Putting your stamp on the business

French bread and letters

We all like a bit of a moan sometimes. At least, I do. Recently on Twitter I complained that I had missed the post as the local collection was made early. I just saw the back of the van as it drove away.

To give them great credit, @royalmail responded within a couple of minutes and registered my complaint via Twitter, complete with reference number. I don’t know how far this will be followed up but I immediately got the feeling that they do care, so my feelings towards Royal Mail became a lot warmer.

I have mentioned before our local baker in the village. They have great products in the bread, and they are very friendly and helpful and allow us to reserve our favourite loaves over the telephone from 7:30 AM onwards. This sort of service inspires loyalty and of course testimonials since my wife and I tell everyone what a brilliant bakers shop they have.

Hospital hospitality

As a family we have seen rather a lot of hospitals recently. I guess we cannot avoid them all our lives.

This past week we spent the entire day at one. I really cannot praise too highly the service, but in particular the helpful friendly caring staff who made us so comfortable (patient and patient’s moral support) and looked after us so well. Of course no one really wants a reason to go back to a hospital, but we would certainly recommend it to others in need, and if we have to be hospitalised ourselves, I hope it is there.

It’s how they do it!

All bakers’ shops sell bread though not all bake on the premises as our does. Our baker stands out because we are made so welcome and can rely on top service. So we recommend them.

Our posties mostly do a very good job, and it makes me feel better about them that the business follows up on complaints rather than shrugs its shoulders.

A great hospital is worth knowing about and great service will help spread the word as well as allaying concerns about having to be admitted.

If we serve well our clients with a smiling face they will recommend us more easily. Smile!

Local shops need the right passing trade

I don’t always like to be right, but when a bookshop opened in our village, I really couldn’t see how it would stay in business for very long. It has lasted only about six months and has now closed. It really is very sad, and I can imagine the owner’s happiness at the start as I suspect he always wanted to run a bookshop. That sort of ambition in the face of stark reality is so often how these business misadventures start.

The shop stocked mostly local interest, remaindered and second-hand books. Such a shop would have to rely on passing trade and also would need to offer a choice not readily available elsewhere locally. Yet in the small “main drag” of the village there are three charity shops selling books (such is the state of local retail anyway), and those books will be of much the same variety as the bookshop had, including the local interest stuff, but of course much cheaper. And then there are the boot fairs and car boot sales to satisfy the second-hand book browser.

A bookshop needs to rely on regular browsing by visitors anyway, and like a website that means having visitors, because you need a fair number of those visitors to get enough purchases. Yet so much of the new and second-hand book market has gone on-line, in particular to Amazon, and many second-hand book dealers sell through the Amazon outlet; some grudgingly, but that is another story.

A shop has overheads such as business rates, and there will be a rent, because the landlord needs to have some return on his investment. The bookshop owner needed to ask those critical questions:

• Do I have the right product?
• Who is my market?
• How will I get customers?
• Can I afford the premises?

I don’t doubt that the proprietor had a dream of being successful and of being a fixture in the village. Starting a new business often has some risk and needs care. It doesn’t make sense to plunge our cash recklessly into a proposition which really has no chance because we have not done our homework.

However, like the road to Hell, the road to ruin is paved with good intentions. We need a proper business plan and to have someone with experience cast their eye over it.

Do you sometimes hate to be right?

Be nice to your customers!

Playing at business

You may think the title states the obvious, but some people don’t use their heads. They take short cuts in their work, such as the carpenter who does a quick botch job, or they take long holidays and wonder why their business income falls and they are broke. It would be hard to believe for most of us, except it happens. Not attending properly to customers’ or clients’ needs means they will go elsewhere.

Doctor Doctor I feel like a pair of curtains. Pull yourself together!

If those slackers, because slackers they are, don’t pull themselves together and offer proper consistent reliable customer service rather than indifference and shoddy work, their businesses will suffer. In so many ways it is easy to make the change. I don’t understand how there can be such people who must rely on the next mug to sign up because they don’t keep their customers for long.

Don’t neglect the marketing

‘Doctor, doctor, people keep ignoring me.’ ‘Next please!’

