Thank You
These are two of the most powerful words in the English language.
A simple “thank you” or “thanks” can go a long way.
If someone’s done something good for you, take a minute to say thanks. They’ll appreciate it.
Death of Powerpoint
I’m currently at the National Speakers Association of Australia‘s annual conference and one thing that’s struck me is the almost total absence of Powerpoint.
With the exception of Glenn Capelli‘s wonderful presentation that bought together teaching, his childhood, presentation techniques, his grandmother, mentor and the Sputnick satellite there wasn’t one Powerpoint.
Glenn’s powerpoint certainly wasn’t the heading, bullet point, bullet point, bullet point, corporate logo, next slide presentation we’ve become tired and jaded with.
Are we seeing the end of bullet point driven presentations?
Motivation
I was listening to a speaker yesterday describing the difference between public sector and private employees.
An interesting point was that the motivations are different; public sector staff are more motivated by a work/life balance while private sector workers are more motivated by money.
This started me thinking about recent blogs I’ve read by Valerie Khoo and Seth Godin regarding the motivation of Wall Street bankers and entreprenuers.
The question of money motivating people is vexed and I suspect overstated. As Seth says in his column, once you’ve an income over a million or so dollars money really isn’t that important; it’s all about status.
A point made by yesterday’s speaker was when he managed scientists he found most researches care about about peer approval. Money matters far less to them than appearing at conferences, presenting papers and being recognised for their hard work and discoveries.
In a strange way, that’s the real explanation for the financial industry’s massive salaries and bonus. The dollar amount is simply a yardstick to measure one’s status. The bigger the yacht, house and birthday party you can afford, the more recognition you have among your peers.
Which brings me to entreprenuers. Unlike Valerie, I don’t think business builders are interested soley in amassing banker like piles of cash. The cash is nice, but they are more interested in doing great things with their businesses or invention.
Cash is a useful measure and it’s nice to have some spare, but that’s as far as it goes. Far more important for most people is the recognition of their peers, security of their families and the satisfaction of a job well done.
Why small business will be the winner from this recession
An interesting post by Peter Bregman on the Harvard Business Review;
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/bregman/2009/03/why-small-companies-will-win-i.html
While I agree with the sentiment and Peter’s conclusion, I think there’s a more compelling, fundamental reason why small to medium businesses will be stronger when the world economy recovers.
Responsibility.
The notable thing about the current collapse is the total absense of repsonsibility from those who created the problems. From the overpaid villains of AIG through to the politicians and regulators who, at best, stood on the sidelines and allowed the excesses to happen.
The main cause of this is because managers have become isolated from the consequences. They take their pay packet, and their fat bonuses, home regardless of the shareholder wealth they destroy.
With small to medium business the owners and managers have to deliver the service they are paid to do. Otherwise the business goes quickly broke along with the proprietors.
Big business grew big because they had the technology to do so. They only big because they had the market and political power to protect their position.
Technology levelled the playing field between small business long ago, the current market turmoil and the political changes that will follow will strip most of big businesses’ advantages.
Which will leave the well motivated, well managed and responsible companies to succeed.
Only a few of these will be big businesses.
Stallers, deniers and enablers
Seth Godin has a look at the three types of people you meet in business-to-business sales.
I think he’s wrong.
These three types are everywhere. Whether you are a consumer or a business, whether you’re dealing with sales, support, billing, enquiries or any other businesses function.
The stallers will do their best to get rid of you, the deniers will say “no” and the enablers will do everything to help you.
For a successful small business you need to be known as an enabler and hiring enablers has to be your priority. Once you’ve done that you have an advantage over most of your competition and almost every big business.
Ignoring your customers
The new Facebook design has picked up lots of critics with nearly 800,000 users giving it the thumbs down.
However Dare Obasanjo claims Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg doesn’t care. Apparently Mark’s view is “the most disruptive companies don’t listen to their customers“.
That’s true – Steve jobs ignored the howls of protest when Apple dropped support for floppy disks and the Apple Desktop Bus which left millions of Mac users stranded with obsolete equipment.
Even more famously, Henry Ford told customers they could have any colour Model T they liked as long as it was black.
Both were right and the customers followed them, although not without some grumbling.
So you can succeed by knowing your customers needs better than they know them, but it’s a risky ask as Microsoft found with Windows Vista, Ford with the Edsel and Coca-Cola with New Coke.
Time will tell if Mark Zuckerburg’s right. It’s a high risk strategy though.
Diversity on the net
Tonight I did my ABC Radio Nightlife spot on Twitter with Mark Pesce.
The callers were an interesting bunch and they showed the diversity of users – older people, Christian and cat lovers to name a few.
It just goes to show how dangerous it is to make assumptions about who uses technology.
Managing your reputation
Keeping track of what your customers and others are saying is important for your business. Luckily there’s a free tool to let you keep track of your reputation on the Internet.
This article first appeared in Smartcompany on 17 February, 2009
Last week at a major telco’s product launch a respected tech journalist piped up that while their new gadget was nice, their network was rubbish and so the gadget wouldn’t work very well.
The telco’s reaction to this deserved comment was instructive on how large corporations deal with criticism.
Rather than take the comments on the chin, the telco’s spokespeople canned the journalist and waved around a report stating their network was the greatest thing since sliced bread, or at least since somebody thought of connecting two cans with a piece of string.
