a 'jack of all trades but master of none'. Even if that is too critical an analysis of your position, it may still be the customers' perception of your business.

Instead of competing on several fronts, I often urge my clients to identify the one thing at which they excel in relation to competitors, in other words, the one thing which 'puts them head and shoulders above' competing enterprises.
The question is : What is the one thing at which you can be world-class?

In a study of the most consistently successful companies, Jim Collins identified that each of these companies uses what he calls the Hedgehog Concept. The fox, renowned for his cunning, has many strategies for killing the hedgehog. On the other hand, the hedgehog has only one strategy for defending itself. Whenever the fox attacks, from whatever direction, the hedgehog rolls itself into a ball of spikes. It works every time. The hedgehog is supremely good at one thing, and it survives by sticking to its winning strategy.The most consistently successful companies identified the one thing at which they can be world-beaters -and then they focused on this speciality to consistently beat the competition.

Identifying your own organisation's Hedgehog Strategy flows from a thorough and objective understanding of:
1. What you are deeply passionate about. (Not what you would like to be passionate about, or what you 'ought' to be passionate about, but what innate passion can you draw on.)
2. What you can (and cannot) be best in the world at (not what you would like to be, but CAN be best at).
3. What 'drives your economic engine', ie how value is created. Ideally this should be crystallised into a single financial measure.
Your Hedgehog Strategy is derived from the intersection of the three factors above.

This strategy applies to large corporations but also to smaller businesses and enterprises in the creative sector. For example, painter Rob Kinsey has combined his passion for the sport of motocross with paintings of motocross that he sells to riders, fans and companies in the industry. By focusing on this narrow niche, he has found the place where his passion, creative talent and target market overlaps. This is the niche in which he can be a world-beater.

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Let me know about your own Hedgehog Strategy!

Telling Africa's Story to the World

Telling Africa’s story from Africans’ point of view is the mission of Africa Media Online, the agency representing African media professionals to the global market.

“In the ‘information society’, if we are to create some semblance of global information democracy, it is important that Africans are heard from their perspective,” says Africa Media Online’s David Larsen

His company has created systems to gather, market and deliver media to users and markets around the world. For the benefit of their world-wide customers, media from a comprehensive range of African picture libraries, museums and archives are available in one place, and managed in conformity with global standards. As well as using the latest digitisation technology, e-commerce systems make financial transactions easy, secure and quick.

The technology driving all this is MEMAT 2.0 (Media Market Technologies), which is an online content management system, developed in-house using open source technology, and launched in 2004. This software provides each member organisation with the facilities to organise their libraries and archives, backed up by training and technical support.

As well as being relatively inexpensive, it is highly scaleable. This means that it can power the collections of individual photographers such as South African news photographer, Rajesh Jantilal, but also the multiple collections of a media organisation such as Cape Town’s Oryx Media and the world-class Bailey’s African History Archive, based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

In addition to running their own websites, African picture libraries and media archives recognise that they benefit by working together in a form of ‘co-opetition’. They can do this by also offering their images through ‘africanpictures.net’, which David Larsen describes as an ‘online superstore’.

Clearly this offers great customer benefits as the global audience can find most content in one convenient place.

David Larsen, a photographer and journalist, set up Africa Media Online Pty. (Ltd.) in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa in 2000, along with Paul De Villiers, an internet entrepreneur. Paul sold his shares in 2006 and new investors were attracted to the company, including Kabusha Technology Investments Pty. (Ltd.), a black-owned enterprise which now controls the single largest shareholding in Africa Media Online. This relationship demonstrates a clear commitment to social transformation, according to David Larsen. The investment structure brings financial resources to the company and at the same time creates an organisational structure which is fitting to the local cultural and political environment.

In its first seven years of business, Africa Media Online has concentrated on photographic images but its systems have always been designed for multiple media forms. The company is aligning itself to the convergence of media so that it will be able to also offer documents, sound and video files. This will mean an even better service for its global distribution partners and clients all around the world.
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Link to Africa Media Online 
More about Co-opetition 
More about Organisational Structures
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