Après le Déluge, What?

The Avalanche is dissipated.

I am close to completing the mail-out of nearly 400 cards celebrating the Christmas season. It looks like that task will be accomplished by the end of November.

Then what?

My plan is to take a break from mailing out material and spend December on the phones.

I think I might phone every person on my list to wish them Merry Christmas.

It can be a short call.

For one thing it will establish voice contact with those I’ve not previously called.

For another it will allow me to determine which of all these new numbers are direct lines, and which are not.

It will help if I have something up my sleeves to offer to them. Such as a PDF file I can send by email.

Talk to Me!

Budgeting with No Cash-Flow

It matters not whether we are talking dollars or hours; it is the same principle.

Let’s Talk Dollars

My neighbour complains that she’s always short of cash, but she has a regular job, gets paid each fortnight. To me it’s an easy no-brainer: Sit down and map out your expenses; trim some. Cook at home instead of ordering take-out, and so on.

Me? I live from cheque to cheque. Never know when the next cheque is coming in. low bank-balance, the usual.

Yet I budget my dollars better than my neighbour.

How?

I sit down at the start of the month and work out what I absolutely have to pay; typically rent, telephone, internet, postage. Food.

If I have cash to cover those, I write the cheques and send them out. Then I economize for the rest of the moth.

If I don’t have the cash to cover all my creditors – I phone them up and tell them so; they appreciate knowing I’ve not skipped the country, and I sleep a little easier at nights.

Let’s Talk Hours

My friend complains that there just aren’t enough hours in the day. She’s wrong.

There are 24 hours in each day, always have been, always will be. (This is not the place to discuss the moon’s gravitational impact on tides and their frictional impact on the earth’s rotation; we know we know that stuff …)

Like you, I woke up this morning with another 24 hours.

Like you, I get to choose what to do.

If I find that I need twenty wide-awake hours to get through the load, I decide that that can’t be done, and I shed tasks until the hours come down to a reasonable level.

Then I start work.

First task is a short email to a couple of people advising them that they WON’T receive an update today after all.

That they won’t receive an update is a pre-ordained fact; I don’t have that much time.

Letting them know in advance that updates won’t arrive allows them to plan their day accordingly.

When you don’t have the resources, managing the resources you do have is doubly critical.

Talk to Me!

Cell Phone for Freebie

Rick needs help with his system, and he phoned me.

He will buy himself an external drive and download RoboCopy and install that then run it to mass-copy everything from his failing hard drive to his new 2.3TB external.

I’m glad, because too many people leave the backup until “After I’ve tidied up the hard drive a bit”, and the hard drive fails terminally while they are tidying up.

I’m SO pleased that I’ve told him I’ll have my cell phone with me tonight when I go up the street to fix Betty’s TV.

Why am I on call for a freebie?

Why not?

It defines my level of service, plus chances are Rick won’t call anyway.

But it will make an impression on him, and he’ll remember that, and talk about it.

P.S.

Rick did call me around 9:30 p.m. while I was adjusting Betty’s TV, and over the phone we wrote a little batch file and he saw it start to run, and learned how to adapt it, so life just got better!

Talk to Me!

Does Staying-In-Touch Work? - 2

2011/06/03 11:18 Mailed Goddamn.pdf //

2011/08/10 11:14 mailed Lawyers.pdf //

2011/10/12 08:09 mailed Excel.pdf //

2011/10/13 15:39 I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. //

Does Staying-In-Touch Work?

You Betcha!

The four entries above are taken from the memo/comments field of a single contacts-database record.

In June I mailed a one-sheet 2-page flyer with an article I’ve written (about Goals, Objectives and so on)

Two months later I mailed another flyer, this one about using The Prospector to generate more revenue from existing clients.

While a third flyer was winging its way out, my contact sent me an unsolicited invitation to join his network.

Is it possible that two flyers (the third crossed in the mail) made contact?

Does Staying-In-Touch Work?

You Betcha!

There is a bonus here: If my objective was to “touch” this contact once every two months, I can now send an eMail and advance the follow-up date by two months; that is, my response to his LinkedIn invitation surely counts as “Keeping my name in front of him”.

Talk to Me!

