Small Acorns

Words: 423
Reading time: 1 min 25 secs

The small business that begins with one individual using a particular technical skill, be it plumbing, printing, legal, web design, or any one of a host of other talents will eventually reach a sales and profit plateau unless something changes.

What may not be obvious is that if potential new customers are not signing up they are telling you they are unhappy and it means that the business needs to do something about it. That’s a valuable lesson, because it will probably apply equally to your existing customers who have refrained from complaining with typical British reticence. You, as the astute small business owner, need to pick up on the language of silence.

Before launching into an expensive (and possibly fruitless) campaign to find fresh fields to harvest, have a look at the ground you are already ploughing.

Your current customers provide your current revenue and they need to be cared for first. And your best customers should receive most of your attention. If you want your customers to stay with you then they are deserving of some special treatment even if it results in being slightly unfair to newer, smaller customers.

This may seem obvious but many businesses just take their present customers for granted. A moment’s reflection will probably reveal that your relationship with your customers is the often only thing stopping them switching to another firm. Such relationships need worked to keep them fresh and constantly renewed. That need not be particularly expensive, or time consuming – but it is invaluable.

Being a great plumber is only part of making a living in a plumbing business. Marketing and sales skills are also needed, as are finance and self-motivation. Without those skills being appropriately exercised customers will neither be recruited, nor will they stay and the technical skill, whatever it is, will be destined to waste away from lack of use.

If you have had the nerve and the self-belief to set out in business for yourself the need to learn more about how that is done successfully will come as no surprise. These are not natural, instinctive skills and few of us have the time or the money to make all the mistakes required to learn by trial and error.
It is demonstrably easier and cheaper to learn from those who already have the proven skills and are willing to share them through seminars, like those provided by H&H Business, to add the missing ingredients of success. They are a shortcut to early success and save an awful lot of time.

Business Fundamentals

Words: 420

Reading Time: 1 min 24 secs

The vast majority of businesses begin small. Most begin with one individual using a particular technical skill, be it plumbing, printing, legal, web design, or any one of a host of other talents. Sometimes the enterprise is helped by the offer of work from a former employer, but when that dries up the business must compete in the marketplace with everyone else.

It is at this point that the single-skill approach suffers. Being a great plumber is only part of making a living in a plumbing business. Some of the other skills needed include marketing, sales, finance and self-motivation. Without those skills being appropriately exercised customers will not come and the technical skill, whatever it is, is destined to waste away from lack of use.

Now, being a great plumber, printer, solicitor or whatever is no guarantee that you will be equally talented where marketing, sales, finance and self-motivation are concerned. Some dabbling may yield partial results, but those will necessarily be limited and the enterprise will quickly hit a ceiling. Indeed, it is almost guaranteed that all or most of this skill set will not be available to you, because you have not had the opportunity to acquire and practice the necessary techniques.

However, all is not lost. Having a particular technical skill proves you have the ability to learn and master certain methods and systems in one area that can be mapped across into other functions. We all have multiple abilities that seemed tough to learn at the outset, but we now take for granted, like walking, talking, swimming and driving in most cases.

If you have the nerve and the self-belief to set out in business for yourself the need to learn more about how that is done successfully will come as no surprise. These are not natural, instinctive skills, but they can be learned by trial and error. Yet few of us have the time or the money to make all the mistakes required for such a long and wasteful study.

Despite that fact, judging by the number of businesses that are struggling at any one time, many still take that route even though it is demonstrably easier and cheaper to learn from those who already have the proven skills and are willing to share them.

More savvy members of the business community make use of workshops and seminars, like those provided by H&H Business, to add the missing ingredients of success. They are a shortcut to early success and save an awful lot of time.

What is everyone else doing?

Words = 104 Reading Time = 0 minutes 21 seconds

If you spend your time looking over the fence at your neighbour's garden do not be surprised if your own is full of weeds.

That is not the same as saying that your neighbour’s garden should be ignored. By all means take a look, see what lessons are to be learned and perhaps pick up new methods or fresh ideas.

However, if you spend all your time worrying about what the neighbours are up to, if you stand open-mouthed in awe at their goings-on, then your own backyard will – perforce – be ignored and your flowers, fruit and vegetables will wither for want of attention.

