Business Skills in Schools

September 17, 2014 //
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As we speak, my son is sampling a range of optional subjects for his new secondary level school. They’re all great subjects, but because of the small size of the school and the teaching abilities of the staff, he will have to make 4 ‘either or’ choices.

One of the either / or choices is business or art. Unfortunately it’s not art in the general sense that we should all strive to be artists, but it’s the painting and drawing variety.

I didn’t have the chance to study business at school. The closest I could get was economics at A level, and I eschewed that unknown quantity for languages, which I liked and was relatively good at. As a consequence I wasn’t exposed to business in any great degree until I got my first job as a college graduate. Of course, some people never brush shoulders with business their entire lives, preferring a life devoted to many of the industries in the pubic sector, like teaching, healthcare, academia and the like.

I think business is a really good idea for kids at school, and why not in primary school as well as secondary? For better or worse our lives are pretty well governed by money, so the sooner kids get their heads around the concepts of money, value, the effect of time on both and managing cash and priorities, the better. It also introduces them to the world of entrepreneurs and being enterprising, which – rather than big business – is the future of work for many of us and gives us control, flexibility and choice, which are all vital to a good quality of life.

Richard Branson has written very recently about the benefits of learning about business in schools and Seth Godin has some very well thought out views on what schools should be getting kids to do. So we’re in pretty good company then. It’s my son’s choice what he takes, and of course I and Mrs D will have some influence, but I hope he chooses business, and does it with artistry.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales

Turning a Book into Bucks

September 15, 2014 //
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When we read a business or self-help book, it’s generally because we want to improve the way we do things and profit from this investment of our time and money.

The hope is that as you get towards the end of the book, you have a good feeling about it and you consider it to be one of the business books that was worth your time and contained some ideas you could definitely use. You can soon relax, reflect on what you learned or what you were reminded of, and consign it to the shelf with the others. And forget it.

We’ve all read books that knocked us for 6 (the cricketing equivalent of hitting a home run in baseball), and really changed our view of the world. Maybe that feeling lasted a couple days, or a week, but pretty soon all but a handful of nuggets is forgotten and we’re back to the way we were before, pulled back to the status quo by the constant drag of daily duties.

It’s somewhat like knocking over the first in a line of dominoes, but the second domino lies beyond the length of the first. The process stops, and there’s no chain reaction, no momentum, and all the potential of the remaining dominoes is still just that, potential.

Why is that? Well, you didn’t do anything! You read a book. You accomplished an event. You didn’t effect a change, you didn’t initiate a process, you didn’t sustain any new behaviour.

We need to recognise that success is a function of learning the new best way of working, adopting it, applying it, coaching to it, and sustaining it. This comes from figuring out what is important to success and knowing how to do it.

We also need to understand that for us to really change for good the way we do things, we have to put into actual practice what we read, or get help to do it. Otherwise, dear reader, all of the power of the book will stay within its covers and won’t be turned into improvement and profit.

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Categories General, Strategy

A Gap in the Market

September 12, 2014 //
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Congratulations, you’ve discovered that great idea that no-one else has thought of. You’ve seen a gap in the market and you’re going to develop your product or service and make the gap yours. It’s your ticket to fame and fortune.

The most important question to ask yourself as you prepare to devote the time and energy to your project is this: there’s a gap in the market, but is there a market in the gap?

You need to estimate your addressable market. How many people – consumers or individual users within your business – are potential buyers of what you’re going to offer? How much would they pay for it? Would they pay on a one-off basis or would they subscribe every year? If it’s a one-off purchase then you’re starting from scratch every January 1st. If it’s a subscription model, then you can already rely on revenues come January 1st. This audience multiplied by the price is your addressable market size.

Now, how much of that market can you win? What’s your realistic market share? This market share is your total revenue from the venture. Is it enough to make it worth your while building your product or service, promoting it, and supporting it when your customers start using it?

If the likely income doesn’t outweigh the likely cost, you don’t have a market in the gap and you need to re-think.

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Give Me Something Meaningful

September 10, 2014 //
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I have a mobile phone subscription, as do many of you I’m sure. My mobile phone company sends me a monthly mid-period statement to my phone of how much stuff I have left, depending on whatever bundle or package I have. I don’t know what my package is exactly. It’s cheap and cheerful, much like its owner.

