Archive For: Management

Are You Beside Yourself?

This is my gorgeous wife, beside herself during a dusk walk at Cardinia Reservoir.

Yes, it’s a sneaky little trick you can do when shooting in panorama mode.
Yes, it would be good to be able to clone yourself to get more done.
Yes, it’s not like this in real life … or is it?

Long time readers will know that I am a huge fan of systemising your activities.
Let your processes and systems run the business and your people run the systems.

Now, with some of the newer technologies and apps available, not only do the systems run your business, but you can also automate them so that they run by themselves.

Here are some examples:
Accounting packages – Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks, Sassuu and others all now link directly to your bank to download your statements and based on past activity, will partially reconcile these statements saving you a lot of time.
Social media – Hootsuite, Buffer and some social media channels themselves, allow you to post your news across multiple social media streams at once. MeetEdgar will store your social media entries by category and continue to publish them according to the schedule you set, ad infinitum.
Education – Online learning via video, audio and other modalities allows you to present new knowledge at your speed and convenience while the student absorbs it at THEIR speed and convenience (and level or repetitiveness required).
Your relationship – Just so you know, you have to do this yourself. Once you automate or outsource it, you are in big, BIG trouble! I thought it was important to state this!

It is now possible, even preferred, that you be beside yourself and be able to leverage your skills, knowledge and earning capacity.

So how can you be beside yourself today?

PS For those of you who will be in Melbourne on Sunday 18th September, I am beside myself with excitement as the choir I sing in Mood Swing will be performing.
If you love A Cappella music and want a relaxed and family friendly Sunday afternoon of enjoyment, check out the details here. I would love to see you there.

Check One Two

If you have ever been to a “gig” you will have heard roadies and sound teams up on the microphone, “check one two, check check, one two onnnne two two t t t two”.

Make all the jokes you want about roadies not being able to count above two or some of them struggling to get above one, they actually do this for a reason.

My sound engineer buddy told me that in the phrase “Check one two” you get the main sounds you are tuning your sound system for.

Think about that.

In the “check” you get “ch”, “eh” and “k”.
You get the “w, “u” and “n” in “one” and in “two” you get the hard “t” and the “ooo”.
It also can test across a vocal range and some of the popping you can get on T and P words.

About now you are probably thinking, “who cares, I am not an audio engineer!”

Think about what you do. What do you do to test that everything works as it should? Do you have a standard way to cross check your output for quality?

Many spreadsheets I have worked on over the years have had erroneous formulas in them that I only picked up by doing some simple cross checks of totals. From my auditing days (a long time back) I picked up the 10% sample test. Rigorously testing 10% of my data to be sure it was accurate. Some at the beginning, some at the end, as well as random middle samples.

At the very least a spell check, grammar check and reading important correspondence out aloud helps me test the flow and effectiveness of the piece.

What about you [First Name]? How to you test your work? Even if “Check one two” doesn’t do it, something else will.

PS Click the image above to see a 70 second video from my recent Gala Dinner hosting for Master Plumbers with more on this.

PPS If you want to see a real gig in action, the choir I sing in “Mood Swing”, has a performance in Melbourne on Sun Sept 18. Click here for details and tickets.

Who’s Your Customer?

It can be confusing in business today to truly understand who your customer is:

Is it the person buying something from you?
Is it the person supplying you something to sell?
Is it the person who services what you are selling?
Is it your team mates who enable you to service your end customer?

In truth, your customer is all of these people but the key customer or the primary customer who you need to look after is the one you earn your money from.

The person who gives you money needs that little bit extra attention because if they are not happy and go elsewhere, all of your other customers suffer.

The agent managing our rental property has had a few issues of late. Their communication has been poor, they have not acted on instructions, their change over of property managers has had a significant impact and their overall service level has been far below what was promised.

When I raised this situation with the property manager and their direct manager, I received excuses, blame, extended descriptions of what had happened but no apology and no sign of what was to happen next to correct the situation.

As you can imagine, I am less than enamoured with this agent and I will most likely take my business elsewhere.

No doubt I have contributed to the mistakes and need to shoulder some of the responsibility. Having said that, it is important to note that while the customer is not always right, they are always your customer and should be treated as such.

So who is your customer and what can you do for them today?

Are You Ready For The End?

The End is coming!!!

OK – so it is just the end of the financial year. Nothing too dramatic but it can still be messy if you are not prepared.

Now many people roll their eyes and then glaze over when people start talking about finances and year end. So let me reach out and give you a virtual slap on the side of the head.