It is no good setting up in business and not marketing. It is much better to make sure that everyone knows about you. You have to be visible. We know there are people who don’t market, but that is when they are so established and offer a great service or product. They get brilliant and deserved referrals.

If you have a new business or one quite young, that won’t work because you have no track record. Otherwise no one will know you are there. Get out there and market, and if you don’t know how, find someone with experience to help.

Make sure you are taken seriously

‘Doctor, doctor, there’s a strawberry growing on the top of my head.’ ‘I’ll give you some cream for it.’

Some people trash their businesses at meetings or networking event by talking too much and not managing their reputations. It is even worse on-line, so everyone needs to watch what they say on Facebook, in on-line forums, in their blog, or even in a thoughtless email. Google is our friend generally, but our enemy with our careless talk because it will come back to haunt us.

Reputation is the most important asset we have in business. Do you know people who are careless about their main source of income?

Related articles

• Careless talk costs business (onourbikes.com)
• Why we must manage our business relationships carefully (onourbikes.com)
• Your customers are not a process (onourbikes.com)

Something to aim for

Here is a confession: I am a consultant. I am consulted about tax issues and I am consulted about business problems. Luckily my potential clients know where to find me. Luckily? Well, maybe not. I have to market to get business. It is obvious really.

I know quite a few other consultants. Many people who are consultants have retired from a long term job, or have been involuntarily “retired” through redundancy. Often such people have very valuable skills to offer and they want to work, or they need to due to pension disasters of which there are many in the private sector.

So often our consultants have no idea how to find business. It is often better not to call oneself a consultant for fear of being a butt of the many jokes.  So disregard my earlier remark that I am a consultant. I am someone who has a good deal of expertise and can really help you and your business. I also can help you find just the specialist you need.

Available for work

We have established that there are many very experienced people looking for freelance work. So many of them have no idea how to find this work and surprisingly for many who may have so recently had a job and had to use IT or ICT are technophobes with regard to the on-line stuff. Sadly for those people, that is where so many potential customers look for specialists if they haven’t found them through networking and word of mouth.

Action now!

So what to do? In many ways it is obvious:

• have a website
• have valuable content on the website in the shape of articles
• have a blog

Content marketing is a main driver of visitors. The technical content on my main tax website is popular. It is also self-tuning in letting me know what people are looking for because I know what was in their search, which I know through Google Analytics and StatCounter.  In fact I don’t have to write articles very regularly if I make sure they are really valuable.

Then there is this place, On Our Bikes. It attracts prospective clients and it helps keep me up the search rankings. I am easily found on a name searchof course because my name is not that common, but there are for more instances of me than of the other guys with the same moniker. So there is no doubt about my name brand but my name would have to be known in connection with what I do for this to be really effective.

It might be better to search for my expertise. If we look for “tax Essex”, but without the inverted commas I am still high up  on the first page. If we enter “tax return Essex”, at the time of writing my business is the first of the entries which have not been paid for on the first page of Google.

So the answer in terms of driving the on-line marketing is through having websites and blogs which are entirely WordPress based. And WordPress is relatively inexpensive to manage though I recommend you do get some help in managing it. The results are really brilliant.

Don’t be Billy / Billie no-mates

I cannot understand how so many “consultants” sit around and wait for business to arrive somehow when they make no effort. Having a LinkedIn profile can help quite a lot. And any profile can help because I keep some of my photos on Flickr and the Google search entry for my Flickr says “Tax practitioner, business connector, freelance writer, blogger at On Our Bikes, Jon Stow Consulting Tax Blog and Jon Stow’s Posterous …” So you can keep your photographs backed up and have a profile mentioning your expertise. And it’s free, though I do recommend that any person with expertise makes more effort than that.

If you are a specialist, you can do a lot at relatively low cost to be found on-line. You do have to make an effort and not be scared of getting out there. Look at what others do, and adapt their tactics to your own skills.

Preferably you should pay a marketing person who knows what they are doing, so get a recommendation. I think that at a minimum you ought to have a LinkedIn profile and a website with a few specialist articles so that visitors can see that you know your stuff. Then talk to someone about how you can be found on-line ahead of other people (that’s called SEO).

Do it!

Just don’t do nothing. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. There really is no excuse especially when the alternative is poverty. Do you need a consultant, oh sorry, specialist?