Who is this Guy Chris Greaves? -2

Two months ago in Who is this Guy Chris Greaves? I issued some crude statistics on what a CEO would see if he received a mailing from me and decided to check me out by using the Google search engine.

I have re-issued the search with these results:

Quantities may vary if you repeat the search, depending on the date, and on the size of your monitor screen.

The results can be summarized as follows

Name Only	& Toronto	& Mississauga
4 out 7 or 57%	10 out of 10 or 100%	Top 6 out of 10 or 60%

The only change is in the Mississauga rankings (I live in Toronto, but right on the border of Mississauga), so this is an improvement, but not by much.

The good news is that “Arguments with the 407-ETR” has dropped off the radar; that sort of thing isn’t likely to impress a CEO at first glance.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been working diligently at tweeting my blogs, products and services, but I know I need to get more out there.

It’s a process, not an act!

Talk to Me !

Business Tweeting

Almost a year ago I documented my Introduction to the World of Tweeting, and am gradually getting a grip, as we say in the trade.

One of the subtleties is recognizing that my target audience tends to be online during business hours, and tends not to be so attentive outside those hours.

So I’ve tried to tweet about important topics – new services, new products, strong blog postings of mine and so on - during business hours, and outside of business hours I schedule those tweets to appear early in the next business day.

In the early hours of this morning I realized that I can still keep my name in front of people by using this slack time-of-day to retweet other users tweets, thereby getting myself into their good books (“Thanks for ReTweeting me!”), without cluttering up the twitter space during business hours.

Like I said, subtle but, I believe, significant.

Talk to Me!

A Stamp Date Stamp

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

I’m feeling quite pleased with myself.

In Staying Ahead of the Avalanche 4 and related posts I’ve described my efforts at touching contacts, mainly with postal mail.

Inevitably I run out of my customized postage stamps, (Running out of Picture Postage Stamps), or get enthusiastic and run of an abundance of letters, and then I’m faced with a small hill of addressed envelopes waiting to go out.

Of course I want to keep my mailings roughly in sequence, and one day last week found me sorting a wad of envelopes in name sequence, then cross-checking them, record-by-record, against my data base.

What a waste of my time!

This morning I hit on the idea of augmenting my envelope macro to drop the print-date right where it will be hidden by the postage stamp.

Once they arrive!

Talk to Me!

Staying Ahead of the Avalanche - 4

My first week of “slack time”, but not really slack. I now have 377 contacts on my list. Two were due for processing today – instances where The Prospector alerted me to a promotion.

Those done I check the “follow-up due today”, and find none.

Makes sense. These past few weeks I’ve strenuously “touched” every contact and set their follow-up date to be 2 months ahead.

Now I have a sense of foreboding: Is this the calm before the storm?

I decide to check the distribution of my follow-up dates in an Excel pivot table:

weeks	Total
-38	1
-30	2
-28	1
-27	1
-25	1
-18	1
-14	1
-12	1
-11	1
-9	1
-8	1
-5	2
-1	2
0	31
1	18
2	22
3	35
4	20
5	7
6	13
8	2
9	39
10	81
11	59
12	29
13	5
Total	377

The average number of follow-ups per week starting at today (week zero) is 27. That means if I “touch” 27 contacts per week, I’ll stay on top of things.

The follow-ups prior to this week need attention. Are they inactive records? Did they slip through the net?

Given that every day or so I receive an “immediate” update from The Prospector, I should contemplate a goal of 30 contacts per week from now on. That would be 6 envelopes, emails or phone calls per day Monday through Friday.

Talk to Me!

5 Pet Peeves

The San Francisco Chronicle in a post titled “LinkedIn’s top pet peeves at the office” lists them as follows:

1: People who don’t take ownership of their actions. This was picked by 78 percent of the respondents.

2: “Negative Nellys” who constantly complain.

3: People who don’t clean up after themselves when using the fridge, the microwave or other common areas.

4: Boring meetings that start late or go way too long.

5: People who “consistently seem to miss your email (you can only use the “it hit my Spam” excuse so many times).”

What about people like us who don’t trudge into an office at nine each morning?

