Who, and How Many are Your Suppliers?

In "What Porter Airlines chief learned pumping gas", Robert Deluce is quoted as saying "Never leave yourself with only one supplier; you must have choice and some tension to ensure value."

Now as soon as you read that you thought of stationery, computer accessories, and ground coffee, right?

Well, yes.

But as an entrepreneur, what do you value coming in more than stationery, computer accessories, and ground coffee?

That's right!

Cash!

Think of your clients as suppliers, your most important suppliers, for without your clients you don't get revenue, and without revenue you can't consider stationery, computer accessories, and ground coffee.

That's a fact.

Now Deluce said "Never leave yourself with only one supplier; you must have choice and some tension to ensure value", and if that is true of your suppliers, and if your clients are suppliers, then Deluce's statement translates into "Never leave yourself with only one client; you must have choice and some tension to ensure value", and how often have you heard that?

I am in touch with one entrepreneur who has one well-paying client, yet is unhappy with the relationship.

"So go get another client" I suggest, but Oh no, "better the devil you know".

Trouble is, once that client becomes unhappy with the relationship, my friend will be stranded high and dry.

As would you.

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How Often?

We all sat down and discussed "How often should I mail out my eLetter?".

Answers ranged from "It depends on your audience" through "26 times a year" to "3 times a year".

I think the best answer is to the question "How often?" will be found by following the path of thought that starts with "What is my goal?"

What is YOUR goal in issuing YOUR newsletter?

Write it down, write down the objectives (or sequence of steps you'll take to reach your goal), and you'll find the answer to your frequency question along the way.

Oh, sorry!

I forgot that you wrote all that down when you were planning your newsletter; just take it out an re-read it.

Again.

Talk to Me!

Volunteers are Priceless

A recent tweet said " Volunteers are not paid; not because they are worthless, but because they are priceless." Hats off to those that share ...", but I disagree with volunteering in most cases.

Over my career I've found myself providing services for free to non-profit organizations who save a bundle through my suggestions, but run an office with a staff of ten, salaries, benefits and electricity bills.

A non-profit is not a non-revenue, and I fail to see why I should not take part in the revenue stream.

I quit all this 15 years ago when a non-profit asked me to drive 10 km north to stand by while they did their first mail-merge. Why stand-by? In case it didn't work and they used a few sheets of paper unwisely.

For a few sheets of paper I was to schedule 3 hours of my time, drive 10 km each way, ...

No. My time is worth more than that.

I am NOT priceless; I am worthy of my hire of any organization in the business world that has a revenue stream.

Especially if their revenue stream is greater than my revenue stream.

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Failure To Communicate

A great blog item from the Fast Company blog. In essence a list of 20 common faults.

And a list of 4 things to do to begin resolving them.

I took it a step further after reading item 6: “Telling the world how smart we are”. I do that all the time. And why not, I’m smarter than most people, I’m telling you!

I collected the 20 faults and pasted them into a table that fit nicely onto a letter-sized sheet, printed it off on white card stock, then guillotined it into 20 separate small cards that fit easily in my shirt pocket.

Then each time I sat down to lunch with a friend or close colleague I asked them to select the three (of twenty) cards which THEY thought best described me.

Interesting.

After six such polls I tallied the scores and ranked the cards.

That’s how I KNOW you all know how smart I am!

If you’d like a copy of the cards, send me an email.

Talk to Me!

Observations

"I didn't apply measurement to our marketing efforts in any sort of disciplined way,"

I learned this a couple of weeks ago when I was assembling a series of web-pages urging people to experiment and measure their efforts at vermicomposting.

Suddenly realized that "experiment" means white lab-coats and Bunsen-burners to most folks in the domestic market. And who wants to invest in a set of gram-scales, count worms by hand etc?

"I just want to have the worms eat my food scraps".

The Answer?

Abandon the words "experiment" and "measure" and use the one word "observations".

Anyone can observe; I mean, that's just using my eyes, right?

And it's not a problem to write down, in my own words, what I have observed ...

Talk to Me!

Does Staying-In-Touch Work? – 3

Here’s another one:

I attended a free seminar sponsored by a major bank – definitely a member of the deep pockets Club, and in my target market.

Funnily enough the seminar was marketing-related – all about LinkedIn.

Next morning I resisted the impulse to ask the host for a LinkedIn connection, and instead dashed off a greeting card & flyer, popped it in the mail.

I figure that asking/getting a LinkedIn connection is just a matter of form once we have met or had a chat by phone.

I also figure that a hard-copy unsolicited essay lasts longer (“sits on my desk”) than Yet-Another-LinkedIn-Invitation.