Mountains don't travel well!

In my work I talk to many small business owners, and on a daily basis. Some in professional services are doing pretty well without making any effort to market. This is because they provide their clients with reliable, dependable support, and in return their clients recommend them to others. That way they have a steady stream of new business to replace the natural wastage, which is often due to other clients retiring and very often selling up.

These established businesses living off recommendations generally are not looking to grow too much, but their owners find themselves able to live a comfortable living. That’s great, isn’t it, in a time when the general business is difficult?

The whole world of small business isn’t like that though. I was talking to the owner of a start-up business two years old, and he told me that business was really very poor. They had hardly any clients coming to them. I commented that they did not seem to have a website and that they were almost invisible in the search engines. The owner said “But in our line we get all our business through word of mouth”; in other words through referrals. Except they aren’t getting any. This is two years down the line.

In some ways I understand my friend’s comment. I believe that once he worked in one of those established businesses I mentioned at the beginning; one where the work just kept coming in because their good service reputation was passed on by word of mouth. In a start up business you just don’t have that. You have to take the initiative. It is no good expecting the mountain to come to Mohamed.

A small business has to market. Any professional service business must have a website, and preferably a blog or good content showing the expertise of the owners. Content marketing for goodness sake! Then once a few clients come along and sign up, rightly convinced you know what you are talking about, they will talk about you. Your best marketers are your client advocates, but you have to have a virtual shop to display your wares.

It’s no good hiding your light under a bushel, especially as we all need money to live on. It’s really not true that if you build it they will come (sorry, Kevin).  You need publicity, your potential clients need to know where to come and they need to know what great stuff they will get when they arrive.

Are you hiding or is it easy to find you?

Related articles

• Why we need to be realistic about our business ambitions (onourbikes.com)

Careless talk... (via Wikipaedia)

One rule of business is “never rubbish the competition” because it creates bad feeling in your profession, you make your potential customers uncomfortable, and people wonder about your character.

Something else we have to consider is careless talk about our clients or careless talk in front of our customers.

It is easy to fall into the trap. We are out at a networking meeting and someone asks about a competitor or a mutual customer. We have to be careful what we say. We can be overheard. Our opinion, good or bad, can be passed on. Our reputation is at stake, whether it is for bad-mouthing an acquaintance or worse, a client, or more generally for being unreliable.

It is just the same on-line, or perhaps it is worse. If we express an opinion on a forum or on Facebook or on another website, it is out there for all to see. If we change our mind we may not have control over the content and be able to withdraw it. If we are unkind to someone on a forum or even if we state what we see as the truth, other people may have a different perspective.

Careless talk in front of our customers even if not about them can be costly. Many of us will have had clients (or will have) where something has not had the desired outcome, even if for reasons we cannot control. The trouble is that clients or customers may not have the full context and may worry about us or about themselves.

I was in a hospital waiting room the other day in which were around eight patients or relatives. Some of these people were likely not to be very well, so they didn’t need to hear the two receptionists discussing a patient who had apparently died in pain. If they had to talk about it, why not in their private rest room; certainly not in the hearing of the worried ill!

Customer relations and indeed business relations require discretion and common sense. If in doubt we should keep our counsel, and we should always engage brain when talking or writing in public. If I had been these receptionists’ manager and heard their conversation I would have “called them in for a chat”.

Have you come across business acquaintances and networkers who couldn’t keep their mouths shut and who have damaged their reputations far more than those they have criticised? How did you feel about them? I bet you wouldn’t buy from them.

Related articles

• Telling your customers they are stupid
• Online reputations again

Confused?

I have seen the expression “knowledge is power” a number of times in blog posts recently. Jim Connolly is correct in saying that knowledge is only effective when you take action.

I believe knowledge is currency. It involves action, but it has to be the right action. Knowledge is what you use to pursue and gain your objective, especially in business. Therefore it has to be valid, which means that it has to have been tried and tested. In terms of improving your business it has to be proven, something which will work for you if you follow the method or process diligently.

I am always been sent emails about how to improve my sales. My deleted items folder is full of them. What I have learned to do is filter out the rubbish. There are some people who I respect otherwise I wouldn’t mention them or read their blog, but at the same time there are others who will invite you to sign up to some program which will help you to (like the seller, allegedly) earn $/£200,000 per year without working more than a few hours work a week. You know the sort of thing.

