Posts Tagged ‘Business Owner’
Is Mary Portas bottom line in the red?
Will Kinky Knickers become a viable business?
I had intended to write about each of the three episodes of Mary’s Bottom Line, the TV programme funded by Channel 4 about retail guru Mary Portas and her attempt to revive British garment manufacturing by producing a range of British made knickers.
I found myself so underwhelmed by the programmes that are lacking anything even vaguely resembling a real business that I was overcome by ennui – hence the delay and only two posts.
Let people do the job you hire them for.
As predicted in the first episode, the unfortunate misfit apprentice was sacked. The young woman’s behaviour apparently “put the whole enterprise at risk” but it was actually Mary’s insistence that she was hired, against all the advice of her staff, that posed the real risk.
The lesson all business owners can learn from this is if you hire people to do a job they need to be allowed to do it, even if this means making mistakes. Our job is to help them learn from mistakes, not prevent them from happening. A business owner who swoops in and overrules decisions will never grow a competent and committed team. When the boss’s decision turns out to be a big mistake it doesn’t do a lot for credibility or morale.
Communicate, delegate and check
After interfering in a delegated task, Mary then went to the other extreme and abdicated responsibility. While she swanned around getting orders and hugs from high profile bosses of retail chains (can you imagine the publicity if they’d said *no*?) and rocked up at No 10 to get a personal assurance from the PM that he would “do everything in his power” to make sure the ‘Made in Britain’ status was granted, her workers were languishing without essential supplies.
They were waiting for her decisions. She assumed they were getting on with it.
Delegation is an art and requires clear communication and checks.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
Also flagged up in the first episode was that the only remaining manufacturer of stretch lace in the UK would manage to muck up the order and, yes, you’ve guessed it “put the whole enterprise at risk”. The lesson from this is to plan for all eventualities.
Having one supplier of critical services or products is risky. Having one person in your business who is indispensible is risky. More than fire, flood, computer crashes or other risks, the risk of *one* is the greatest. Always try to have a back up.
Plan, plan and plan some more
Only after the staff had been hired, the patterns made, the lace ordered and the production started did the critical process of pricing and branding (apparently) take place.
There are business plans and business plans. The sort that is concocted with the aid of a crystal ball to get funding or investment at the start of a venture usually never sees the light of day after its purpose has been accomplished but that doesn’t mean that other plans, real, live, working plans aren’t needed and used on a daily basis to keep the enterprise on track.
Business is about making the numbers work
Its easy to get caught up in the emotional roller coaster, the urge to do good, to make a difference and power an idea through with sheer chutzpah and force of personality. True entrepreneurs are ace at this. People respond to emotions: they’ll follow you, throw their commitment in to your idea and buy into your passion but if the numbers don’t stack up, the business will fail, no matter how many people are passionate about it.
Profit is the only measure of a successful business.
Mary has a business partner who does the behind the scenes planning an managing. The factory she is using has a managing director and a team of number crunchers. Being a figurehead is great, being an entrepreneur or a visionary is great but most of the success of a business comes from the very unglamorous careful planning and managing of resources.
Spot trends
One of the really positive lessons to come out of this programme is the importance of spotting trends and jumping on bandwagons. We too often use historical evidence to plan our business tactics. We look at past trends, what sold, what worked and try to replicate it but the stroke of genius comes when we can spot a future trend and exploit it as it unfolds.
It seems that there is a real resurgence of manufacturing in the UK as materials, labour and transport costs make manufacturing abroad less cost effective.
It may be that there really will be a revival – a trend that started before this show was made, but guess who will get the kudos? Maybe the final lesson is:
Be an opportunist
What are your views – leave me a comment below!
Related post: The holes in Mary Portas’ knickers
Posted in A-Z of Business Success | 
Tags: Apprentice, Bottom Line, Business Owner, Business Owners, Channel 4, Committed Team, Credibility, Ennui, Garment, Hype, Insistence, Mary Portas, Misfit, Mortals, Personal Assurance, Retail Chains, Swamp, Tv Ratings, Viable Business, Young Woman | 
2 Comments »
What’s so good about a MasterMind Group?
A MasterMind Group is sometimes known as a peer group mentoring forum or a Boardroom forum.
These groups simulate the many different roles that it takes to run a successful business and giving a business owner independent advice from people with no hidden agenda.
I often get asked, “Why would anyone want to join a mentoring group with people who know nothing about each other’s businesses?”
There are three excellent answers to this:
1) The product or service a business delivers may be different but the process of running and growing a business has many generic activities. Almost everyone who starts a business has had experience of other businesses and brings many skills and lots of expertise to a group.