Learning from our mistakes

Words: 78 Reading time: 16 seconds

We spend needless time worrying about mistakes, mainly because we have been programmed during our formative years to concentrate on correcting our errors, rather than maximising our successes. What we have rarely been taught – but what we must quickly learn for ourselves in business – is that mistakes are the inevitable corollary of success. Unless we are making mistakes we are missing opportunities; we are not trying hard enough and we are forgoing huge, valuable and irreplaceable learning.

When learning doesn’t help

Words: 575 Reading time: 1 minutes 55 seconds

It doesn’t matter much who you marry because they will turn out to be someone different anyway – or so they say. Business is just the same. Whatever you thought you were getting into will turn out to be something different in reality. And whatever your business is like today, next week, next month or next year it will have changed.

That’s life, but instead of successfully taking ourselves through it, we often sabotage ourselves by using three rules we learned at school. And these three false rules are at the heart of people feeling isolation, something I meet so often in clients.

The first rule is: there is only one right answer. This rule has everyone chasing the golden key that will unlock the secret of success. That the next book, course, or seminar will contain the Holy Grail and they will receive that great big tick of approval they have been seeking ever since attending nursery.

Unfortunately, in the power politics of the classroom, what is denied to virtually all pupils is the hypothetical nature of knowledge. Even 1+1=2 is an hypothesis and true only under certain conditions, as far as we know. The square root of 4 is either +2, or -2, or some other answer that we don’t know, but may exist.

The second rule is: focus on your weaknesses. Do you remember taking test and getting a mark of 18 out of 20? Pretty good! But what the teacher had you focus on was the two answers she thought you had wrong – not the eighteen answers you had correct. We can spend our whole lives looking in the wrong direction, trying to address minor faults instead of maximising our talents by doing even better the things we can already do well.

All those lives wasted and wrecked as a result cannot be counted. Imagine a Paula Radcliffe, or a Michael Johnson, or a Carl Lewis being told that, while they were quite good at running, they needed to address their weaknesses in the shot putt, or English composition, or historical dates. Would they have then developed into the outstanding athletes they subsequently became? Of course not! They would have been mediocre at whatever they did instead.

The third rule is: no cheating! Everyone must find the answer for themselves. The testing and examination regime placed constraints on leaning across to see what your neighbour had written on her answer paper. Inevitably, that has carried across into our working lives.
* Who has not worked extra, unpaid hours rather than ask colleagues to help?
* We have all sat through that awful, boring, stammered presentation by the HR Director when everyone knows that his deputy would have done it twice as well in half the time.
* And we men have all struggled to lift things that were really too heavy for us, but we refused to wimp-out and ask for a hand. Some of us have even injured our backs as a result.
*In business we sit in isolation, struggling with a situation beyond our immediate area of expertise, rather than pick up the phone and ask someone who knows.

So, day-by-day, week-by-week these well-learned axioms stand in our way, simply because we let them. Our parents, our teachers, our peers and our role models may have initially introduced us to these rules, but it is us that perpetuates them even though we are now fully grown and cognitive adults.

Yes, sometimes learning is over-rated.

Shoes from a Sweet Shop

Words: 736 Reading time: 2 minutes 27 seconds

“Why can’t we just give the customer what he wants and needs and stop worrying about our own systems and processes?”

You may be familiar with this recent gripe I heard from a business trainer. It’s not uncommon from people who engage directly with clients when their own grand schemes seem to be going awry. And it does seem to pick up on common themes of listening and customer service.

How well does it work in practice?

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, just giving the customer what he wants and needs is a process in itself, if that is how the business decides to operate.

A process is “a sequence of interdependent and linked procedures which, at every stage, consume one or more resources (employee time, energy, machines, money) to convert inputs (data, material, parts, etc.) into outputs. These outputs then serve as inputs for the next stage until a known goal or end result is reached.” [businessdictionary.com]

Whereas a system consists of elements which continually influence one another (directly or indirectly) in order to achieve the common purpose the 'goal' of the system. All systems have (a) inputs, outputs, and feedback mechanisms. Systems underlie every phenomenon, and are everywhere one looks for them. [businessdictionary.com]

So, really, the call is not to abandon systems and processes, merely to operate different ones that are seen as better serving this advocate; whether such a change would better serve the business as a whole is an entirely different question.

