Over-sized garden folly

Sometimes I meet people who do not so much have a business plan as be after just making a fast buck. They try to follow every trend, or start implementing a strategy they just thought up in the middle of the night without thinking it through. The trouble with ideas they have in the middle of the night is that they may well be (well you have guessed it) dreams.

Anyway, there will be some product they can make or get and sell for a few weeks in the summer. It might be a pottery garden feature. “Hey, we can knock up a few of those.” Suppose the weather is poor (again) and no one can work or enjoy their garden? The summer doesn’t last more than a few months. Where is the revenue stream coming from then?

The truth is that we all need a longer term plan to make money. We need to plan our income for all four seasons. If our business is seasonal we need to think well in advance what income we can get in when our core activity is slow.

We all need to change and adapt in our business environment, and adjust our marketing strategies, but we also need to have firm long-term objectives to ensure the continuity of our income and survival.

I didn’t make up the garden ornament story. It was one example of having a “bright idea”; spending money and working hard without considering whether there was a demand and if so, how long that demand would last. Have you heard of any expensive dreams like that?

Early retirement?

One of the advantages of having my own business is, I have always thought, that I am doing something I enjoy and having responsibility for my own working life. In fact, having responsibility for all of my life.

In employment, we may think we have a career, but if we work for someone else, however ambitious we are, we are always going to be dependent on other people’s opinions about us, right or wrong. There will always be an element of “seeing out our time” until we retire. That amounts , at best, to being on a ladder to climb in the world of employment, and at worst, a treadmill. I am not sure where I used to be before being unexpectedly ejected, but I cannot say the overall experience of employment was entirely wonderful, though I had some fun.

To me, having my own businesses means I am in control of my own destiny.

The other day I was sitting in a waiting room talking as you do to a guy I had met briefly a couple of times before. Our appointments were running very behind so we had quite a long time to chat. My companion told me he had retired at the age of forty-seven and taken a pension, which meant he had been retired for fifteen years. I guess he was fortunate to have one of those old-fashioned final salary pensions which we all wish we had or could qualify for.

I know the guy has a serious hobby working with wood, but it is not a business. So is working with a hobby doing, or is it just being? If he had run even a part-time business for the last fifteen years would that have been more in the way of doing? Should not we keep ourselves sharper by doing?

I cannot imagine not working at something even if it is voluntary work, because surely we should keep our brains active? Is having an activity without a beneficial end result for someone else not doing, but just being? I do not want to judge my new acquaintance, but just to understand him.

Would you just like to be or do you always want to do?

Be nice to your customers!

The long wait

We have an apartment for sale. We don’t live in it. It was my Mother-in-Law’s home but sad-to-say she is no longer with us.

The flat is empty of furniture and redecorated, but the carpets need cleaning. My wife telephoned a local carpet-cleaning business and left a voice-mail. They called back (rather oddly on a Sunday afternoon) to make an appointment to do this.

My wife waited at the flat at the appointed time to let the carpet cleaners in. In fact she waited an hour after the appointed tome. During that hour, both she and I called the business’s number, but we both got voice-mail and had to leave messages.

Yesterday afternoon the carpet cleaning people returned our calls and seemed unaware that they had missed the appointment. They asked if they could come round to do the job, but my wife said that she would give the business to someone more reliable.

What have we learned about the carpet cleaners?

• They do not monitor telephone calls so are not available to customers and prospects when needed.
• They do not follow up messages left for days.
• Their booking system is poor and unreliable.
• They are unbusinesslike.
• They do not realise their failings so…
• …they do not apologise

What can we surmise?

• They are too mean or cash-poor to invest in a proper telephone answering system to which they can respond.
• They have no concept of the meaning of customer service.
• Their business will fail or most probably already has even if they don’t know it yet.

What do we know we should do?