1: I can take ownership of my actions and show responsibility by admitting fault and mistakes as soon as I see them. That let’s my clients know that I’m honest and won’t let surprise cost-overruns leap out at them. Fixing mistakes as soon as they happen is the fastest way to get rid of that dirty smell.

2: This is easy for me. “The answer is always YES!”, and each time I’ve answered “No”, I’ve regretted it. The journey should be fun with someone else who is prepared to give-it-a-whirl.

3: I don’t share a common kitchen area, but I can clean up areas of the project used by me. That includes printing a hard-copy of a document and proof-reading it in a different room a day later to catch even more typographical errors.

4: Each email or phone conversation has a goal. I ought to be aware of that goal before I pick up the phone, or start typing. Staying focused on the issue lets me deal with clients quickly and frees them up to get back to their own job.

5: Making sure I respond to all emails the same day is mandatory, even if the response is just an acknowledgement that I’ve received the email. “I’ll need a couple of days to put this together” let’s my client budget their time and schedules. Plus it gives me a chance to send two emails instead of one!

Talk to Me!

Staying Ahead of the Avalanche - 3

Well! This feels good.

I have run through all 376 records in my contact list.

For the past few weeks I have opened up the database form and clicked on the button “FollowUpToday”; there are usually 3 or 4 records that had been marked for flow-up on that particular day.

Once those were done I’d click on “FollowUpPast”, and it’s that count that I’ve been whittling down at the rate of 15 envelopes printed per day.

This morning that command showed up empty at around 10 a.m., so I have not one single contact record untouched over the past two months.

I’m taking a break.

Tomorrow I’ll click the “FollowUpToday” and probably come up empty.

Then I’ll click the “FollowUpPast” and probably come up empty.

Then I’ll click the “StalestActive” and it will show me a record due for follow-up on the 31st of October (I just checked). I’ll be able to reduce the interval on my “touchings” and make a point of working on anything up to 10 records per day to keep up to date – postal mailings, emails, phone calls – all part of the mix.

Talk to Me !

Christmas Is Coming! - 2

In Christmas Is Coming! I outlined my plans for printing Christmas Cards.

I want to keep the essays flowing, and have been pondering who gets a card.

I figure to keep on my regular schedule of printing an essay-sheet (or “flyer” if you will), and mailing it off in a regular envelope to any contact who has not yet received two flyers.

Anyone with 3 or more flyers mailed, or people I’ve met face-to-face, get a card.

The rest, I fell, might see it as just too presumptuous of me if they received a card?

Talk to Me !

When is a Virus Not a Virus?

When it’s not!

I make no apologies for the setup shown in the photograph.

That’s my “Big Beige Box”, used to be my main system, now serves me as a printer server and more importantly, plays music 24/7. The music is piped through the Noresco Quadraphonic amplifier and thence to most rooms in my home.

The Panasonic mobile phone is one of three I collected from the recycle bin; it works better than the set I paid money for at Zellers!

Over the past few days, some sort of virus has hit the BBB and not until this morning did I track it down.

I should state that I am beyond-paranoid about infections, with one memory-resident package and two on-demand packages checking my systems.

I don’t do any web browsing or email on the BBB; it just plays music through WinAmp, so I’ve been in a mild state of shock when the WinAmp program emits “Fur Elise” repeatedly.

I switch to the BBB and shut down WinAmp, thinking it has a bug of some sort, but “Fur Elise” continues as strident as ever.

I fire up Task Manager with Ctrl-Alt-Del and search running tasks; no sign of anything malign.

Then “Fur Elise” stops, so something I’ve nudged has frightened the virus into silence.

• Darn thing started up again this morning at 7:00 a.m..

In desperation I shut down the BBB with the reset button on the front panel. Axed it dead. No Power. Powerless.

• “Fur Elise” continued!

How can a computer play music once the power is off?

This must be some sort of weird virus in my Sound Card? No.

The Panasonic mobile phone has an alarm set for 7:00 a.m.

It plays “Fur Elise” repeatedly, then stops after one minute.

Phew!

Talk to Me !

Why Wouldn’t You Buy this?

I’ve listened to Rick, developed a course outline, built a web page, and emailed the link to him with a question: “Why wouldn’t you pay to attend this course?”.