THIS STUFF IS IMPORTANT!

Too many people delegate their finances and then end up in deep water because they did not pay them enough attention.

You don’t have to do it but you have to understand it. If you don’t understand then keep asking questions until you do.

This is particularly important for small to medium enterprises.

So here are a few things you need to do (and what I spent Sunday doing).

Get your accounts up to date
Look at how you will distribute your profits
Consider what depreciation you will be doing
Consider if there are any significant purchases you may need to make prior to year end
Consider if you are paying yourself a wage or a dividend
Ensure you have enough cash on hand to pay your June BAS (you do set some money aside from each sale don’t you?)
Talk with your accountant NOW about what you may need to do to prepare for year end
Read your Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet statements and make sure you understand them

If you are an employee, you won’t need to do all of these but it is still important to consider if you want personal tax deductions as to what they may be.

You may also choose to take the time to consider your financial position and net worth to look at if it has growth since last year and what you need to do about that in the coming year.

The business maxim of “What gets measured gets improved” has never been more relevant than to your own financial situation.

So are you Ready For The End?

NOTE: This is not considered advice. Every persons situation is different. Please be sure to contact your own financial and business advisers to assess your situation before taking action that may affect your financial situation. We assume no responsibility for any action or lack of action on your behalf based on this legendary and rather nice article. Come on. Let’s get serious. You have to take responsibility for yourself and your own situation. I still can’t believe you have read all the way to here. Ok, go and do something fun now.

How Do You See It?

This weekends Certified Speaker Professional Summit was held in Denver Colorado.

I got so excited because on the second day IT SNOWED!

Now the others at the conference were less than excited. Snow could mean delays, flight cancellations and missed appointments.

While both perspectives are valid and based on difference experiences, one caused less stress than others.

Some of those with internal flights started worrying about cancellations straight away and others took the approach, “we see how it is tomorrow” and turned their focus on the sessions at hand.

Every situation has different perspectives. Some highlight your fears, others your dreams and some reflect the situation as you see it.

No one perspective is better than the other but some do make your life easier and less stressful.

What about what is going on in your life and business? Do you see the problem, the alternative or some other perspective?

So how do you see it?
PS I am celebrating my birthday on Tuesday. To help celebrate I have a gift for you. But I can’t deliver it until I return in May. So keep your eye out for the gift in May!

Take Me Home

One of the key things you need to know as a speaker (or as a budding rock star) is that the audience want to take you home.

They may have only heard you for an hour or two but there is a connection and they want to get more info from you or hear more of your stories or find out more about your message.

This is true regardless of your “status” in the market place. There will be audience members that just connect with you, even if you are not the headliner legend in your field. For example, my lovely wife and I went to “Burn the Floor” at Crown Casino on Friday. It was a very good show with lots of dancing and some great music. A very solid casino kind of show. Everything done really well and done within budget.

But they still had a merchandise stand with posters, CDs, trinkets and clothing. At the end of the show there was a significant crowd there all wanting to buy their merchandise.

So as a speaker, educater, professional what do you have that lets your audience take you home?

Following in the footsteps of others from Professional Speakers Australia (The association for experts who speak) I have created over thirty differents discs (some CD, some DVD and some template discs), two books, two e-courses and many other products. After presenting at the Professional Speakers Australia event on the weekend on how to create product like this, some of the audience wanted to take me home. Having this product meant that they could.

If someone wants to take you or your company home, how do you make that happen?

What’s On Your Mind?

It was a big weekend after an even bigger week.

Friday I was hosting a client “talk show” to profile their new and upcoming software releases for their top 70 clients. There was a teenage birthday. Saturday had meetings reviewing the annual residential and future direction on similar events as well as catching up with other training and video production colleagues. Sunday was hang out with my gorgeous wife in the morning, big dog walk and then a few hours of finances and a BAS statement.

Phew!

What better way to chill out than to take the beast for a fang up to Drouin only 75 km away. (If you are not sure, click here to see where it is on Google Maps.)

At our recent residential retreat, Therese Sheedy was instrumental in guiding us through what it mean to be mindful and how that benefits you, your energy levels and your overall health. Motrobike riding is a great way to be mindful.

The secret of mindfulness is to be only thinking about what is happening here and now. If you don’t do that on a bike, you crash!