I’m looking at the statement right now, and I have 98 minutes left across all networks, which is good. I also have 998MB of data left, which presumably means my allocation is a GB, because I don’t use it much outside of a wireless network.

Guess what? It also tells me I have 44,989 texts left this period. Yes, you read that right, 44,989 texts. WTF!! Clearly there is no or negligible cost to the company of processing a text message, and I can send them free with viber and whatsapp, including send photos and movies. But who in the marketing department decided that it would be a good idea a) to place a limit on this, b) to set it at 45,000 texts per month and c) to communicate how many I have left, when if I texted constantly for the period in question, 24/7, I couldn’t get through them all.

Give me something that is meaningful, something that I value. Otherwise you’ll make me angry. And you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

The Wonder of Airline Food

September 8, 2014 //
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As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m a big fan of packaging, compactness and travel (here and here). The secret to good business travel lies in a combination of these 3 concepts. By good, I mean efficient, effective, optimised travel.

I’ve never really bought into the long haul travel idea of taking a pill and sleeping through the journey, especially the west to east flights which tend to be overnight. For me, even though you might be shattered, you miss one of the main joys of the trip.

Airline meals on long haul flights are a wonder. Compact and bijou, they are breathtakingly well designed pieces of real estate. Everything is compartmentalised, allowing the cabin crew to offer even those of us in cattle class options for our main course and to slot in a heated meal accordingly. The output is tasty, well thought out food combinations, hygienic and with the minimum of packaging, most of which can be recycled.

Aircrafts are all about the trade offs between space, weight and power, and so you can fit maybe 40 meals into a chilled cabinet on wheels that can’t measure much more than 30cm x 100cm x 75cm. Amazing.

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Categories Customers, General

Travel Light, Arrive Light

September 5, 2014 //
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Maybe you’ve seen the film Up in the Air starring the inimitable Mr George Clooney. There’s a scene where his character extolls the virtues of moving effortlessly through travel hubs and getting through security with the minimum of fuss.

I’m not quite that extreme, and I don’t travel nearly as much, but I am an advocate of ‘travel light, arrive light’, especially on those short pesky business trips for 1-5 days. I have a business friend who even for an overnight stay will always check in a bag and for whom the the thought of travelling light brings him out in a rash.

Far from cutting down your options, however, it helps you focus on exactly what you need for the trip, during the day and the evening-into-morning time. More importantly, it makes you learn to respect space, organisation, minimalism and a lack of clutter. This lack of clutter and lack of baggage – the physical seems to transfer to the psychological too – allows you to exit quickly with a skip in your step and whisk yourself away to your destination.

The low cost airlines help you take this approach by charging you for checked in bags and allowing you a regular cabin bag and a smaller bag. The long haul airlines will also let you bring on 2 regular cabin bags. You save money and effort and you get to make better choices with scarce resources. So what if you have to wear the suit jacket on the journey? It makes keeping your vital travel documents secure even easier.

True, you don’t have a contingency plan with this approach, but when was the last time you needed one?

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Categories General

Great Products Don’t Need a Manual

September 3, 2014 //
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We have a vacuum cleaner, as I’m sure you do. It’s quite a well-known brand with a purportedly heavy emphasis on product design. I hate it. I won’t list the myriad reasons why I hate it, because that would be beyond dull. I will mention one though, to illustrate the point of this post.

You have to take off the dust container to empty it, which as far as I’m concerned requires a degree in advanced engineering. There are two buttons to push with helpful arrows on them, which seem to want to work together but which fight with each other and act in opposite directions so that within a matter of moments you’re wanting to wrench it from the base and cast it over your garden wall.

Mrs D bought the vacuum cleaner, and loves it, naturally.

But my point is this: great, well designed products don’t need a manual. Manuals always make me hark back to the bad old days of IT, which are still here, where some smart alec would answer your ‘how do I’ question by telling you to ‘RTFM’, which stands for the profane version of ‘Read the Flipping Manual’.