• Make sure our customers can find us and speak to us when they telephone.
• Deliver what we say we will when we say we will.
• Be courteous.
• In the event something has gone wrong despite the best efforts we always make, APOLOGISE.
• Make up for any failure promptly and maybe we can save losing their business.

We know all that. Can anyone explain why it is not obvious to our local business that may not get to clean many carpets? What do you think?

Related articles

• Living up to our business philosophy

Weekend in the sun (edited with PicMonkey)

Have you tried Zemanta when blogging or managing your on-line content? It helps find your own related content and images as well as articles and blog posts from other people which will add value to your writing. It will also connect you to those other writers who may feel complimented by your interest and remember you well. It will help you build your community and gain helpful links back (but don’t ask).

A very handy post on the Zemanta blog highlights a long list of content marketing tools. I have not tried them all and have my reservations about the continuing usefulness of Google Alerts, but as they say, suck it and see.

Then there is a further list of tools used by on-line luminaries. The only one I use currently is Buffer, and probably not enough, but I am working on it. I will try the others, but not over the weekend if it is sunny.

Finally, there is PicMonkey, a free way of editing images for your blog without downloading any software, brought to my attention by Blogworld.com and then by Jim Connolly.  PicMonkey is mainly free, but often it is useful to pay for extras, and after all, that is how they make their money.

Good luck with your research on these useful tools. Maybe we can share experiences. Have you tried any of these, and how did you get on?

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My Kindle

I have had my own business for nearly eleven years. It hardly seem possible. However, it is not the same business I started. In the beginning I hardly used email to correspond with clients. It wasn’t that I was an old dinosaur; I have been using email since around 1989. No, it is just that it was not what my clients expected back then. Many of them were not computer literate anyway. Some still are not, but we can cater for them.

Eleven years ago I would not send documents for approval by email either. That was largely because we did not have an easy format such as PDF which we have today. I used the telephone a lot more although it is still important to talk to clients, or rather, to listen.

We didn’t receive so much in the way of services through the Government Gateway on-line a decade back. All my clients were local. Now I have clients from the UK to New Zealand and from Honduras to South Africa.

All this is possible because the world has changed, and also necessary because there is less “local” business of the sort which is interesting or profitable. I have adapted and changed because if my business had stayed the same in terms of offerings, service and the way those services were delivered it would have been broke. Milkmen are a rarity because there is no demand. People buy their milk at the supermarket.

I hope I do not seem unkind, but this week I had one of those on-line petition emails from some booksellers who were petitioning for Amazon to pay more tax. Yet I am sure the reason for their knocking Amazon was because Amazon is eating into their business. I feel sorry for the booksellers, but we cannot run our businesses as museum pieces., because we will make no money.

Some booksellers have moved half their premises over to selling coffee to encourage the browsing client, something I first saw this approach in Dallas more than a dozen years ago. I am not sure if this still works, but surely it is the browsing public who would still buy books in bookshops, where they would choose a good read? If you know what book you want you buy it One-Click through Amazon, or it is delivered to your Kindle. You do not go to the High Street to see if the local shop might have it.

In business we cannot blame others if our sales are weak. We need to change or get out and start anew with something else. How have you changed your business to move with the times?

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Stuck

Nigel Farage of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) accuses political opponents of ‘scrutinising each and every one of our 1,732 candidates, monitoring every social media output over the last few years’ to look for comments embarrassing to UKIP.

If there are ill-chosen words in the Tweets and Facebook comments of UKIP’s candidates he cannot blame UKIP’s foes for finding them. They are stuck with their injudicious comments. We all have our reputations made or potentially destroyed by our on-line presence.  Our stuff is out there and it would be hard to delete all traces.

Our comments are our responsibility as are our reputations. If we have no self-control how can people trust us any more than the political candidates who shoot their mouths off on-line?

Where have I got to?

Sometimes tried and trusted methods stop working, and we hardly notice because we carry on out of habit. That is what happened with me and breakfast networking.  It took a while for it to dawn on me that I was not getting business any more. Perhaps I was in denial because I always enjoyed meeting people and even running a group. However it is jolly hard work and very time consuming to run a group if you make no money in doing it.

