I wonder what would happen if…..?

Finding out that customer want free delivery and how I found out that is what they wanted.

Hello everyone and welcome to another Blog.

This week I have have thinking about how to move our Liqueur business into new areas.

Considering that I manufacture liqueurs, it may come as a surprise to find out that I do not consider that I am in the Drinks business.

Rather, I am in the Gift business.

This means that all new products and initiatives have to be seen through the prism of the Gift market and our customers. I do not supply supermarkets, pubs or hotels – I sell direct via our website, at consumer shows and via specialist drinks retailers.

What this means is that I do not have a high overhead company unlike some of the companies that are in the Drinks business. They have factories to keep open so they need to shift the products to make room for the next lot coming down the line. What this means is that particularly at Christmas, it is a great time for consumers to buy Malt Whisky – you’ll never see it so cheap. The stocks have to be shifted as there is another warehouse-full about to be bottled and then sent to the supermarkets.

In the Gift business, customer service is more of an issue and one that has to be taken seriously. One change that I am about to move to is to offer our mail order customers ‘Free delivery’ for all orders.

Up to now, they had to spend @ £50-60 to get free delivery – now it will be free for all orders. Obviously, our prices will have to alter a bit, but not by as much as you would imagine as most of our customers tend to buy over 3 bottles at a time anyway.

How did I work out if this was what customers wanted? Well, I started asking them to fill in a simple surevy last Autumn at a few large shows and then sent an invitation to our online customers to fill in an online survey – in return for doing this for me, they and anyone they know, get 10% off any of our liqueurs for the rest of 2011.

The number one service that our survey respondents wanted was ‘Free delivery’ – and now they are going to have it. I shall write another blog after this sales season to let you know if the move to ‘Free delivery’ was successful

All the best-Roy Lewis

 

When suppliers drop a massive price hike on you.

How not to be a supplier and what a price shock does to me, their customer – I look for a new supplier right away.

Hi there again,

Writing this while I am still reeling from the shock of a massive price hike by another of our suppliers. Unfortunately for us, all our price lists have been printed so as they cannot be altered now for this year, I will just have to take a margin hit.

So what happens next? The search is on for a new, more reliable source of goods. When prices just creep up, there is never enough impetus to find another supplier but when the shock is big enough, it is worth the effort to do something about it and quickly, so at least there is a back up plan in place.

Happily, this event is unusual, as I have a good set of steady suppliers who do not dump price hikes on me without any warning. Those that do, rarely stay suppliers with me for long.

Most of the time I focus on looking after our customers, but paying attention to suppliers is vital too. Just the fact that I do not have to keep researching and then changing suppliers, saves a large amount of time and effort. In addition, a new supplier may end up being worse than the last, despite the promises.

For a change, I took a cold call from a Card service company and despite having to postpone my meeting with their salesman several times, we eventually met up this week. I am always a bit wary of these types of companies as once they have you as a customer, that’s when the surprise charges start to appear. I ditched Pitney Bowes for that reason years ago – every few months they thought up a new way to fleece me. In addition, I had to pay a ridiculous fee just to have the benefit of their machine that was very costly to run. No winners there apart from Pitney Bowes. Not for me.

With this new supplier, so farI have been impressed by their ognanisation – they do what they promise. This is a massive issue for us, as we rely on other companies delivering the service we have paid for. Most don’t do it and we often have to check that they have collected goods, delivered them to the right address and even that they have read their emails or checked their fax machine. All this hassle does is persuade us not to use them.

If you have any either good or bad experiences with suppliers, please let me know and I will publish a selection in future Blogs.

Sunny weekend coming-Great! Roy Lewis

 

 

 

 

Frustration and hassle = new opportunities

New printer is great but too expensive to use-now what?

Hi there again,

Just when you think things are just fine, another real cracker appears on the horizon.

This time it looks like a real showstopper and the show that is going to stop is your business. If you are in a small business, you will probably have one of these moments. The trials and woes of employees seem easy compared to what you have to deal with and the shocks always come out of the blue. Otherwise you would have know what was coming and would have prepared.

This week’s one for us was tied in with buying a new printer. The old ones that we have used for years, HPBusiness Inkjet 1200, have done terrific service but the print was steadily deteriorating. A new printer was called for so I duly ordered one from the local PC repair company.

