And then there was JATO

It was 1996 and the project for Volvo Cars of North America (VCNA) was in full swing.

Six months before, we had moved out of our dusty old wood-panelled office in Davies Street into a beautiful Georgian building at the end of Stratford Place, opposite Bond Street tube station – Mayfair, oh yeah! Sorry about the flex, but this was a high point. The only fly in the ointment was that, as I was quite junior, my desk was in the basement with no windows. (Seniority often seems to be proportional to floor numbering, doesn’t it?) However, the whole building had generously high ceilings, including the basement, so it didn’t feel cramped. If you read my previous article mentioning Nigel climbing in through the window when we were locked out, the picture at the top shows the front of the building he climbed in his business shoes, which is impressive.

My office was open plan and there were about 20 desks, of which on a typical day eight to ten would be occupied, the other consultants working at client sites. The desks were arranged in groups of four. Opposite me was an American guy who would not stop talking. He didn’t seem to have a project to work on and just kept rabbiting on about nothing while I was trying to work – rabbit-rabbit-rabbit. So after a month I was relieved to hear from my boss John that he had fired him, apparently for wearing white socks. That wasn’t the only misdemeanour, just the last in a list of issues that suggested the guy really was not cut out for a life as a consultant.

I had been working on my spreadsheets. Broadly, our area could be described as Strategic Marketing. We were analysing the four ’P’s: Price, Place, Product, Promotion. Which of these factors affects a client’s sales level and how much influence does each of them have? If you have good data, you can do a statistical regression analysis and measure this. The regression analysis gives a number, a ‘coefficient’, for each potential sales driver that says how important it is relative to the others in driving sales.

John had suggested to the client that we could include in the analysis a detailed description of the specification of the cars we were analysing. He found a company, JATO Dynamics, that provided extremely detailed data on the specification of makes, models and variants of cars. For example, for a given model and variant, the JATO database would say whether the wing mirrors were electrically controlled or electrically controlled and heated.

I used this data to create what are called ‘dummy variables’ for levels of comfort, engine power, safety features and ‘gizmos’ (i.e. electronic features). The dummy variables were decimal numbers that approximated a relative level of development of each of these qualities. A 9.5 for comfort meant positively luxurious, a 5.0 implied the interior was a bit spartan. The plan was to feed these dummy variables into the regression analysis and to work out the relative importance of each feature to customers buying the cars.

Each dummy variable was a weighted average of the relevant features shown on the JATO database. Choosing the weights carefully was critical to success and it was also rather subjective, so my boss John planned to get the client to sign off on the choice of weights that I proposed. I had to create a spreadsheet in which the weights could be clearly seen and changed when the client came to visit. This was not easy.

The client project manager Alicia (pronounced ‘Alisha’ in the US) had come over from New Jersey, gone through the weights with me and signed off on them. Next it was our turn to visit the client in the US and John asked me to write a presentation to summarise how I had done the analysis, which I was to present to a group of senior managers at VCNA in New Jersey.

This was my first business presentation. I had written many essays at school and university, I had written and delivered a full semester course ‘Mathematics for Decision Making’ at Ithaca College London Center, but this silly little presentation felt like the hardest I had ever written. How do you explain technical subjects to lay people in an engaging way… with pictures? I tried to make it into an engaging story, explaining the process I went through, with the occasional statistics joke and there was a line I had prepared after a general description of the easier parts of the analysis that went, ‘*beat*… and then there was JATO’, where I explained how hard that part of the analysis had been. I thought it would be funny. I spent hours on it and was quite pleased with the outcome. Finally, I was ready to show my efforts to John shortly before our flight to JFK. He read through quite quickly and delivered his verdict:

‘Gideon’, he said, ‘the client doesn’t want to know how difficult it was. They just want you to deliver what they paid you for’.

Ouch.

That was such a useful lesson for a young consultant. You continually have to keep putting yourself in the client’s mind:

• What do they want?
• What do they need? (If it’s different from what they want, how can you break it to them gently?)
• What is valuable to them, what is not?

I rewrote the presentation and it went well, thanks to John’s input.