2) The process used in the most successful MasterMind Groups produces a situation where solutions are created from the combined efforts of the group members and do not rely on one person’s pre-existing knowledge.
and
3) One of the major benefits of a well run MasterMind Group is accountability. The members commit to certain actions and keep each other on track.
If people have heard of MasterMind Groups its usually in relation to Napoleon Hill’s book “Think and Grow Rich”.
Hill established that many of the successful people he interviewed in the 1930s attributed part of their success to meeting with a peer group on a regular basis to discuss ideas and create new solutions to problems. He describes the process as ” When two people come together to discuss ideas it is a s though a third person appears with ideas that the others would not have thought of on their own.”
What do a potter, a metalworker, a doctor an engineer and a preacher have in common?
There are many wonderful examples of MasterMind Groups working to create success for their members but for me, one of the most powerful examples occurred long before Napoleon Hill wrote his famous book.
When the potter is Josiah Wedgewood, the metalworker is Matthew Boulton, the doctor is Erasmus Darwin, the engineer is James Watt and the preacher is Joseph Priestly the ideas produced quite literally changed the world.
Steam trains, electricity, canals, mass manufacturing, the discovery of new gases, processes and materials accompanied dramatic social and educational reforms in the middle of the 18th Century that brought about the Industrial Revolution and great wealth but for the original group of friends the support they gave each other was crucial.
Known as the Lunar Society because they met when the moon was full to aid their journeys, these men worked together to break down physical, social and educational barriers.
The internet has brought down even more of these barriers and made it easy to collaborate, to produce great ideas and to take the idea of MasterMinds to new levels.
When Napoleon Hill wrote “Think and Grow Rich” he meant think as in develop the ability to think, to process ideas and solve problems. By rich he meant not just monetary wealth but knowledge, discipline and fulfilment of potential.
All of this is achieved by mastery of the mind.
A Master Mind Group is exactly that: an opportunity for you to develop mastery of your mind, to think and grow rich with the support of a peer group.
If you would like to join us or have questions about how to get involved, just give me a call on 07711 705038.
Posted in Mastermind Groups | Tags: 1930s, Boardroom, Business Owner, Generic Activities, Group Members, Growing A Business, Hidden Agenda, Independent Advice, Josiah Wedgewood, Mastermind Group, Mastermind Groups, Matthew Boulton, Mentoring Group, Napoleon Hill, New Solutions, Peer Group, Preacher, Successful Business, Third Person, Well Run | 2 Comments »
Question Time
David F Smallman, Managing Partner of Pathfinder Team Consulting, invited participants in The Inspired Group to ask him any question about business. These are his answers:
Q. What advice would you give someone in their first year of business?
A. Don’t lose the passion. Ever. Not even in your 42nd year.
Q. Is it wise to use an untested business model?
A. No. Get it tested.
Q. How do you make sure a new idea doesn’t get stolen before you develop it?
A. Keep it out of the public domain until you’ve had it patented, trade marked etc. Non disclosure agreements are hard to enforce.
Q. What is the best way to price your services?
A. Price the project according to the value to the customer. This may mean that you charge two very different prices for the same work. Charge 25% up front, then two further instalments of 25% and 50%. In over 40 years in business we’ve never had a significant bad debt or had to waste time chasing money. Cash flow is vitally important and this way, your expenses are covered before you start.
Q. What is the single most important ingredient in creating a successful business?
A. Passion (as above)
Q. What one channel would you choose to market a business?
A. It depends on the type of business:
Manufacturing – distribution / sub contractors
Service Provision – figure out how your customers/clients like to buy and meet them there
Accounting / Financial services – traditional routes are still working
Q. What will the future economic power of the UK be like?
A. Look out for a debate between David and Phil Jones of Excitant Ltd on this topic. David recommends reading The Big Short by Michael Lewis.
Q. If the three essentials of business are producing the product or service, managing and marketing, what time should a business owner spend on each.
A. In a 60 hour week (which most business owners admit to working)
Marketing 55% – 33 hours
Making 35% – 21 hours
Managing 10% - 6 hours
Anyone spending more than 6 hours managing a business needs to streamline or outsource and ask themselves if they using this as an excuse not to do the marketing.
Similarly, when marketing, use the same equation:
Existing customers 55%
Short term prospects 33%
Long term prospects 10%
Q. Should we strive to continuously make our services or products better?
A. Excellence can sometimes be the death of a business. Quality is what is good enough to satisfy the customer.
Q. Is social media providing businesses that use it with an advantage?
A. Many big businesses just haven’t got it yet but many smaller businesses are using Social Media to great advantage so it gives them an edge in engaging, listening and providing what customers want.
