Countdown

I’m sure that we have all seen the show.  It’s where two people compete against each other and a clock in games of word dexterity and mathematical agility.  A little bit like business really: marketing (words), business maths, and your competition.

But I’ve only just had that idea, so that is for another time, because what I want to talk about today is getting things done.  I’ve talked about it before, our 1440 minutes we each get every day, and how important it is to use those minutes productively if we are going to be a real success.

So, how about this for an idea?

Setting ‘end times’ is one of the most important things you can do to help you get more things done.  It’s pretty simple with things like meetings.  So how about this for a way to ensure your meetings don’t over run?  When parking your car, don’t put in extra money in case you get delayed, instead make sure the meeting is focused and keeps to time.

But back to my idea.  What about when you are at your desk?  You’ve a number of things to do and you’ve got all day to do them.  Don’t you find that whatever it is just fills the time?  In fact you could do with even longer still.  There are distractions, no parking meter, no next appointment to go to.

Here’s the idea, I got it from Nigel Botterill, get yourself a nice big alarm clock and put it on your desk.  Now write ‘your’ appointments in your diary.  For example: write sales letter 9.30am till 10.00am.  Then at 9.30am set your alarm clock and off you go.  It makes a big difference I can tell you!

So, if your are really serious about getting more things done please start using ‘end times’ and get yourself a nice big alarm clock.

In a few months time you won’t need the clock and you will be getting far more done.

Please let me know how you get on.

46 Weeks

One of the most important things we do as business owners is to decide how much we want to earn from our business each year, because only then can we determine how much we actually have to sell.

What follows is a simple calculation to work out what your hourly charge rate should be.  Now before you say, “But I’m not charged out by the hour”, the principle is the same for you.  You need to know how much you want to earn and how your business is going to generate that income.

So, first decide on how much you want to earn; how much do you want to pay yourself?  For this example I am going to work on £50k (before tax).

Obviously our starting point is 52 weeks but from this we need to take off 5 weeks for holidays and one week for being ill.  This leaves us with 46 weeks.  Why?  You can’t earn while you are on holiday or off work sick.  This means that based on a 5-day working week we have 230 days per year when we can earn money.

Therefore, to earn my £50k I need to invoice £218.00 per day and based on a normal 7.5 hour day this is an hourly rate of £29.00 per hour.  But, this is where a great many business owners make a big mistake and end up wondering why they never make any money.  Because the fact is you only make £29.00 per hour when you are doing chargeable work.  And that is the key – chargeable.  Sales, networking, invoicing, meetings, estimating, travelling, social media, etc., are not chargeable hours.  So, you need to know exactly what that split is.  Some say that of a typical working day only 40% is chargeable.  But, for my example I am going to work on 50%, which means that my hourly rate of £29.00 per hour now becomes £58.00 per hour.

Now before you start thinking, that’s not so bad, or I’m already charging more than that.  To this figure you need to add your overheads and variable costs.  For example: rent, insurance, car, tools, computers, petrol, etc.

This is a very simple calculation but one that most business owners don’t do.  Please don’t be one of them, as knowing what your chargeable rate should be will make a big difference to the standard of the life you live.

Who will get to the phone first?!

Communication today is easier than it’s ever been and yet it is still the biggest area where all too many businesses fail; big time.  And it is costing those businesses a great deal of future business and, more importantly, profit!

If you are dealing with a customer and they are waiting on something, and it doesn’t matter what that something is, you must contact them before they contact you.  If your customer makes contact first you risk damaging your relationship with them and the amount of future business you get from them and the people they know.  And don’t think that providing a great service or product makes up for bad communication because it doesn’t. Great service or product is a given.

This week I’ve come across two examples of bad communication from businesses that will affect their future business.

First is a case of a business returning to put right a small problem with some work they had done.  Nothing major at all; maybe thirty minutes work and no real cost.  But despite promising to return do the work it took a great deal of chasing by phone and email to actually get the company to turn up.  The customer was just left not knowing if the work would be done or not and started to look elsewhere to get it done.

The second case was just a matter of being kept up-to-date with a situation.  Again nothing major in itself, but the customer was asking for updates and not getting any.  A simple “there’s no new information at the moment” would have been so much better than having a customer think that they had been forgotten.