For me it was great to smell the countryside, be fully aware of the traffic around me (including the dude who was speeding and cut me off), and think of nothing but what I needed to do to keep safe. I didn’t even know where I was going. It took me awhile to decide and only then did I realised I had missed the turn off. No problems – I set a new destination of Drouin and just kept going.

So What?

Ok, so I get you don’t really care that I have gone off on a motorbike ride.

Here is the point: I took time out to forget the rest of the world, the rest what was happening in my life and become a Human Being and not a Human Doing. Not only does that charge my batteries it also makes me easier to be around, more grateful for what I am already experiencing in life and better able to manage the issues that I am facing.

So how do you get present?

How do you let go of everything around you and just “be”?

It is incredibly important to empty your mind at times, so what mechanism will you use to do that?

What’s Your Policy?

A few years ago my good friend Simon told me about a recruiting policy that the company he worked for had. It wasn’t a written policy but it was a cultural policy. That is, everyone knew about it and there was an understanding that it had to be met by all applicants.

I was talking with Natasa, a speaking colleague on Friday and she has the exact same policy for her clients. She and her business partner actually wrote theirs down in long form but the title of the policy and it’s intent is the same.

So what is the policy?

Quite simply it’s “No dickheads“.

What that means for Simon and Natasa is that any potential employee or client automatically goes through the scan of “are they a dickhead?” If the answer is yes then they do not get the job or become a client. It is a very simple way of formalising a gut feel or a vibe that the person you are dealing with is not going to be fun to be around.

Do you have a policy?

With all of the people that you deal with on social media, in real life, at work, in your business, at events, we need to be able to choose quickly as to whether we want to engage with them or not. The No Dickhead policy is an easy tool to help you choose who you invest your time and energy with.

So what’s your policy?

PS I came across this excellent list of 30 Improv Rules that Lead to a Happier Life. It is an excellent list of life policies to consider as well.

Can You Sleep at Night?

Ethics are so important in business, yet also so boring and dull. Most people can’t identify their ethics or what drives them so how can they make the right decisions?

A recent article regarding the Dick Smith company talked about how venture capitalists made huge amounts of money. But at what cost? They essentially stripped Dick Smith of all its assets and sold it off to an unsuspecting investors (typically Mum and Dads who know the brand). It is now in the control of administrators. While the vanture capitalists made a stack of money for the few, what damage to the many?

A recent Forbes article talks about how a recent Gallup poll rate corporate executives near the bottom when measured on ethics and honesty. It goes on to show how the ethical approach is the more successful long term. That business is seen to lack ethics and are not to be trusted is a poor indictment on businesses today.

I make my decisions based on my core values. Those are to Inspire, Energise, Influence and Have Fun. They guide to do what is right for me and to better serve others. Those who have registered for the 2016 Kick Start later this month will go through the Values exercise to determine what counts for them.

So what about you? What counts for you? How are your ethics? What do you do when no one is watching? What do you base your decision making process on?

Do people trust you, but more importantly, can you sleep at night?

It’s Finals Time

So how was your weekend? Were you one of the many that watched one of the football finals?
You had your pick of the bunch this weekend! Aussie Rules, Rugby League and there was even some other form of rugby happening in the UK. In Victoria, we even had a public holiday for the parade of the AFL Grand Final teams the day before the final (I am still not sure why).

No matter which game you may have watched, the look of jubilation and achievement on the victors faces, holding aloft their trophy was pretty cool. They had strived, trained and sacrificed to get to this spot and they deserved the win.

Here’s the thing. That team that came second place, they had also strived, trained and sacrificed. They probably deserved to win just as much.

When you think about it, even the third, fourth and fifth teams had strived, trained and sacrificed.

So while the striving, training and sacrificing are important, it is performing under pressure that counts. Being able to do what you said you would, regardless of your situation.

When is it Finals Time for you? When do you need to perform under pressure and how can you best prepare for it?

How Good Are You?

Successful people often operate under a cover of feeling “not good enough”.

Many corporate leaders (particularly women) are expecting a knock on the door and their leaders to come in saying, “we know all about you. Who do you think you are to be holding this position?”

Not surprisingly, this never happens. In fact, it is usually the opposite. They usually achieve more and receive praise from their peers and superiors.

STILL they doubt themselves.

The reason they are successful is that they do not let this seed of doubt stop them from taking the action they need to. They also acknowledge their insecurities as well as their success.

It’s ok to feel “not good enough” just don’t let the feeling control you.

So, how good are you?

Bringing Home the Bacon

Image: SauceOnPurpose.com

This Friday, I am delighted to be filling in for Jacki Mitchell on her award winning show Taking Care of Business.