Especially for a start-up business person it is a confusing world out there. There are so many offerings. Some “knowledge” has no currency value because it is counterfeit. Knowledge is often confused with “belief” too. Belief isn’t proven. Practical advice from a successful person is proven. We learn from our mistakes but it is too expensive to make many.

Some offerings of advice for marketing, cost cutting, public relations or whatever it is will be be real deal. The only way to find out is to look at testimonials and get permission to speak to satisfied customers, preferably not those hand-picked by the seller. Unsolicited recommendations from people you trust are even better.

It really is a case of “buyer beware” (No Latin today) to find the real deals. There are plenty out there, and armed with valuable knowledge you can exchange it for effective action.

King Canute, or Knut or Knud is best remembered for commanding the tide to stop coming in, either because he believed he was so powerful that the sea would obey, or because he wished to demonstrate to his courtiers that he was human like all of them, and was bound to fail. He was a successful monarch of his time, so I believe in his wisdom and prefer the second version of the story.

I thought of our Danish King when out in our local village the other day. As it happens he may have been to our ancient village,  as his army fought a battle locally and

Winning near Canute's battlefield

camped only four miles away. I think that Canute would have realised that we cannot stand in the way of change, however much we dislike it. And our village is changing.

Byegone days

We have no independent grocer left. We have a small but good Cooperative supermarket. We are going to have a small Sainsbury store as well though how they can both be viable is beyond me. We still have an excellent baker who survives by being excellent. Aside from two funeral directors, the rest is mostly takeaway hot food; a very good fish and chip shop, three South Asian takeaways and two Chinese, one much better than the other. There are some other businesses hanging on, but as the passing trade lessens it will be harder for them.

We know that the shoppers now go out of town for food and clothes, or they go on-line. Although there is a slump in the construction industry right now, we know that more houses will be built to fill in the green bits of countryside as well as the ingress of retail parks. “Infrastructure” such as roads are then built. The trouble is there is no big plan or Big Idea. It is just a pressure of numbers and of population, but no planning beyond dealing with the next few years. Yet to me the one big project which is HST2 seems misguided.

Village museum?

I don’t think the country should be preserved like a museum.  In a way that happens when you have an area which is very limited, such as the island of Jersey. The planning laws for any new builds there are very strict, and the size of population is very much controlled. You and I if we are non-Jersey people cannot easily take up residence in Jersey. We could work there for a while if our services could be justified, but at the end of our contract we are on a boat or plane away. Therefore to the occasional visitor like me, Jersey has retained its character. We in the mainland UK and in most countries just can’t do that.

So we have to accept that the world is changing. You and I know that we have to adapt our businesses. Perhaps we need to work more on-line, whether selling gifts or our services. A lot of this is demand-driven of course.

Ten years ago I met all my clients. They sent me letters and papers. I sent them letters and forms. Few used email.

Now I do not meet all my clients in person although I prefer to and it involves less red tape. My clients email files. We have video conversations via Skype. I deal with queries using email and I send reports to clients on-line. I email forms. I submit on-line to Government departments.

Some clients still like paper, so they get paper. But some practitioners in my line of work became frightened by the on-line environment and quite a few of them retired. As recently as two years ago I took over a client from an accountant who wrote out all his clients’ tax returns by hand. How long must that have taken? How could he have remained competitive? The answer is that he couldn’t and he would have had no room to compete on value, which is what all of us providing professorial services should be doing.

Change or die

So we must adapt our businesses and be prepared to change as needed. If we don’t need a shop or any premises at all, we must bite the bullet. If we need to follow the supermarket and get new premises in the retail park, do that!

I like to think that King Canute understood that we cannot stand in the way of the tide of progress. I also believe that he would have still been good at strategic planning and helped Government at national and local level to be a little less haphazard in their own planning. What new plans do you have?

It's cold out there!

Employee blues

I was in the tax business a long time as an employee, and in the corporate world we were also in the “business advisory” sector. As someone who has run businesses for some time, I realise how fundamentally useless the so called “business adviser” employees were, because really you don’t understand small business life until you have run a small business. And by small business I don’t mean one within the SME broad brush. I mean one with just a few employees, or with no employees and a few contractors, or one which is essentially just a self-employment.