Personally I’d be tempted to point out to the esteemed and highly paid writers of the report that two cans of string are probably a touch more reliable than their client’s network in notoriously remote locations like North Sydney and Martin Place.
While telco managers usually get away with head in the sand behaviour, business owners in the real world can’t. Their reputation with customers matters.
In the current business climate, you can’t afford to be dismissing your customer’s concerns. When a customers complains, action needs to be taken and lessons learned from that complaint.
How business leaders deal with complaints is a real test of how good they are. Handled well, a complaining customer can be turned into a raving fan of your business and a complaint should be an opportunity to review how well you do your job.
You don’t need to be hosting press conferences with stroppy journalists to find out what people think of you. One Internet tool for managing your reputation is Google Alerts.
With this, you can set up an email summary of each time your target word or phrase has popped up on Google and have it delivered to your inbox.
I have all my business names listed with Google’s alert service so I can see when others have mentioned them on Internet forums, blogs or websites. It’s also very handy on keeping an eye out for anyone breaching your trademarks.
Incidentally, the journo was right, and that particular telco’s network problems have been widely discussed on the net and in the media. It beggars belief the managers and PR couldn’t have expected this sort of criticism if they’d been running these tools.
The web’s a pretty effective way of getting good and bad news out about a business. If you watch it closely, you can anticipate problems before they bite your bottom line.
Why your business should have its own domain
In our society where half the population seems to be on the road at any given time, having signage on your company vehicles is one of the most effective ways of publicising your business.
Because I spend too much time sitting in traffic jams I get the opportunity to study a lot of this advertising. All too often I see terrific, well done designs let down by poor email or website addresses.
No matter how much you spend on snappy slogans and flashy logos, an email address along the lines of fredtheplumber@biginternetprovider.com.au will spoil the effect. Addresses like these make it hard for passers-by to remember, and they smack of someone who can’t afford the less than $200 to set up a business internet domain.
One of the great things about the internet is it allows smaller businesses to punch above their weight. With your own domain name, even the tiniest microbusiness is on the same basis as their multinational competitors, and they can do this for less than the cost of a cappuccino a week.
Another big plus is your own business domain unties you from your internet provider. In Fred’s case, if he decides to change internet providers, he can’t have his address follow him. With his own domain, he can change internet providers every week without affecting his email and website addresses.
Setting up your own business domain is a two-step process; first you register your domain with a registrar and then arrange for a hosting service to look after it for you. To simplify things most registrars, hosting companies, internet providers and web site developers can do it all for you.
Whether you do it yourself or get someone to do it for you, it’s important to make sure someone at your business is designated as the administrative contact. This means you have ultimate control over the domain and you are the first to be told when fees are payable or domains are expiring.
There’s no reason in my mind why even the smallest business doesn’t have its own domain. Compared to the costs of a Yellow Pages listing, local newspaper ad or even car signage, a domain and the associated hosting costs are almost nothing.
Your business name is an important asset. If your organisation doesn’t have its own domain, regardless of its size, then you aren’t getting the most from that asset.
The echo chamber
Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman worries about the insularity of America’s economic leaders.
He’s right to worry. The economic downturn is going to be longer and deeper than it otherwise would have been because our business, political and economic leaders steadfastly refused to acknowledge the levels of debt our societies were being burdened with and now they refuse to deal with the fact that debt is being unwound.
The challenge for business owners now is not to fall for the orthodoxies and slogans but to take a realistic view of what’s happening in the world and the effects on customers, staff and suppliers.
Just listening to your mates repeating your own beliefs is not good enough. The politicians have their pensions, the executives their golden parachutes and the economists tenured positions. You probably don’t.
Read widely, listen and be sceptical of those with special interests to protect. Most of all don’t act on the advice of those who think it will be business as usual next year.
Business as usual is going to be very different from today onwards to what it was two, ten or twenty years ago. It’s time to reinvent and look for the opportunities those too deep in the echo chamber are unable to see.
Every business is different
One of the things I’ve always believed is every business is unique.
Your character, your staff, your processes, your customers, your premises and every little thing your business does makes it totally different to every other business in the world.
That’s the beauty of business and it’s why any advice you recieve should be tempered by the knowledge that no-one knows your operation better than you.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t listen to advice. You should because a fresh pair of eyes or ears can alert you to something you’ve missed.
This isn’t to say you shouldn’t experiment with new ways. Those businesses who don’t will probably not survive the next five years.
But what’s works for the guy up the road won’t necessarily work for you. His blog might be successful while yours may fail; she might be able to ditch the Yellow Pages while you cannot; they might be able to use social media while your contacts ignore it.
So understand your own businesses, its staff and the customers.
And most of all understand your own strengths and weaknesses.
Business cards are a business essential
I attended a meeting last night where half the people didn’t have business cards, including one of the organisers and two of the sponsor’s representatives.
That’s a shame for those people. The humble business card is one of the most important marketing tools you have.
Your staff should all have business cards and carry a few with them all the time. When you’re hosting an event or meeting, then you simply can’t enough cards.
Business cards may be low tech, but they are a great cost effective way for getting your message out and for helping people remember who you are and what you do. Get some printed up today.