There are more questions and answers on the LinkedIn discussion http://lnkd.in/Hw4QVb
Questions that David didn’t have time to answer:
Is there a particular hobby or pastime associated with business success?
Is there a difference between leadership and management? (See http://lnkd.in/xMdyjG for this discussion)
What is the best strategy to cope with a business failure?
Posted in 12 Steps to Success | Tags: Bad Debt, Business Model, Business Owner, Business Owners, Cash Flow, Economic Power, Excitant, Financial Services, Instalments, Michael Lewis, Money Cash, Non Disclosure Agreements, Participants, Passion, Public Domain, Question Time, Service Provision, Smallman, Successful Business, Time David | No Comments »
Twitter Business for Beginners
Can you really get business from Twitter?
(3rd update Nov 2010)
“Yes you can, and this is how.”
Business Basics
Twitter can do what every business owner wants and needs: it can allow you to listen to what potential clients and customers are looking for, need and think and it can be the means by which you connect with them directly as individuals and create rewarding relationships. In Twitter terms you ‘follow’ the people you want to listen to and attract the people you want to talk to as your “followers” (more of this later).
Ignore media reports
You probably need to ignore most of the media reports about Twitter which are either focused on celebrities and totally irrelevant or intent on rubbishing a new media that threatens the established ways of reporting world events. Neither of these viewpoints has much to do with using Twitter for business.
Getting started is easy
If you haven’t already got a Twitter account go to www.twitter.com and follow the instructions. Do write down the password you use for your account as you’ll need this for all sorts of applications that come later. It is essential to personalize your profile. Use your own name rather than a company name but make it short, simple and memorable.
Your bio
This is often the first thing people look at when they are deciding whether or not to follow you. First impressions count and you will be recognised both on-line and in face to face meetings from your avatar picture so its really important to use a good one (close up head shot is best) and don’t change it too often. People form relationships with people not companies so don’t use a company logo.
You will be found by people doing searches so include your nearest city location and the keywords that will make it easy to find you.
Include a link to your web site or blog but also some information that is not just about business. For the same reason make sure you turn off the “Protect Updates” option. There is no point in using any social networks if your aim is to be private. Lighting a beacon fire or using semaphore is likely to be more private than any communication via the internet.
Who to follow
Use the search facility or the ‘find friends’ option to start following people you are interested in. Another way to find people to follow is to use www.twellow.com (the Twitter Yellow pages) or www.tweepsearch.com – a way to find people based on keywords in their bio.
You may find that some of the people you follow will follow you back or random people will find you. You will get an email to let you know who they are. If any of these look like spam accounts or have content that you find distasteful (remember Twitter is completely uncensored) you can use the “block” facility. No-one knows if they’ve been blocked or by whom. It just means that you won’t see their tweets and they won’t see yours.
If you don’t enjoy your Twitter experience you can change it by following different people. Think of it as leaving one party and going to another one!
Sending your first tweet
To send your first tweet type something in the box at the top of the page – max 140 characters. This will go to all the people who have already decided to follow you. What you’ll see on your home page now is a stream of tweets for the people you are following. Underneath each message you will see options that let you ‘favourite, re-tweet or reply’. ’Favourite’ stores that tweet in the “favorites” on your Twitter homepage. ‘Re-tweet or RT’ sends the message on to your followers and ‘reply’ means you answer the person who sent the tweet – but publicly. This will put an @ symbol in the text box followed by the twittername of the person you are replying to. Type your message and send. Your tweet will be seen by that person and also by everyone else who is following both of you.
Jump in
When you see a conversation or a comment that interests you, just join in. They are public not private and most people are happy to hear new comments. It’s sometimes hard to follow conversations because people dip in and out but don’t let that bother you. Anything really interesting will probably come round again. Think of it like a party in a big house – you can’t join in every conversation at the same time.
If you want to send a private message to someone (not often necessary) use the Message option on the top menu bar. You can see all the DMs you’ve sent and received on this page. You can also see all the replies that have your @twittername in them. Always try to reply to these as they’re from people who are talking to you or about you!
What to tweet about
Join in as many conversations as possible, establish relationships, be as interesting as possible and your number of followers will build. Unless you are really, really funny or the circumstances are exceptional please spare us weather reports, your tea making habits, ablutions and health reports. Think about standing in a room full of people where you can be overheard by anyone – would you spew out quotes or endlessly repeat everything that others are saying? I hope not!
