Jim Bottomley

One of Canada’s foremost futurists, Jim Bottomley has been a management consultant for over 25 years and is also a successful entrepreneur. Unlike other futurists who specialize in one trend category, Jim provides insight into trend convergence, examining how technical, social, economic, demographic and trends in human behaviour are combining to provide future opportunity and affect the strategies for future success. Having worked in many sectors, from Fortune 500 companies to nonprofits, Jim can suggest innovative strategies that cross boundaries.

As a consultant, Jim has helped many companies and government clients find direction and cope with the stress of increasing change, facilitating strategic plans, marketing strategy and new product development and performing sales coaching, work design and organizational change initiatives. He has also helped many regions in Canada with their Innovation/Cluster strategies, recognizing that a key to future success will be how to better harness internet and social media strategy to improve stakeholder relationships. Often major change initiatives go wrong for organizations. Jim can examine the conditions that produce the best results, looking at the latest methods and ways to improve workplace culture, leadership and initiate positive change. Jim can advise how to avoid the traps that lead to “the dark night of the innovator,” including the different reaction to change initiatives between Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y.

Jim owns businesses in retail, consulting and software development. He is a partner in the Breken Group, providing EdToolset software to Economic Development Professionals and YLM technology, the world's smartest local business directory, internationally. Through Orascom, YLM is offered to over 100 million moblile phone owners in Asia and Africa. In Canada, YLM.ca is utilized by over 100 communities, involving 300,000 businesses and drawing over 1 million searches per month - it is now expanding nationally.

Previously, Jim graduated with the Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario and managed marketing programs for Quaker Oats, from Cap’n Crunch to Life Cereal, along with helping launch new products, from pet foods to cereals. Jim lives in Jasper, Alberta with his wife Deb, where they operate Elysion Florals, a destination retail store.

Jim is the ultimate event customizer. He performs trend analysis, interviews stakeholders and will identify not only the most important issues and trends impacting future success, but will support strategic direction and supply innovative advice. Clients report that his treasure-trove of real-life stories provide insight into how to better utilize effective strategy and make future success happen.

Jim’s sessions are fun and dynamic, offering unique customer-focused thinking models, combining humour, high-energy and practical examples to make the future less threatening and ideas for future actions more innovative.  Overall, Jim provides systems of planning and organizational change that result in clients looking at their organizations’ future in a fresh and involving way. Jim’s sessions are consistently rated at the highest level, serving to motivate, excite and inspire, with practical knowledge participants can use to get fired up about their future!

• 7. Clusters and Collaboration: Innovation for Municipalities & Government

  Jim has helped organizations and regions innovate. In healthy regions, competitiveness and innovation are concentrated in Clusters of interrelated industries in which a region specializes. The Regional Cluster approach to Economic Development drives innovation by forging partnerships between the private and public sector to leverage research, developing new products and services for companies in the region, growing local employment. The resulting benefits come from successful commercialization, either by starting new companies/partnerships, growing existing companies and/or by attracting new companies to the region by promoting the benefits of joining the local Cluster effort. Jim has facilitated visioning and planning exercises for many cities and regions, small to large, such as Peterborough, Ottawa, the Provinces of Saskatchewan and PEI, also facilitating the Strategic Planning sessions for the Economic Development Council of Ontario. Jim is capable of pointing to the foundations for Cluster success, including issues related to the attraction of skilled labour and investment, the connection to branding a region and strategies to overcome barriers to success.  Community capacity building is collaborative, with more opportunities for success than ever before.

• 6. Future Success for Entrepreneurs

  Jim owns businesses in both retail and service categories. He operates these in smaller sized communities, remotely, as he lives in Jasper Alberta, relying on effective delegation and goal-setting. Mr. Bottomley is a partner in the Breken Group, combining strategic planning and marketing strategy development with award-winning integrated ebusiness solutions. Breken's new software product, www.ylm.ca, is utilized by over 100 regions in Canada and is now being licensed to other nations. Jim's consulting experience includes facilitating visioning and planning exercises for small business clients in many sectors, helping them achieve growth, obtain financing and plan successful strategy. His company, Entreco Corporation, trains entrepreneurs, successfully launching over 1,000 businesses while utilizing Jim's unique 4-D Planning model. Jim stresses that all success comes from lining up a better benefit delivered to a target customer who cares about that need being satisfied. Jim's 4-D planning approach helps identify the information that needs to flow, decisions that need to be made and provides a simple but effective way to align goals. Ultimately Jim helps answer, "what business am I really in?" Customer-focused thinking is enhanced by exercises that may include designing a love boat cruise or predicting cat owner attitudes towards their pet.