I know that one-person bands are sometimes described as not real businesses (I think that is unfair) but one-person bands up to businesses with twenty to fifty employees face many of the same challenges. Yes, there is always a danger of generalising but most of those face the same sort of market.

Over the Christmas period I was able to chat with some of my former colleagues who still work for larger organizations, though some are in the same market as my rather smaller businesses. I know that some years ago a few thought about going independent, but in the current economic climate they say that they will hang on to their jobs. I think that is wise.

It’s cold out there

Starting your own business is at the best of times challenging. You need:

• Some money for essentials
• A plan of action (different from a business plan for the bank)
• Marketing (where most ex-employees fall down whether former “business advisers”or not)
• A good accounting system
• The drive to succeed
• Room for you in the market

The last is so important. So many established and formally very successful businesses are under pressure. People are not buying new kitchens and bathrooms. They are not having their gardens landscaped. They are not visiting High Street gift shops or hot food takeaways in the numbers they did five years ago. Actually they are not visiting High Streets so much at all, economizing on fuel and price by buying essentials in big supermarkets; one-stop shops. Retail has moved on-line anyway.

Realism is sensible

Much as I love to encourage start-ups, room for you in the marketplace is the most important consideration right now. If you have a job you should hang on to it unless you have a really Big Idea. It would need to be an innovation where you can make your own space in the market, or you should be confident you have special expertise and know there is a shortage of it. It is no good trying to do what many others are already doing.

If you have a start-up, I will be pleased to help you. If you have lost your job and would like me to put my thinking cap on for you, give me a call. If you have had the Big Idea you know where I am.

Toyota Aygo via Wikipedia courtesy of Rudolph Stricker

Value pricing

Now we all know (I hope) that when we offer a knowledge based service we bill for value. So if you deliver a huge cost saving to a manufacturing business by helping it re-source its raw materials you should charge it according to the value it receives in savings. If you offer a brilliant marketing solution that saves your client £50,000 a year you might charge a fair percentage of the first year’s savings and try not to be greedy of course.

When I worked for a large firm of accountants a client was charged £50,000 for saving £500,000 a year. The delivery cost was about a tenth of the fee, but the client was very happy.

Product pricing

However, if we are delivering a physical product or a program we need to be careful because our customers have a choice. I have an issue over some software. I like it a lot and have been a customer for years. However, the number of separate clients in its database has now exceeded a certain number and I have to upgrade to “unlimited” from the number of clients I have been paying for, rather than have another increment in numbers and another limited extra amount to pay for my software license. This means I have a huge hike in the cost of my annual license for this software.

You might say that as I like this software it is worth paying the extra amount, but of course it increases the cost of running my business rather more than seems sensible.

Jumping the ship?

Rather than buying the top-up to the license I have purchased a small limited license from a competitor for the extra number of clients I need. You know what? This software I am trialling is rather good. Also, if I were to buy their “unlimited” license it would cost much less than the unlimited product of my current main supplier, by which I mean some hundreds of pounds.

What do you think I will do? Well, it is most likely I will make the switch. I understand that my data can be moved over to the new program. I am not going to name names of software providers. It is just that if the price structure of the current provider were more sensible I would not even be thinking of leaving them, but why would I pay a huge amount of money for capacity I don’t need? It would be like buying a huge turkey for Christmas and at considerable expense, just for my wife and me. We would never eat it and would be sick of the sight of turkey before long.

Price comparisons

What I am driving at is that if your product isn’t a lot better than other people’s, you cannot charge a load more for it. Even if it is better, it has to meet the customer’s need. If you can buy the same product cheaper at Aldi, why go to Waitrose? Well, I concede you might enjoy the Waitrose experience, but you wouldn’t pay hundreds for it; at least not all in one go.

Why pay more for a Peugeot 107 than you would for a Citroen C1 or a Toyota Aygo? You wouldn’t. They are basically the same car doing the same thing.

So your product must be better than the others and it must meet the customers’ needs without their feeling they are spending money for something they don’t need. Because they won’t spend that money if you don’t get your pricing right.