Self-Employed Business Travel

June 16, 2017 //
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Business travel – in the sense of employed business travel – is fundamentally different to self-employed business travel. This is obvious in one way, since it’s the company’s money as opposed to your money, even if you have your own limited company.

In another way, though, in employed business travel you’re essentially getting reimbursed for everything you’re entitled to within the parameters of your employer’s expenses policy. You’re reimbursed for all expenses you reasonably incur.

When it’s your own money, and your own business, you’re more frugal, both with your customer’s budget and with your own budget, those expenditure items you don’t pass on to your customer.

As a self-employed worker you want to remain competitive, so charging significantly higher day rates to cover all your expenses is sometimes not a viable strategy. This manifests itself in the difference between, for example, charging an employer mileage for car use, as opposed to charging a customer the fuel and absorbing the quasi-hidden depreciation costs of putting miles on your own, self-employed car.

My self-employed business travel is not a life of taxis to the airport, airport executive lounges, ticket upgrades and so on. For me, a typical overseas journey can be a short walk to the train station, a train to the city, a short walk to the coach station, a coach to the airport, a flight with a budget airline, a lift to a cheaper – and therefore off-campus – car rental facility for getting to meetings, following by the reverse on the way home. Some of the expenses I absorb, some of them I pass on to my customers. This agreement keeps me competitive and more importantly fosters long-term relationships.

Everyone realises sooner or later that business travel is not the glamorous pastime we thought it was before we did it repeatedly. With self-employed business travel the sheen wears off even more quickly.

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Categories General

Life Hacks

June 14, 2017 //
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What did we call life hacks before we called them life hacks? That phrase has only been around for a few years but already I can’t think of what term we used to describe the short-cuts or tricks of getting by in life that we pick up as we pass through the decades of our earthly existence.

Anything that gives us the inside track on a task and saves us time improves our personal productivity, wellbeing and happiness. There are myriad life hacks we use every day without even thinking about them.

I drive a lot of different cars. I travel overseas once a month and hire a car when I’m over there. Whenever I’m picking up my hire car I generally ask the staff member I’m dealing with if the car has blue tooth for hooking up my mobile phone (they almost all do nowadays) and which side of the car the fuel cap is on so I know how to pull into a fuelling station on the correct side to fill up the tank. If I forget, I have to get out of the car and look for it.

I’ve been driving for over 30 years. Imagine my surprise and astonishment, then, when someone told me earlier this year that on almost every car dashboard there is a little icon of a fuel pump and an arrow indicating which side you dispense fuel from. Brilliant! I’d noticed the icon many times but hadn’t registered the significance of the arrow. I’m sure most of you knew this one already, and are tut-tutting to yourself, safe in the knowledge that you’re probably oodles of life hacks ahead of me.

For me, however, it was another life hack acquired. Another micro-improvement.

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Categories General

Sport is in the Entertainment Business

June 12, 2017 //
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Sport is in many ways the descendant of the gladiatorial contents from ancient times. You have your protagonists, or your actors, and you have your audience. The job is to entertain the audience of paying customers.

The other day I took my mother to a cricket match near where she lives. It was a match between England and Ireland, what’s called a One Day International, and the first of a 2-match series. England, as I write this, are the world leaders in this version of the sport, and Ireland are fast coming up on the rails into the top tier of international cricket. England’s pool of players to draw upon is massive, Ireland’s is tiny.

This was a 50-over match, so each team receives 300 deliveries from the opposition to score as many runs as they can. Whoever scores more runs, wins. A lot rides on the toss of the coin as to who decides to bat first or bowl first. The decision hangs on many things, like ability, confidence, the pitch condition, and the weather. Ireland has beaten England once before in a memorable ‘ODI’ in the World Cup over a decade ago.