Fortunately, my on-line social media activity and my websites do get in business. It is still all about talking and especially listening to what people need, and of course not selling. I enjoy the on-line stuff too, so it isn’t as though I have no fun marketing.

Recently it dawned on me that Google Alerts wasn’t (or weren’t) working. I have for several years used the service to spot when my name was mentioned somewhere on the web, or when my business names were mentioned and to find key special words which interest me. I find I am not the only one to have noticed and although there are reports it has been fixed, I still have not had an Alerts email for weeks even though I try to pop up all over the place. How much am I missing?

TalkWalker has been suggested as a substitute but I am not convinced so far.

Have you found trusted tools and practices can start letting you down? I would love to know.

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• Google Alerts Not Working? Try Alternative – Talkwalker Alerts

A couple of years ago I bought two LG computer monitors. I was very pleased with these. The definition and quality of the displays were excellent.

About eighteen months ago, one of them started to fail. Having checked the fault was not at my end (faulty leads, faulty computer etc.) LG said they would replace the monitor. They sent a new one by courier and took the other one away.

A week or so back the other monitor bought two years ago exhibited the same fault and failed. Again LG offered to replace it and I accepted. Unfortunately their courier is far less good at customer service than they are, and has let them down.

In all our businesses, sometimes things go wrong. It is how we deal with the problems that preserve our good reputations or lose them completely.

I sympathise with LG in that they have done their best to put a problem right. They need to sort out why their courier does not in reality have the same great customer service philosophy that they do.

Don’t let you service providers let you down.

Have you enjoyed great or poor customer service recently?

We try to avoid those “networkers”, don’t we? We try to get as far as possible from them as we can. We can do without those boorish opinions, and we know they will never connect us or refer us because they are too busy thinking about themselves.

It is the same in the world of social media. There are people who claim superior knowledge not just in their line of business but in every aspect of of the world. They rubbish other users of Twitter, they give their opinion of those who hold a different view within their expertise, they show their political prejudices by rubbishing certain politicians, and they have those Smart Aleck comments about any and everyone who doesn’t agree with their bigoted views.

We avoid that sort of person when eating our bacon roll at the local breakfast meet, and thank goodness we can un-follow them on Twitter and un-friend them on Facebook once we see the cut of their jib.

I don’t reckon the Alecks and Alecksandras get much business from their networking, but they are too arrogant to understand why.

Don’t you avoid them like the plague?

Part of my business is to facilitate services to other businesses which they may provide to their end-client. I am good at selling services to my own clients ( though I say it myself) because I know the value of what my business provides, and I can help my clients and prospects to see that value and buy into it. That will be because they receive great comfort and very likely substantial financial benefit from “buying me”.

Many of my potential clients are small firms of accountants who do not have the tax expertise that businesses like mine can provide. Of course we never steal other people’s clients, but just the same there is a reluctance as well as a lack of ability for the intermediary accountants to sell our services, and that means that their clients do not get the service and expertise they really need.

The blocking factors are:

• Many accountants do not charge their clients enough for what they do.
• Their clients expect to be only a low fixed fee whatever services they require each year.
• Accountants are quite often hopeless at selling, and especially at selling value.
• They join the race to the bottom in terms of fees for selling generic services such as accounts and tax returns and have no room for manoeuvre on fees.

How do we get round this, and sell more through those other businesses who themselves should be “making a turn” on the fees we charge them?

• Firstly, we need to convince the intermediary business of the value of what we offer.
• We should ask to draft any proposal they send to their client, emphasising the value if we honestly think we can deliver the value for that client, or
• We should ask to speak to the client direct, reassuring the intermediary that we will not steal their business.

Of course this is not just a problem in my profession, but in so many where we need our services to be sold through others.

Do you get frustrated when someone else ends up selling you short to their customer?