His reply, naturally, “No reason; I know that you built this course around our lunchtime conversation about my needs!”.

That’s the First Hurdle Cleared

Before I email the link to 100 prospects, I have five more emails to issue, seriatim, as we used to say.

To Promod, Cathy, David, Ken and Wallace, each in turn, “Why wouldn’t you pay to attend this course?”.

Each person will come up with at least one objection, which I can then deal with by adding it to my material;

Another Hurdle Cleared!

In short, by asking a small focus group for their objections up front, I can possibly double the positive response rate to my sales mail-out.

“Why Wouldn’t You do this?”

Talk to Me !

Running out of Picture Postage Stamps

Well, this is a mini-catastrophe.

I have just hand-signed about 50 letters to be mailed out, and ten of them have timely notes such as “Congratulations on your new appointment”.

But I’ve run out of my customized Picture Postage stamps.

Uh-Oh!

Those letters won’t go out until the next order comes in.

The less-timely letters can wait a week, I guess, but how I wish I had set aside ten stamps as an emergency-reserve for timely mailings!

Talk to Me !

Staying In Touch – 7

I know you read a different blog yesterday that said “Staying In Touch Is Important”.

Today I’m going to tell you WHY it is important.

A client has asked me if I know a reliable web designer.

I immediately thought of Carole and David, and forwarded my client’s email to them both.

Why Carole?

Carole put me in touch with a prospective client two weeks ago, and I’ve been chatting with that prospect for a week or so now.

Why David?

David and I agreed to meet for breakfast next Friday, so he’s been on my mind.

Here’s the Catch

Because Carole and David, both web designers, were in my mind/brain/head, my reaction was instant: “Yes! I know TWO web designers; I’ll click “Forward” and send this email to them.

I did NOT go to my contacts database and search nearly 400 records to find out who has been tagged with “web” or “html” or “Sales”.

Talk to Me !

You can Learn an Awful Lot, Just by Reading

Sometimes a solution just pops right out at me!

Some seven hours have been spent to date in conversations and proposals for an individual; I should have spotted this a mile off.

Friday saw the arrival of a two-page response to my response to a two-page enquiry about my proposal to charge $500 to begin specification of a multi-site data-mining project.

(You’re not meant to be able to read it; just to get an idea of the task facing me this morning).

A second reading turns up this delightful little nugget:

“I am concerned that the real cost of this project is much more than $500, and I'll be disappointed with what we get with the initial work.”

Well!

Absolutely. This is NOT a $500 project; there are at least 5 hours involved in laying out a solid foundation in specifications of the database, parsing requirements, data validity, and a sound overall structure for the rest of the project.

That’s without taking into account the seven hours I’ve spent to date.

The prospect is already prepared to be disappointed; there is an element of “I knew when we started I was going to be disappointed”; but Management Measures, and it’s the $500 that caught my eye.

My solution is time-effective:

I am concerned that the real cost of this project is much more than $500, and I'll be disappointed with what we get with the initial work.

CG> “My experience with this kind of project, if it is to be done properly, on budget and schedule, is that it will cost you more than $500 to achieve. If your budget is $500 or less, I think you are going to be greatly disappointed. I am sorry to have taken up your time in this matter.”

Click “SEND” and we are done.

On to the next task.

P.S.

The reply comes back within minutes:

AS> We don't have any budget for this really. I would have to decide what is worth it to invest and whether you are the right person with the right personality to get it done. I think witnessing the way you quoted this tells me that while you may have the right talent to do this, I am not sure you understood the scope of the work that had to be done, and was a bit disingenuous in your quote. That's why I was trying to clarify exactly what you were saying.

AS> I appreciate you being upfront about the work and quote. It helps us understand what may be involved in just the spec writing, which is quite a bit of work like I feared.

There is, you will note, no “call to action” here, so I am let off the hook.

On to the next client.

Talk to Me !

Just Call Them up!

It’s been 6 weeks since the firm has sent me any pick-up work writing Word/VBA code, and frankly I’m worried that I’ve said or done something wrong.

It’s been bugging me.

This form is not known for its great corporate communications. It is quite possible that someone, somehow, has taken offence and no one can be bothered telling me the gig is over.