When I asked my social media contacts what did they want me to talk about, there was a resounding reply of “BACON”.

As many people know, I am a huge fan of bacon (new research shows it keeps you young too!) but I thought that listeners may be more interested in Bringing Home the Bacon.

It is one thing to talk about sales, marketing, strategy, productivity, business plans and so on. What counts is actually earning money.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a firm believer that SUCCESS is measured by far more than just money, but as the late great Kevin Merry (my dad) used to say to me, “it’s not a sin to be poor, just damn inconvenient”.

How good are you at Bringing Home the Bacon?
Do you bring home enough bacon?
What are you doing to provide better value to your employer and customers?

There are always ways to acquire more and better bacon if you need it. What are you doing about your bacon supply?

PS My apologies to any vegetarians for this image and bacon concept

PPS Join me on Friday 10th April 2015 on RPPFM (you can stream it) at 11am to hear about one of my favourite businesses The Farmers Larder (they make real bacon) as well as tips on how to turn Linked In contacts in to high quality bacon.

Are You Really There?

Registration Desk

I had the great joy of working at a client’s three-day conference and trade show last week as Master MC and Exhibition Host.

It was a huge success on so many levels. But still…

It is a personal bugbear of mine that companies pay large money to sponsor an event or exhibit an event and they get the wrong people on the stands.

While this was a great show, so many of the exhibitors were not really there. They were on their phone, on their laptop, chatting to colleagues, doing anything but being present and focussing on the delegates – THEIR TARGET MARKET!

It is really simple, don’t take your phone to the stand. If you need to be near your phone all day you are the wrong person to be there so get someone else. Use the conference as a marketing tool by creating a special out of office message.

Leave a phone message that states; “Hi you have called YOUR NAME. I can’t take your call because I am hosting a stand at the XYZ Conference. Come and see me at stand 123 or leave a detailed message and I will get back to you once the show closes for the day.”

Do what it takes to focus on your target market – the whole reason you are there!

What about you?

Whether it is on a trade show floor, chatting with friends or meeting with colleagues, are you really there?

Ethics, What Ethics?

One of my gorgeous wife’s friends is looking to buy a house.

After a lot of searching, she found one she liked. Like all good homeowners, she did her research. She had the conveyancer review the contract of sale/section 32 and she also had a property inspection.

For those that don’t know, a property inspection is where a qualified inspector comes and does a detailed inspection of the house and reports back to you important information about it. It is a valuable report that can prevent you from buying a house loaded with potential disasters. As with all transactions, the report is the property of the person who paid for it.

The day before the auction, my friend received a call from the person who did the inspection advising her that the real estate agent had contacted them and asked for a copy of the report so they could display it as part of the auction documentation.

Whaaaaa….

The inspector did the ethical thing and said it was not their call to make and the owner of the report (our friend) was the only one who could make that decision. The agent then advised they would contact my friend – which they never did. I suspect that they knew after paying hundreds of dollars for a report, our friend would not be willing to give it away to her competing bidders.

Here is the outcome of poor business ethics:

A formal complaint can be made against you to your industry body (as will happen in this case)
You will never get work from this potential customer again
Your reputation will be sullied in the market place
Your whole industry will be drawn into disrepute
You won’t sleep well at night

What about you?

How important are ethics to you and your business? How often are they discussed in your team meetings? What can you do to be sure that everyone on your team acts ethically even when no one is watching?

Unleash the Beast

Meet Winston the oh so cute and slightly anxious toy poodle.

A couple of days ago I heard him making a funny noise so I came out of my office to see him like this. He was so proud of his hunter skills.

He had found, caught and killed a mouse.

It is the last thing I really expected of him. He was strutting around so proud of himself. He had tapped into his hidden wolf ancestral skill set and accomplished the unexpected.

Have you ever done this? Not killed a mouse but tapped into something you never knew or forgot you had and achieved something spectacular?

Maybe it was a sporting event. A hole in one, an ungettable slam dunk that you got or a forehand smash that went exactly where you wanted it. It could have been in business. Negotiating the unnegotiable, meeting an unreachable deadline or leading a team to “victory” in a manner that everyone was in awe of the achievement?

Like Winston, it is attacking the situation and never giving up. Continuing on even when things are not happening just as you want them that will bring you to the achievement. Tapping in to your internal motivation with a focus on your end goal.

Keep going and unleash your inner beast, you may just surprise yourself!

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