One of the extreme models of customer service, and a very successful one, is Nordstrom. For those that don’t know, Nordstrom’s is a chain of department stores in the USA. At the end of 2000 they had 77 full-line stores and 24 clearance stores in 25 states, generated annual sales of almost $5 billion and boasted a sales-per-square-foot of $400, which is almost double the industry average.

A central plank in the service ethic that underpins Nordstrom is the single rule governing all employee actions:

“Use your good judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.”

That’s interesting. All it calls for is good judgment, not an unconditional abdication to whatever the customer demands. For example, in the early 1990s the residents of Santa Clarita, Los Angeles expressed a strong desire to have a Nordstrom store in their community, because of the improvement it would bring. At the time of writing, as far as I can tell, they are still waiting.

Even Nordstrom sets boundaries.

Ryanair can be seen as being at the other end of the spectrum, yet it's a highly successful business. It got that way by deciding exactly what it wanted to do and sticking to it.

Ryanair aims to be a low cost airline, so it flies to low-cost airports which are in out-the-way places. If a Ryanair flight is diverted, perhaps due to bad weather, there will be no coach laid on at the alternate destination. Ryanair is a low-cost airline. Coaches are not part of the package.

Michael O'Leary, the Irish airline's boss, now wants to abolish the luggage check-in. He proposes that people carry their suitcases to the boarding steps, where staff will stick them in the hold. This would be unacceptable at BA. At Ryanair it’s expected.

On opening up new routes Michael O'Leary has said, “I don't give a toss where people want to go. I'm in the business of creating a market for people to go where they have never heard of.”

Ryanair – we do what we do.

So, just giving the customer what he wants and needs misunderstands what customer service is about. Certainly, one must listen to customers, but one must also learn. And part of that learning may be that what this particular person wants is not what this particular business does.

Others may do what they want a lot better. In that context good service would consist of steering the person in that direction. They were never your customer in the first place, because a customer is someone who pays you for what you do.

And as a business trainer my complainant should have understood this.

“Why can’t we just give the customer what he wants and needs and stop worrying about our own systems and processes?”

Let’s be charitable and put it down to frustration. The simple fact is, you can’t buy shoes from a sweet shop.

Lessons in Staying Positive – #3

Words: 388. Reading time: 1 minute 18 seconds.

We all tell stories. We construct them from the events we pick out of our moment-to-moment existence. However, the events that I choose to notice and those that loom large for you will often be different – even when the whole experience would appear to be the same.

Have you ever been present at the same meeting with a colleague, but come away with a different version of what took place?

Or to the theatre with a friend who noticed aspects of the drama that completely escaped you?

Or seen an accident after which your witness statement differed from that of another honest observer?

Of all the stories in the world the most compelling are those we tell about ourselves to ourselves. Our story is our life; it is our version of reality. Our stories impose order and meaning on the chaos; they give us structure and direction.

Recently I asked a business acquaintance what her story was. She jumped right in with her first job and then told me about each job she has had since.

That’s interesting; what happened to her childhood? What happened to the rest of her life?

What does it say about her? And what story is she telling herself?

As life unfolds for you:
(a) what will you choose to focus on?
(b) how will you interpret what you focus on?
(c) what will you do and (a) and (b)?

If we see the thorn and not the rose, the past and not the possibility, the lesson and not the learning then we will tend to awfulize.

Awfulizing keeps us stuck in the past exclusively viewing the worst of the world. It then extrapolates from that very selective stance to a future ever and always more dire.

The third lesson is to glamorize rather than awfulize.

If you notice yourself awfulizing, neutralize your runaway thoughts with these two questions.

- How is being attached to this awfulized story influencing my reaction?
- How would I be different in this situation if I were not attached to that story?

It’s a rare situation that goes as badly as the scenarios you make up in your mind beforehand.

So what is the worse that can happen? And what is the best that can happen?

Which would you choose to focus on to maximize its chances?