• 5. New-Age Technology that Works: Strategies for Future Success

  Change is accelerating and technology is transforming organizations like never before. Jim will examine how technical, economic, demographic, social and trends in human behaviour are combining to affect the future of IT strategy and service delivery. The focus will be to address the stress related to change by stimulating innovative rethinking of the approach to planning, looking at ways to more successfully implement technology for future success. Jim will make the case that we are entering a whole new economy and the rules for success are changing too. Helping technical people see that human needs should drive planning, not the technology itself, provides enormous wins in being able to effectively plan and implement technology solutions. Jim is a partner in a programming business, but has imposed an outlook he calls the 80/20 rule—instead of thinking of themselves as programmers, his team thinks of themselves as solution providers. The emphasis (80%) has been shifted to thoroughly building stakeholder use-cases, spending the time to really know current and future needs, before programming begins. This outlook has allowed Jim’s firm to develop applications on-time, on-goal and within budget for many government clients. This insight has been praised by many technical clients, including the Canadian Information Processing Association and the Alberta Association of Records Managers and Administration.

• 4. Leadership Skills of the Future

  Rallying change is tough. People have to be engaged and see how their role contributes to future direction.  Audiences come to recognize that change is accelerating, but we do have greater control over change than we might think! Jim has learned that people tend to quickly judge specific change as either “good” or “bad”, when the truth of change is that it invariably results in BOTH positive and negative results. By developing action plans to enhance the positives and minimize the negatives, people not only recognize the need for change, and are better able to cope with the stress of change, but are more apt to successfully implement strategy. Jim can provide insight into effective leadership strategies for the future. His ten-module leadership sessions have been delivered to over 500 managers and he can deliver exercises that highlight these insights, including how to better work with Baby Boomers and the unique outlooks of Generation X & Yers.

• 3. Four-Dimension Planning: Marketing and Selling Strategies that Sing

  The trend towards individual power through knowledge has transformed the way North Americans buy. Customers are more informed and demanding than every before and seek having customized services delivered to them. With each of us confronted by over 4,000 ad messages a day, and with all of us facing information overload, effective targeting with an appropriate, clear sales pitch is key.  Often, the goal of clients is to improve margins and Jim can share many stories to demonstrate how this can be accomplished. Ultimately Jim helps answer, “what business am I really in?” Jim has been involved with many marketing projects, including new product and service launches, package redesigns, advertising development for all types of media, as well as delivering sales development programs. Using numerous examples, participants will learn how to better develop marketplace positioning and branding strategies, forge marketing partnerships and determine target focus. Insight into new-age selling strategies, based on changing buyer behaviours, will boost marketing and sales performance. Increasingly, customer satisfaction measurement combined with social media campaigns can help improve customer relationships and drive success.

• 2. The Age of Innovation: Improving the Organization

   Jim will provide insight into global trends affecting the future of the client’s organization, reflecting likely changes to the workplace, service delivery, client and stakeholder expectations and impact on future success strategies. The result will be to provide greater awareness of trends, issues and opportunities and to better enable managers to lead change successfully and work with their teams more effectively. Jim has performed work design projects for many clients in several sectors, including manufacturing, insurance, education and government. All have achieved outstanding leaps in productivity and performance, but the key to success is effectively incorporating people into the change initiatives. Often major change initiatives go wrong for organizations. Jim can examine the conditions that produce the best results, looking at the latest methods and ways to improve workplace culture and initiate positive change. Jim can advise of how to avoid the traps that lead to “the dark night of the innovator.”