As I say, both of these cases will cost the businesses concerned future business.  In one case all possible future work, as the job had a problem and it took a great deal of effort to get it put right.  The person concerned not only won’t be using them again, but, worse still, they won’t refer them to anybody else.

In the other example the person concerned now has a doubt in their mind.  They will use the business again but they will be more cautious next time and, until they are completely happy again with the service, they won’t refer them.

Both these businesses have lost potential business through poor communication.  And, in today’s world of phone, text and email that is just crazy!

So, who should you have got in touch with?  Make that call before whoever it is can call you.  Do you have a procedure in place for customer communication?  What are your rules for ‘Follow Up’?

Better communication will improve your sales in the long term; all you need to do is make that call!

Glasses on the bar!

It amazes me how many businesses seem to go out of their way to lose business and customers.  And I fell prey to this just this weekend.

Now, okay, it’s a Bank Holiday Weekend and the pub I was in had been busy. But no business can afford to throw away business – ever.  Well, not if they want to be Super Successful.  Or, maybe, even just stay in business.

This is what happened.  Things were becoming calmer after a hectic lunchtime and two of the bar staff started to clear the tables of empty glasses; something that really should have happened as part of the service.  Soon the bar top was covered in an assortment of dirty glasses.  Now to my mind it would have been better for one member of staff to collect the glasses and the other to take them off to the kitchen.  The whole bar looked a right mess.

But, things were far worse than that.  No one was served for over five minutes!  And there was a fair number of us; in fact the bar staff had to work their way through us to get to the bar.  This was when three locals had decided they had had enough.  There was another pub up the road.  A couple that had only just arrived followed them out of the door.  I was only getting some extra drinks or I would have left as well.

The thing that got me was that these two members of staff could see us all waiting but didn’t think to stop doing a job that could wait and instead do a job that would make them a profit.  Now I certainly won’t be going to that pub again; maybe I never would have done as we were only passing by.  But the three local people certainly gave the impression that they wouldn’t be back as it seemed this was pretty much normal service.

Business is tough at anytime, and is certainly hard at the moment, so you just can’t afford to throw away business that is already in your hands.  Now I’m sure that you are thinking that you would never stack a bar high with dirty glasses when you had customers waiting, but are you absolutely sure that you aren’t doing anything similar in your own business?  Might just be worth a look and you never know you just might see an increase in your profits if you were to find something.

Off Piste!

I’ve just returned from a brilliant skiing holiday in Italy with one of my sons.  The snow was perfect, eight inches fell one night, the sun shone, and I was in good form.  Overall a great week.

The off piste skiing was very good and lots of fun, although, at times, our play resulted in an unexpected tumble and a face full of snow.  I even have a video to remind me!  One of our ‘excursions’ reminded me of how easily the plans we have for our businesses can go astray when we lose sight of exactly what we are doing.

We were half way down a run and stopped for a breather.  Having calmed down our heart rate (well okay mine) we started off again and my son decided to take a different route; he would join up with me again further down the slope just around some trees that we could see. That was the last I saw of him for almost an hour!

It turned out that just around the trees, but out of sight of where we were, the slope turned in the opposite direction to that which we were going.  So he decided, like any boy would, to go off piste, through the trees, and make his way over to the slope I was on.  But that didn’t work, as the contours of the mountain forced him further away from both me and the slope he had left.  In the end a climb, a walk and a great deal of sweat got him to another lift and eventually we were able to meet up again.  I have to say it was pretty scary for a while; I didn’t know where he was or if he had injured himself.

But, what has this all got to do with your business?

Well, my son and I had a plan; to ski down a particular run to a particular lift.  It would take around five minutes.  But, because another route looked interesting, and knowing nothing about where the slope went (we didn’t look at our piste map), we ended up with a lot of hard work, a fair amount of worry (on both our parts) and almost an hour of lost time.  In truth my son did a fair amount of skiing but I just had to wait; but you get what I mean.  And often we do the same in business.  We get distracted from our goal, forget what our original plan was, and get bogged down in stuff that we should never have been doing in the first place.  Often this results in wasting a great deal of time and money along the way.  And, worse still, sometimes our goals are lost for ever!