Ireland won the toss and decided to bat first. ‘Uh oh, I said to my mum, ‘that could shorten the day considerably.’ Ireland were duly skittled out for about 130 – 300 is a good score – , lasting barely half the 300 deliveries they were entitled to, and England knocked off the runs required with about 200 deliveries to spare. Instead of the match being scheduled to finish at 6:45 pm, it finished about 3pm.

I was furious at what I considered to be arrogance on the part of the Irish captain to opt to bat first. He obviously felt he could win the match, but generally it’s better to bat second, because you know what the target is and you know the run-rate you need to get there. In my view, his thought process should have been: ‘You know what, this is a big step up for us, and a big chance for us to shine. It’s also the first game in the series, and there’s going to be an adjustment period as we step up. Let’s put England in, they’ll probably score about 300, and we can give ourselves a chance and not panic.’

What he also should have said was, and this is going to sound like heresy: ‘You know what, we’re in the entertainment business, and there are 15,000 paying fans out there, 90% of whom have come to see England play. They’ll get more value out of the day, and we’ll have more chance, if we bat second.’

We can’t forget that sport is in the entertainment business, with the emphasis on business. If you’re David against Goliath, you should let him do his thing first, give the crowd a show, see what he’s got and then you might see a weakness and sneak a win. You’ve got no chance otherwise, and people will stop paying to see what looks on paper like a one-sided show. After all, look what happened the last time?

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Strategy

Slightly Off Your Game

June 9, 2017 //
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Sometimes, in business and in life, you’re slightly ‘off your game’. You’re not quite there, you can’t put it together, the muscle and brain memory is not firing right for you. It’s a tough rut to get out of, without doing a reboot or calling it quits and sleeping on it.

In sport it’s easier to see when you’re slightly off your game, because it’s pretty binary. It’s either in or out, a hit or a miss. You either win the point or you lose it, win the match or lose it, pretty much.

I was reminded of this the other day when I was playing table tennis. I used to play competitively for many years and am currently getting back into it more regularly after a decade and a half on the side lines. The other day was one of those days when I was slightly off my game, and at a certain level of ability the margins are so small. The ball was clipping the edge of my bat a lot, rather than hitting the sweet spot, because my timing was slightly off and I couldn’t get either my conscious or subconscious mind co-ordinate the hundred or so muscles in quite the right way.

The ball was also missing the table by small margins, and hitting the top of the net a lot. With table tennis, the ball is maybe a quarter of the height of the net, so you get a lot of shots hitting the net cord, compared with tennis or badminton. When you’re sightly off your game, you hit the top of the net a lot, and the ball either comes back on your side, or dribbles over the other side, or else sits up for the other player to crush past you. Either way, it’s really hard for both players to establish any kind of rhythm.

A couple per cent degradation in your execution and the result is maybe 20% worse, easily the difference between winning comfortably and losing comfortably. Frustrating.

I know you either win a deal or lose it, and a lead either becomes an opportunity or it doesn’t, but business, projects and sales cycles feel a lot less binary to me. If you’re slightly off your game, you don’t necessarily get direct feedback from a prospect or customer. You don’t necessarily know that a specific campaign hasn’t converted a specific individual, or that your answer to a sales objection has been answered satisfactorily.

All you can do then is go back to the data and study the statistics over a larger number of similar circumstances rather than an isolated, specific interaction. And work hard all the time to reduce the occasions when you’re slightly off your game.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Park and Ride

June 7, 2017 //
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Park and ride is a great concept for cities, especially those that have compact centres, limited parking or horrific traffic. Dump your car out of town, hop on a dedicated bus every few minutes, swoop into town on the bus lanes, get dropped off really close to where you need to be, do your thing, pick the bus back up and pick up your car.

People who like having their car close, like driving or want some control and flexibility, they tend not to be big fans of the park and ride.

I tried it for the first time in decades quite recently. It was an interesting experience. I was taking my mum to a cricket match, in a place notoriously poor for parking – even if you have a disabled parking pass – so we opted for the park and ride.