Sure enough, yesterday the phone rang, and for 75 minutes the host and I chatted.

• Sure! Send some stuff by email.
• Sure connect with LinkedIn!
• Sure!

Just what I wanted.

Lunch can’t be far away ...

Talk to Me!

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!

Time Blocking

There’s an excellent little article on Time Blocking here, and I recommend you read it. Takes about 60 seconds.

There’s an excellent little time program here, and I recommend you download it.

Then start cheering as your backlog disappears!

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Thank You for Contacting

Thank you for contacting me at IHaveAWebSite. I will get back to you as soon as I can. Many thanks; I’m Me.

I don’t know about you, but I get a tad cheesed off when I am hooked up with an email address which uses an auto-responder to let me know “your call is important to us”.

I think it’s the height of insolence to use a robot to respond to my hand-crafted enquiry.

I think it’s ABOVE the height of insolence to use a robot to respond to my subsequent hand-crafted responses.

Talk to Me!

What's Different this Christmas?

I can be a bit slow on the uptake sometimes.

It's just dawned on me that out of about 200 Christmas cards mailed out so far in the past month, not one has been returned.

Of course, now that I've typed THAT, there'll be a flood next week!

What's different between this year and past years?

(1) I have spent more time this year "touching" my contacts, either by phone, by email, or by letter; and issuing letters is one way to check on mobility of the addressee.

(2) My contacts are higher-echelon, the C-crowd, and CEOs, presidents and the like move around less than do middle-level managers and clerks.

There are probably more reasons, but it is comforting to know that this year my mailings are reaching their targets.

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The Proposal

My client’s client is having problems; I have a solution.

I submit a proposal for 10 hours work, and a few days later word comes back that “they like your proposal but think it should be only seven hours”.

My immediate reaction is to hit back, so I go to bed with a book, instead.

In the morning things seem much clearer.

I have 13 points now against the rejection, many of them knee-in-the-groin arguments, which never help in business relationships.

But I’m very proud of the first three, so I share them with you:-

• Client doesn’t know how to do it; that’s why they approached me. How can they know what work is involved?
• If Client doesn’t know what work is involved, how can they know how long it will take to do the work?
• If Client doesn’t know how long it will take to do the work, why do they think it can be done in 30% less time than I think?

My business, you see, is the application of logic to business problems, and this is just another business problem (mine this time) that can be resolved by the application of logic.

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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!

Shift Desk Sideways

My second 10-foot length of plywood, a.k.a. "The Other Desk", shows no surface area. It has become a storage depot for stuff.

Office Rule:

• Tables and desks are for working on or at, not for storage.

So starting this morning I’m going to be shifting stuff leftwards towards the other end.

Some item has to be taken OFF the desk and stored where it ought to be stored; even if that dumpster gets emptied twice a week.

The space it leaves will be occupied by something else, and the right-hand side of my desk will become clear.

By the end of the week, or even by the end of the hour, the desk should be a beautifully long and wide working area.

Talk to Me!

Paying Double At the Door

“We have an event tomorrow, and 26 people have registered online but only handful have paid $10 online. When these unpaid who turn up at the door, will be charged $20. Can some one explain to me, why are they prepared to pay double at the door, while they can get away paying only $10.’

It's Simple.

I may get a better offer elsewhere before your event.

• When registration (online) is free, people will register.
• When it comes to parting with money, we all think twice.

And hedge our bets!

Talk to Me!

You’re Right!

Don’t you just love hearing that?

Don’t you just love it when the other person puts you on a pedestal with those two words?

I know that those two words make me feel just GREAT!

So why aren’t I using them more often to make people warm to me?

Talk to Me!

But What Really Blew Me Away

Another great little post from Seth Godin.

I’m tempted to reproduce it in full here, it’s so concise, but go read it for yourself.

I plan to spend more time examining what makes ME feel good at places where I do business!

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!

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!

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 !

Staying Ahead of the Avalanche - 2

I’m almost up to scratch!

This morning there were 19 stale addresses, and I have been churning out 15 per day, so that means I’ll probably get completely up to date tomorrow.

Or so I Thought

Part of my procedure is to research each contact on CNW before printing a letter; that way I get to add a personal touch to each letter.

But today, CNW is not slow; it is unresponsive.

My rate has dropped from one letter each 5 minutes to 30+ minutes per letter.

Not a Good Use of My Time

So at 2pm, with 9 outstanding envelopes, I’m calling it quits for the day.

Finishing on Friday instead of Thursday is not a big deal.

Better I do something useful than sit staring at the monitor screen, drumming my fingers ...

Talk to Me !