So, my question for you.  When did you last review your goals?  How often do you review your goals? Weekly?  Monthly?  Ever?

For real success I believe that you should, on a daily basis, ensure that whatever it is that you are doing is moving you closer to your goal and not further away.  This isn’t to say that your goals can’t change, shouldn’t change, but you certainly shouldn’t just let your business run along not knowing where it is going.

Pretty Woman

One of my favourite films is the 1990s film Pretty Woman starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. I like the film for all sorts of reasons, but it was something that happened to me this week, and a similar event that happened to Vivian (Julia Roberts) in the film, which got me thinking: namely, the short-sightedness of some businesses.

In the film Vivian has been given some money to buy a dress, but because of the way she looks she can’t get served and so can’t spend her money; needless to say, another shop gets the cash.

Well, what happened to me was nothing like that, but it was the same short-sighted view on business.

I am co-directing a stage show, HMS Pinafore.  We have given the show a modern twist and the ladies’ chorus first appear on stage having returned from a shopping spree (see the connection?!).  One of my jobs is to source props, so I went in to my local town (Kingston) to see if I could get a few. We need around twenty bags – classy paper carriers from the top shops there.  All the shops were really helpful and interested in what we were doing: Crabtree & Evelyn, T.M. Lewin, Tommy Hilfiger, Fat Face, L.K. Bennett.

All bar one that is: French Connection.  “We don’t give carriers away”, I was told in a snooty tone.

Why do I think this is short-sighted?  Well for three reasons at least. 1) All the other bags will be shown to an audience every show (free advertising), 2) I’m unlikely ever to shop at French Connection again, whereas the others I will, 3) some of you reading this will have negative thoughts about French Connection.

So, my point is this, are you doing anything in your business that might be hurting it without meaning to?  Is your local PR as good as it should be?  Little things can mean so much and often a business can’t tell when things started to go wrong for them.

You might be wondering which shop was the nicest to me.  Just in case you are it was T.M. Lewin.  I was asked if I wanted men’s or ladies bags by a member of staff, but before I could answer another member of staff said to give me some of each.  What a difference in attitude!

They were born different!

At the weekend my wife and I got to see the film Les Miserables: one of my all time favourite stage shows.  It was good, but I have to say that I much prefer the live event.

As usual we arrived just as the programme was starting as my wife doesn’t like the adverts, whereas I do, so it’s always a fight to see just what time we will get to the cinema.  My wife always has one last thing to do before we leave, while I have been ready for hours (well okay minutes).  Why do I like being early?  Well, there are many reasons, and these are just three of them.  I hate being late for anything, you get better seats if early, and, as I help companies with their marketing, the adverts can be a rich source of ideas; none more so than this past weekend.

An advert started with the line “They were born different!” and it showed all of these extraordinary people doing both amazing things and unexpected things exceedingly well.  It talked about getting rid of the ‘bland’, the ‘beige’, and the ‘common, can’t be bothered’.  I have to say that I was hooked.  I was also thinking that this is just what we talk about at the Entrepreneur’s Circle; Nigel (Botterill) has a crusade against beige.  I also loved the use of my favourite colour – bright red.  The advert finished with “…welcome – splash of red.”

In case you haven’t seen the advert yet or worked out who was advertising, it is the new Virgin Atlantic offering – Flying in the Face of Ordinary.  It’s a brilliant advert and if you are in business a must see (link below).

So, what can we learn from Virgin?

Well, Virgin and Richard Branson have always been different.  It’s what millions of people love about the Virgin brand.  People want to fly on a Virgin plane, ride on a Virgin train.  Why?  Because it says a great deal about them as a person; by association they are different to other people.  It defines them as a person.  It’s fun.  It’s an adventure.  Richard Branson listens to us!

And that is what we as business owners can learn from Virgin.  What really makes your business different from every other business doing what you do?  How can you make your business stand out from your competition?   If you join the crusade against beige, join me, the Entrepreneur’s Circle and Virgin Atlantic. Dare to be different and your business could really take off.

Don’t know where to start?  How about asking all of your customers why they use you?  It could be very interesting and a great place to begin.

http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/gb/en/the-virgin-experience/fitfoo.html