• 1. Trend Convergence: Future Success Strategies

   As a futurist, Mr. Bottomley looks at trends with a unique spin. Whereas some specialize in demographics, others, social or technical trends, Jim is able to combine trend categories. Real insight into innovation comes from trend convergence, enabling organizations to better identify opportunities, potential new product and service offerings and to better focus future efforts, helping lead and cope with change.  A recent client sums up the impact Jim makes:  “It wasn’t so much that the information was new (although I did earn some amazing new things), it was the way the information was presented that made me think of issues in my organization in new ways.” Jim will identify the most critical issues facing the organization/industry, explain what is behind them, and help support the organizations’ future direction/strategy to improve. In all cases, individuals are more aware of the need for change and have greater awareness of how to lead it.

• We have looked over the evaluations and we are pleased to say that the annual meeting was a great success! Your presentation was well received by our members and your message certainly gave our group tangible information to take back to their companies. Thank you for moderating the session, "Effective Manufacturer and Distributor Relationships". The session was a huge hit among our manufacturers and distributors alike. They both walked out of the session with some great information. Thank you again for providing NAHSA with an outstanding experience.

  North American Horticultural Supply Association

• Many of the delegates have mentioned to us how much they enjoyed your presentation. I think it is safe to say that very few of our delegates would have considered applying trend analysis to developing their business plans – but they will now. We also appreciated the effort you put into researching our industry. It paid great dividends in the relevance it added to your presentation.

  Canadian Electrical Contractors Association

• We were able to recognize the opportunities and tools needed to be innovative and competitive in a change environment. Our tourism operators came away with new ideas for collaboration and a better sense of the strategies for future success.

  Tourism Federation of Ontario

• Jim's presentation was easy to follow and examples were easy to identify. He stimulated some personal `aha' moments and his brain teasers were most helpful. We have a better understanding of trends and your presentation was helpful and interesting, placing labels on change experienced.

  Peterborough Social Planning Council

• Your research to learn more about the FCIDB and what is important to our membership and industry, both prior to the conference and by speaking to members and executive over the two days of the conference, was noticeable in your presentation. Your understanding of the business allowed you to take the information learned over the first day from other speakers, tie it together and relate it to our business in a way which was very informative and relevant. It is wonderful to have you come along to inspire, grow, develop and expand the boundaries we create.

  Federation of Canadian Independent Deposit Brokers

• Jim is a top-notch market analyst and futurist. In order to prepare his presentation he interviewed key people from our management/marketing team, provided us with useable ideas and left us with a practical understanding of our market. His talk brought clarity to issues like how population demographics affect future positioning of our products. Jim spoke to our top management and received nothing but praise from our experts: he does his job well and presents his research with great enthusiasm. Jim was rated higher than any speaker at one of our conferences for many years and I highly recommend Jim to any audience that values both content and enthusiasm.

  Manitoba Hydro

• "Your presentation was right on the mark regarding the future needs and required focus of independent retailers in Canada. Based on the response from the group I would suggest that your messages were heard loud and clear. I also want to thank you for the efforts you made to customize your presentation to our group. Your pre-research added significantly to the quality of your presentation and helped to ensure it resonated with us.

  Mega Group Inc.

• We were able to recognize the opportunities and tools needed to be innovative and competitive in a change environment. Our tourism operators came away with new ideas for collaboration and a better sense of the strategies for future success.

   

  Tourism Federation of Ontario

• Mr. Jim Bottomley’s presentation addressed the topic in a very practical way and provided excellent advice and suggestions to the conference participants. His style is informative, engaging and entertaining, and we highly recommend Mr. Bottomley as a keynote speaker in the e-commerce field.

  Contact North/Contact Nord

• I found Jim Bottomley’s presentation excellent. I also appreciated his efforts in calling various representatives from CIPS before the event to ensure his message met our crowd…overall a great job!

  ISM Canada-IBM Global Centre

• Jim did a superb job yesterday as our Keynote Windup Speaker. He presence is overwhelming and his command of his topic is equally superb. His discussion flowed seamlessly from area to area and he continuously tied his observations back to our industry. Watching the folks in the room, it became apparent that I was not the only one who enjoyed his presentation.

  Canadian Home Builders Association