You may not have heard of Dick Rowe. He is the executive at Decca records who turned down the Beatles, just before their meteoric rise to global fame and fortune.
It is reported that he famously said: “Guitar groups are going out of fashion, Mr Epstein”, before showing the lanky Liverpudlians the door and ushering them up the road to EMI.
His story is a reminder of how close you can come to unimaginable success, only to see it glide by forever. In our own walks of life and business professions, it goes without saying that none of us wants to be the equivalent of “the man who turned down the Beatles”.
For consultants, this might translate into failing to recognise the merits of a revolutionary new approach to building services design that goes on to eclipse traditional approaches.
For contractors, it might equate to failing to equip your workforce with new skills required to deal with emerging systems or techniques.
In my own field, distribution, one of the key challenges is to stay ahead of the constant technological changes. As a major player, we take the subject very seriously indeed.
It is a daily issue, handling and assessing approaches from existing and potential new suppliers offering new technologies and developments on existing products.
With literally hundreds of thousands of individual product lines in our catalogue, this multiplies into a colossal and demanding task.
The rise of green issues and the drive to more sustainable solutions has added new impetus to the pace of technical developments. We are approached daily by suppliers and inventors from all parts of the world, with innovations and new products for which many claims are made.
In evaluating them, the requirement, as ever, is to strike a balance between innovation, proven performance, sustainability and cost-effectiveness. It is not always an easy balance to strike, but it must be done.
The issue came very much to the fore recently with the creation of the Sustainable Building Center, the working showcase of green construction materials and building services products based in Leamington Spa.
In the face of a tidal wave of technical innovation and creativity, and approaches ranging from global manufacturers to individual inventors working out of garden sheds, the question arises - what is the right basis on which to select new technologies to deploy and market?
On the one hand, you don’t want to “turn down the Beatles”; but on the other, you equally don’t want to go to market with a brilliant new technology that is untested, or you are unable fully to support.
Fortunately, greater minds than mine worked this one through. The solution is to cast as wide a net as possible, initially, to ensure all valid technologies are considered, but rapidly hone this down to products with verifiable proven performance and which are cost-effective and available nationally.
There will always be a risk that the Beatles may slip through. But, at the same time, it is heartening to learn that, among others, Dick Rowe did sign The Rolling Stones, Vera Lynn, the Bachelors and Tom Jones.