First of all, there were almost no signs to get the park and ride. Fortunately my mum knew where we were going, and I had looked at the map beforehand, but still the signage was very poor, which makes no sense if you want to encourage the use of it by providing a good first experience. We had little or no wait for a bus to leave, and the fair was an extremely reasonable £4 each for both ways. The journey was OK, and we were dropped off at the place which, we were told, would also be the pick-up point, on the same side of the road. Fine.

The walk to the venue was short, so it was all good. Then came the return journey. As often happens after an event finishes, the whole attendance who had arrived at the event in steady streams over time then exited the event all at once in a massive throng. Consequently, there were a couple of hundred people waiting at the bus stop when we got there. The match had finished early and no-one seemed to have told the bus company to be ready early and at short notice. There were 15 minute gaps between the buses, rather than the 5 minute gaps that were advertised.

We finally got on a bus, which departed and took 40 minutes going 3 sides round the mobbed ground we had just exited in order to follow the park and ride route. We finally got back to the car and made our way home.

So, a great concept, with less than great execution, which was a shame. I score it 6 out of 10, a B-, ‘could do better’ on the report card.

Categories Communication, Customers

The Eyes Don’t Have It

June 5, 2017 //
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Is it just me or have eyes failed to to keep up? While peace, our understanding of nutrition and farming techniques mean that we are bigger, stronger, faster and we’re living longer than ever before, the eyes don’t appear to have got the message.

Take me for instance. Into my sixth decade, but not by much, I have 3 pairs of glasses. I have a pair for screen-work, phones, laptops, TV and other devices. I have one for driving, because I can see perfectly well into the long range but I can’t read the dashboard numbers and letters. And I have a pair of sunglasses for sunny or bright-light driving and so that I can read prices in shops and books when I’m sitting on a lounger by the pool.

I’ve always had perfect eyesight, except that mid-way through the fifth decade the focal point for close-up work had lengthened to the point where I couldn’t hold a book far away enough or reach the keyboard with the target in focus. From there it’s been regular and expensive trips to the opticians. More pricier than the occasional trip to the physio.

What was life expectancy as recently as a thousand years ago? Half what is is now? The eyes don’t have it any more. We’re living too long and it’s not like we can retrain them like other muscles. I know of no exercise program focused on strengthening the optic nerve and the muscles that control focusing, if indeed they are muscles. All we can do is have corrective surgery in some cases or wear corrective equipment in other.

I’m happy to acknowledge that all my experiences and observations might be coloured by the fact that up close attention to the typed word is my life. I’m both a publisher and consumer of it, for many hours a day, so that may have contributed to the speed of the decline. But even so, if all the magnifying tools in the world disappeared overnight, or I found myself washed up on a deserted island, I would be, to use a crudity, buggered.

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Categories General

Being Driven

June 2, 2017 //
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I drive quite a bit. Short journeys running errands and dropping kids around town, and long journeys to airports and customers. I like to drive, and I generally do the driving when Her Ladyship and the little angels accompany me. It frees up my wife to organise a bunch of things on her phone, and I don’t mind at all.

The other day, in a break with tradition, I was driven, on one of our normal routes out to the country for the weekend. My wife drives a little slower than I, but not much.

It’s not comfortable being driven! Not as comfortable as it should be. You forget, when you’re in the driving seat and shimmying through country lanes with gay abandon, that you’re holding the steering wheel, which anchors you to your seat and minimises unnecessary roll.

The kids don’t mind of course, because they’re used to it, but more importantly they’ve never driven so they don’t know what it’s like. It was for me, though, an instructive lesson that I must drive more slowly, more smoothly and more considerately when I have company, passengers, customers if you will.

Categories General

The Ryanair Rebooking Scam

May 31, 2017 //
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I travel on Ryanair a lot, at least twice a month. It’s an affordable, efficient and on time airline. I’ve written about the airline a lot on this blog, too many links to insert here and also I notice there’s no search function on my blog, which I must fix – but, trust me, I’ve written about Ryanair a lot.

