Well, today they have, and I'll tell you why. I picked these glasses up on Saturday and they're vari-focals and a lot of people struggle. When you buy these types of glasses, the optician'll tell you that it can take several weeks for you to get used to wearing them, stick with it, persevere and all that sort of stuff.
I know this already because my wife bought some maybe three weeks ago. It just happened that we both ended up needing glasses. I'm not sure why that is. She's really struggled with them. I was thinking to myself this morning about how I got them, I went into town, picked them up from the opticians, put them on, drove home no problem. I was walking through the town, no issues.
It got me thinking about how different people deal with and react to, or adapt to change. This is the same in business life as well. Following on from that, you know your mind starts to work away and I started to think about how much, as a business, The Marketplace has developed from where we started three years ago.
Three years ago, myself and my co-director Gareth Alexander, were, and are by profession, procurement & supply chain experts. We've got many, many years of experience in this field. We set up this business to provide those services and use that expertise to help other businesses.
Where we've ended up three years later is quite a different place. What we've ended up doing is actually using our experience and expertise and knowledge that we've gained over the last 40 years to build software a product, which provides a service to our clients, and utilises our experience and understanding of how business is won and how supply chains work and so on, to actually provide something which is very unique to our clients.
We recently have been described as a ... well, we've been described as the oldest digital startup in town, in the country or whatever, which I'm not sure is a good thing, but that took me by surprise because the business has never been described as a digital startup. Then we've now also been described by somebody else as a SaaS company, a "software as a service" business. That's really what we are.
We have a software product we're providing to other people, we not so much hands-on in terms of helping people with the day-to-day aspects of procurement and supply chain and bidding and tenders and all that sort of stuff anymore.
It just shows how much we've developed, and that's been the right thing for the business, because we've been quite open and fluid to change, and we've ended up in a fantastic place with a fantastic product that we wouldn't have if we'd have been rigid and thinking, "This is what we do, we help people win tenders and build supply chains." That's no longer really what we do.
Our experience in that area has allowed us to end up with something completely different, but something that's really good fun to run as a business. It's a very rewarding service we provide to our clients, and it's going to be very, very successful.
Hey, that was it really. I just wanted to talk about how adaptable are you to change. Are you stuck in a rut? Are you doing the same things that your clients are doing to win business? If you are, then you're missing a trick. Think out the box a little bit, think about what you could do differently in terms of running your business, the services you provide, and winning business. There's always a better way.
That's it. Jason Kay from The Marketplace. I'm off now, it's nearly lunchtime, and I'm ready for a bite to eat, so speak to you soon. Cheers.
