Commercial Awareness Meet and Greet Event with Colin Dobbyne

On the 20th of October, The Commercial Awareness Society at UEA were proud to hold their first event, comprising of lots of pizza, drinks, the opportunity for members to sign up to the blog and our guest speaker Colin Dobbyne from Karl Storz.
Colin has worked in business consultancy for just over 10 years. Within this time he has owned his own company, predominantly dealing in the medical sector, sold this company and now works for Karl Storz as a consultant.
The talk was started off with a particularly influential quote from Oscar Wilde ‘I am not young enough to know everything’. This was a familiar trend throughout the session, where we were made to realise in the business world you will constantly be learning things and the importance of adapting to changes to remain successful. The session then went on to break down the particulars of commercial awareness, and how to break the concept down depending on what firm you are focusing on. As we are all aware, the term changes invariably depending on the circumstances. These main particulars were; what makes the business a success, who are the customers, where the business is in the market place, how it makes money.
From this, Colin stressed the dangers of how individuals can have amazing ideas, but without putting these factors into consideration they will be left pennyless. Colin spoke of his personal experience, whereby he lost a lot of money through the team advising him failing to be ‘commercially aware’, in that he would simply be ‘outspent’ by the other side. This was then tied in with the importance of communicating effectively with clients and customers. The latter part of the talk focused on figures and terminology, where Colin spoke about how to make an impressive mark. This included general factors such as the health of the business, where it is in the market, its profits and costs. Other values to focus on are what it says in the mission statement.
A particularly helpful example was given of a Bakery, whereby Colin demonstrated the importance of having an knowledge of environmental forecasts. The reason being, the success of the harvest season is predominantly determined by the weather, thus the availability of ingredients and the prices etc. 

With Kodak being used as an example of a company failing to recognise and adapt to threats, leading to failure in the market, Colin rounded up the session by advising members to have a clear idea of where you are, the obstacles in front of you and how you are going to get to where you want to be.

- Ava Bazley