A good friend has been bugging me ‘So, call them and find out!”.

I’ve been too scared.

What if they don’t want me any more?

Finally logic kicks in.

You Know What?

If they really are through with me, it’ll come out in the first 60 seconds, and I can say, calmly and politely “Thank you for letting me know”, and there’s an end to it.

If, on the other hand, it’s just a seasonal slow-down, then I can sleep again at night time.

I Called

It’s a seasonal slow-down. School started up yesterday; everybody’s back from vacation, ...

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Christmas Is Coming!

It is more than two months away, I know, but since my “touch” mailings go out every two months, it might be time to start thinking about Christmas messages.

I still have a carton of cards, snowy-scene, of the local church. That makes for a Christian-themed seasonal tasteful local effort.

I still have several cartons of DUCA cards .

This coming weekend I might gear myself to being able to print the flyer, and as well spit out a personalized card with its envelope. I’ve received compliments on my personalized cards before. It strikes a chord of automation in some minds. (“What a clever guy you are ...”)

Talk to Me !

Staying Ahead of the Avalanche

There’s no other way to describe it, unless it’s ‘”Trying to make it to the beach before the huge surf wave dumps me”.

When I rose this morning my little contacts database told me that there were 14 contacts required “touching” today, and a further 102 were in the backlog.

My plan for touching a contact every 2 months is failing; I can’t keep up with the workload.

Why Not?

Management Measures.

It’s time for some figures.

I explore the database and check the Date-Last-Modified field on the personal records.

The earliest Date-Last-Modified is May 18^th this year. That’s 17 weeks back, as I compose this draft.

I have 340 personal contacts on this list.

That’s above my goal of two years ago, which I had pegged at 300.

It seems that I’ve been able to maintain a steady rate of 340/17=20 contacts per week.

That’s certainly not ten per day, and most of these, recently, have been straightforward mailings.

If I tabulate the count of contacts-per-week against the week number I see this:

Wk	Ct
1	8
2	10
3	12
4	1
5	1
7	24
8	55
9	41
10	24
11	9
13	35
14	25
15	28
16	57
17	9

I Work in Spurts

Over the past 4 weeks I’ve contacted 35, 25, 28 and 57 people respectively. An average of 36.

The other spurt averaged 36 contacts per week, too.

My running average over the period works out to 23 per week; better than 17, but “Christopher can do better”, as my school report card said.

It seems that 35, or even 40 contacts per week ought to be doable.

If I make 40 contacts per week over 340 contacts, that means I’ll make contact once every 8.5 weeks, which ought to be about right.

In other words, my number of contacts is correct, and my goal of touching each one about once every 2 months is correct.

A New Goal

I just need to be more diligent in reaching my goals each day.

A running average of 23 per week is 4 per business day.

I need to double that to 8 per day.

Aiming for ten is a good idea, a doable stretch.

Catching Up

In the meantime, I need to catch up, to give myself breathing space while aiming for my goal.

I can do that by temporarily stretching my next-contact-date button from 2 months to 3 months.

To Justify that I HAVE to see at least 10, but preferably, 15 ENVELOPES waiting to be mailed out at the end of each business day.

P.S. So, obviously, I should drop ten, or fifteen blank envelopes near the printer each morning and churn out postals until the day’s supply is gone.

Talk to Me!

How Many can You Follow?

If you’ve been following my saga on Twitter you will know that I’ve been puzzled about the vast numbers of people who follow me for no apparent reason, and the number of people I follow, for reasons that escape me after a month or two.

There are people I keenly want to follow, tweeps on whose every word I hang, but too often they get swamped out by a burst of activity from others who I’m following.

And how on earth did I end up following “BeerGuy”?

So I’ve Made an Executive Decision

Right now I’m following 50 tweeps.

That’s too many.

I will reduce that number by ONE at the start of each week, until I reach 40; then I’ll re-evaluate the situation.

Then I may reduce that number by ONE at the start of each week, until I reach 30; then I’ll re-evaluate the situation.

I rather think that following 30 tweeps; seriously following by being able to engage with them, is a commendable activity.

Trying to follow 300 is just plain stupid.

Talk to Me!