They’ve improved the way they treat customers over the years. After flying with them hundreds of times, I’ve never had to amend a pre-booked flight before, however. It’s a scam.

Many months ago I booked a long weekend away for me and Her Ladyship to Rome. She’s never been, so we were really looking forward to it. Out on the Friday morning, back on the Monday evening. Perfect.

Then my good lady got offered a new job, a great job. The only snag was that she had to start the Monday we were flying back from Rome, so I needed to cut short the holiday by one day and rebook the return flights.

Firstly, they stiff you €40 per flight to re-book. Painful, but not the end of the world. Secondly, the new return flights were for some reason really expensive, more than the original out and back flights combined, so I parked the change for a day or two to think about it.

As luck would have it, the next time I looked at the new flights I was in a brand new browser session, and had forgotten to follow the process of re-booking the pre-booked flights. Lo and behold, the price of the ‘net’ new flights was less than half the price of the ‘rebooked’ new flights going through the re-booking process.

Armed with this insight, I looked at re-booking both the outbound and return flights and going somewhere much cheaper that Rome, either Edinburgh and London. The re-booked flight prices were over twice the price of making a brand new booking.

So Ryanair charge you €40 per flight to change your flights and more than double the prices for the pre-booked flights. It’s a really laborious, painful process in their legacy system, too. It’s also a scam, plain and simple.

The original flights to Rome were €370. Brand new return flights to London were less than €100. To change the Rome flights and re-book to London would have cost us an additional €180, after the €370 credit had been applied.

I’m now looking at cancelling the flights to Rome. I’m not hopeful of getting anything back.

Don’t change your flights once you’ve booked them with Ryanair. They have you over a barrel and will ride you like a rocking horse, to mix some wooden metaphors.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Technology

Dog’s Life

May 29, 2017 //
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I was at a second hand book fair the other day, one of those affairs where the books are strewn everywhere, unsorted and in boxes on trestle tables and in boxes on the floor under tables.

Crouched down under the tables with books in one hand and sifting with the other, scrabbling around for the authors I was interested in, I thought about how different it is being almost at floor level, like a dog, a small pet or a small child.

It’s a dog’s life down there. You can’t see anything, except the floor, people’s feet and legs, and other small people. Adults trip over you. Everything is geared to heights comfortable to the average adult. It’s almost like being a second class citizen.

I think also that’s it’s a useful exercise in humility, since it puts you in the shoes of other beings who spend their lives at ground level: small children, small animals, small people and also, to an extent, people in wheelchairs. It’s not that fun, once you’ve experienced life at a ‘normal’ altitude.

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Categories Communication, General

In Praise of the Chrome Tab Circular Timer Thingy

May 26, 2017 //
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I use Google Chrome for my web access. I use it on my Mac laptop.

Sometimes I’m just browsing. Most of the time I’m working. Sometimes I’m doing highly repetitive things like making small changes to web site text pages, via a content management system (CMS).

It’s the small things that make the difference when it comes to usability. I really like the circular timer thingy on a chrome browser tab. It’s so simple, and yet so communicative, instructive. When you do a ‘send’ like clicking a link or submitting something the circular thingy goes one way, and then when you start to ‘receive’ like getting a new page back or updating the page, the circular thingy goes the other way. When the browser fully delivers the page, the thingy disappears and the tab favicon comes back. I see the process every time I compose and update this post.

It’s not in the middle of the screen, obscuring your view and your productivity, like the pinwheel of death. It’s up in the browser tab.

This is great when you’re doing lots of updates, because as soon as you see the circular thingy reverse its direction you know you can switch to another tab, saving lots and lots of milliseconds, which add up over time and really help you out.

Well thought out, simple and illuminating. Marvellous, magical usability.

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Categories Communication, Technology
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