Selling on Twitter
As with all networking you need to get to know people before you start selling. An intriguing link to a subject on your blog or website will start to build an interest in what you do but if you blast out sales messages or are just plain boring you’ll lose followers pretty quickly.
When you get a really interesting tweet or a request for help, for example: “anyone know a great packaging company/hotel/printer?” etc., you can re-tweet the message using the re-tweet button. You’ll build a lot of goodwill and friends by re-tweeting. A good strategy is to send as many tweets as possible that other people think are worthwhile re-tweeting. Some people seem to think that if they re-tweet the millions of inspirational quotes that come their way their name will get re-tweeted too but if they’re not original or really funny you’ll just bore and annoy your followers and lose them.
Remember that the people you are interacting with aren’t virtual people. They are real people in a virtual meeting place so behave as you would if they were in the same room as you.
Automation
Some people use a system called autofollow which means if someone follows you, you automatically follow them back and if they unfollow you, you automatically unfollow them. This is generally only used by people who care more about the numbers than the quality of the people they follow. It’s easy to get thousands of followers if you choose to follow thousands of people but you are probably following a lot of automated accounts that just spew out sales messages rather than having meaningful conversations with people. Its better to choose who you follow by looking at their profile. If I get an automated Direct Message (DM) I generally unfollow that account as I’m not interested in anyone who treats me like a number instead of an individual.
There are lots of scams offering ways to get more followers but these often link to automated systems that take over your account so treat anything like that with extreme caution.
That’s the basics covered and I’d recommend you spend a few minutes every day getting comfortable with those and build your followers before looking at what else is going on.
Beyond the basics
You’ll find that people on Twitter talk about the best way to use it, the various applications and options and send out links to guides and tips. This is the easiest way to learn about all the various ways that have developed, usually independently of Twitter, to make it even better. If you see someone doing something or using an application you’re interested in, just ask them how to do the same.
A couple of the most popular free applications to keep track of your account are TweetDeck www.tweetdeck.com and Hootsuite www.hootsuite.com which allows you to arrange your twitter stream into groups. You can group together people whose tweets you definitely don’t want to miss so that they all appear in one column. You can see all the tweets that mention you in a separate column. All remaining tweets will just stream past in another column and you can dip in and out of those conversations as you choose.
If you use Facebook and LinkedIn you can set these pages to appear on these application too and manage all your accounts from one place.
There are various other applications for PCs, Macs and mobile phones. You can use some mobile phones to tweet messages and photographs http://twitpic.com The best way to find out about these is to listen to others, experiment & play until you find what suits you.
One of the easiest and quickest ways to get more business using Twitter is to have a blog that is configured to update Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks whenever you post a new entry. As long as the blog subjects are of interest to your followers they will RT these links and lots of people will visit your blog and help you to build a reputation as an expert in your field and make you easier to find on Google and other search engines.
There are lots of useful tools at www.tweetlater.com including setting up automated tweets and numerous analytical tools at www.twitteranalyzer.com. Again, use these with caution or your will either bore people or annoy them and lose followers.
How it works for me
I have been using Twitter since January 2008 and choose the people I follow very carefully. Because much of my business is local I started out by selecting local business owners and connecting with people I already know.
However, I quickly found and joined in some really interesting conversations about things that are nothing to do with my business and started following and being followed by a wide variety of people from different countries that include writers, artists, journalists, photographers, musicians and TV producers. I’ve learned a lot, expanded my interests, made friends and laughed so much that at times I couldn’t see to type.
I’ve built my business connections because all of these people are connected to others who have been drawn into the conversations. I’ve been invited to write for other people’s blogs and I’ve had blog posts re-tweeted by people who have no interest in my business but because they’ve grown to like me they promote me to their followers and I do the same for them.
As a result I’ve had more people attend my workshops, mastermind groups and other events and I am building a reputation that goes way beyond the local people that I regularly do business with. I’ve also been invited to join and contribute to a private international discussion group of people who value my business ideas.
As all this activity is free, the only investment is my time which is a lot less than any efforts I could have made to get my business known by so many people.
I only ever tweet from my PC, never from my phone and I’ve never posted a twitpic. I use TweetDeck and HootSuite as I find they both have features that are useful. I follow about 1100 people (its too many really, I need to prune the list!) and am followed by about 2,000 people. However, the people who are following me have between them hundreds of thousands of followers so the number of people I am able to reach goes way beyond my own account. My account is a small one by many Twitter standards but it’s manageable and gives me great results.
If you’d like to know more about using Twitter I’d be very happy to help. Just email me or send me a Tweet http://twitter.com/AnnHawkins/
This article was first published in Aug 09 and updated in June 2010 and Nov 2010