I don’t want to read the manual. I shouldn’t need to read the manual. Apple have been producing great products since the i-Mac and before. I can remember getting two documents: one is a quick start guide where in 5 easy steps you can learn how to plug in your device and power it up, ready for use; the other is a manual that you only ever need to refer to if you have to troubleshoot or you want to learn some ninja inside moves.

Every product designer should be asking themselves this question: how can I make this product so easy to use the user can just switch it on and pick it up as they go? Try setting that challenge to the folk that produce TV remotes. You might as well lock them in and throw away the key.

Vacuum cleaners can be funny though. Here’s the funniest joke from 2014’s Edinburgh Fringe.

 

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing

When I am One

September 1, 2014 //
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First Birthday Card

First Birthday Card

This is my 154th post, dear reader. More importantly, it’s exactly a year ago that I started the Monday, Wednesday, Friday episodes of the Paul Dilger blog.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it from time to time. I’ve certainly enjoyed writing it. I never did it for the viewing figures or the influence, rather for the discipline and enjoyment behind writing. If I’ve imparted anything useful on the way, then that’s a bonus.

As Eric Morecambe used to say: what do you think of it so far? Rubbish!

I know it’s been an eclectic bag of stuff to date, which is why when I very first started writing it, the byeline ‘Musings on stuff I come into contact with’ seemed appropriate. It still does I think.

I will, however, be giving some thought to whether the topics – and therefore the blog itself – should be more focused and consistent, or remain the rag-bag of ramblings that it has come to be.

As always, dear reader, your views are welcomed.

Talk to you in the second year.

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Categories Communication, General, Language

Simplicity Brings Power

August 29, 2014 //
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As human beings, we have a tendency to overcomplicate things. Sometimes it’s not of our own doing, it’s the way things grow organically when time, people and variables conspire to turn things into a mess.

The last thing you want to do in life or work is create your own Gordian Knot. Simplicity is your guide. If you can distill things into the simple, most important thing, then you get clarity, you can make decisions, and you can execute.

Try these things to bring simplicity and create power and forward motion:

– Get people to explain things to you in terms a 10-year-old would understand, with no jargon or fancy words

– When faced with a large problem or project, break it up into smaller pieces and fix those pieces one at a time. Then you can celebrate the small victories towards the large end goal

– Prioritise or rank the factors you’re dealing with. You want to focus on the major priorities. All the other less important factors floating around are a distraction that stops you seeing the wood for the trees

– When unsure of what to do next, break the process down into a series of steps to get you where you need to be. Then take that next step

– Be continuously aware of your own or external complicating forces. They are the enemies of progress and the thieves of time

Simple is strong and powerful. Complicated is sapping and fearful.

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Categories General, Language, Strategy

It’s Not You, It’s Me

August 27, 2014 //
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A sales proposal is a bit of a misnomer really. It should be called a buy proposal. ‘Here’s how, what, when and why we propose you buy from us.’

I supposed it’s called a sales proposal because most sales proposals start selling from the first line. If you’re not filling in a tender document and are therefore constrained by the order and flow of the information you present, you have 100% control over this document. Sales proposals don’t start with you. They start with your customer.

Next time you write a sales proposal, try this approach:

– First, what is your customer looking to accomplish? What are their goals? They’re not looking to buy what you have, they’re looking for the benefits and achievements that result from buying what you have

– Second, if relevant, what is stopping them from getting to where they want to be? Especially for larger investments, there is usually something that’s stopping them from achieving their goals, otherwise they wouldn’t be spending money with you. There is also an opportunity cost of not fixing the problem if they decide to do nothing

– Third, how have you helped companies with this problem before? Relevant experience in your prospect’s field is very important. They don’t want you learning the job on their time and with their assets

– Fourth, how will what you have uniquely help them achieve their goals? What makes your offering better than the competition, including ‘internal’ or ‘do nothing’ options?

– Fifth, what results will they get from investing in you? You need to demonstrate the planned for value if at all possible

– Sixth, what will this cost them? Simple, clear, unambiguous is the way to go

– Seventh, your call to action. What do you want them to do next? Call you? Have a meeting? Seek further clarification? Place the order? Lead them down the next natural step towards buying from you

The Sales Proposal: here’s what we propose you do, not here’s what we propose we do.

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
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