The shock was that instead of paying £2-6 for a HP black cartridge that would print out 1,000 pages, the new printer needs cartridges that cost £28 each and print @ 300 pages.

That means that the price per page has gone from 0.005p per sheet to @ 10p per sheet. I have estimated that instead of spending about £10 a month, the cartridge bill will be over £100 per month, perhaps even £2-300 per month.

So what can I do about it?

The new printer is great-very good print. But very expensive. The first thing I have done is to do nothing, i.e. print as little as possible. Before when it was amazingly cheap, prints were made of almost every email and document. That’s all been cut out. Next is to repair the old printer an reconnect it so that we have a high quality and a draft printer.

Now I’m off to find a better source of cartridges-more on this when I have some news. There must be lost of other users of the same expensive cartridge printer that could do with paying less too.

This whole scenario is played out throughout businesses every day of the year. Things are jogging along fine until either a big price increase occurs or the owners come across an issue that is so frustrating that they go out and produce a solution that they can then sell to others in the same situation. Only then does something happen. A good number of the new ideas and products that I have ended up selling have come from just these situations. No doubt there will be others and those too will lead to another business revenue stream.

Fine weather coming-have a good weekend. Kind regards, Roy Lewis

 

 

How not be a supplier. Read on….

How a supplier successfully won and then lost my business before I even got started.

Hi everyone again. I’ve been out of the loop for a while but am now back for more.

Lots has happened since the last post and over the next few weeks I will be writing about real business experiences that just so happen to have crossed my path.

This Blog is all about how not to help your customers and the classic example of this is Royal Mail. They contacted me  several months ago about taking advantage of their small parcel service.

The idea is that, if a customer sends out lots of similar parcels, instead of trudging over to the Post office and waiting for ages to be served, the postage could be printed out on a label and the whole lot just handed in to the local Royal Mail office. The alternative is to have Royal Mail collect the bags each day, for a charge of about £500 a year.

Well, as I have started another business that indeed ends up sending out lots of parcels, I thought this service was made for me.

I duly signed up. then everything stopped.

Various staff got in touch with me, made promises and were never heard from again. At last after several calls to the original sales person, I have at last been able to log into our account. I  watched the Demo on the site and it appeared to miss out the crucial part of how to print out the labels.

I really want to do business with Royal Mail with their Packet Service but it seems overly complicated and tricky to use. Perhaps it will be easier once I get going with it. Only 3 months have passed with no progress whatsoever.

I have used this experience to look again at how we look after our customers. I am getting back to them much faster and sorting things out for them as much as I can. The result is that the customers do not keep calling us and the issue gets dealt with. Sometimes we have to wait for another company to come back to us which is very frustrating. In the end it always get sorted out.

Postscript: I have decided not to use the Royal Mail Packet Service. If they can’t help me get started, i have no chance whatsoever in them helping me once I get going. As I am spending £50-150 per week on freight that they could have carried, this is a bad move for them and a good move for me – at least I can keep the business moving along.

More real life business stories next week-all the best, Roy Lewis

www.hebridean-liqueurs.co.uk

 

Getting to grips with too many ideas

Opportunities and getting started.

Hello again,

Ever ended up with too many business ideas all zooming around in your head and driving you mad?

Well, it happens to us all, if you’re in a receptive mood that is.

Before I ran my own company and was an employee, I could never figure out how it was that those that ran their own companies always seemed to be ahead of the game in spotting trends and new ideas. As an employee, I was focused on doing the job I was paid to do, quite rightly, but on long flights and train journeys, I would have nothing better to do that flick through magazines and muse on the ideas and products advertised.

The main issue was how to investigate and get a new business up and running while still being an employee. Everyone I know who has started up their own company has been in this situation. Some get their ideas fully researched before they go for it. Others are just convinced that the new venture will succeed and that’s that. Somewhat risky.

Do you have an idea for a business and just can’t seem to get anywhere with it?

What is stopping you?

If the answer is TV, newspapers and no time, then I’m afraid you need to look again at what is really motivating you and what you really want to do.

If, on the other hand, your business idea makes you wake up at night with the excitement of how it will pan out, then at least that will give you the push to make the time to do the research and get things moving.

Off for Easter Holidays for a week or so. All the best, Roy Lewis

What is stopping you? Fear is the key.

New ventures, overcoming the element of fear and using it to your advantage.

Hello again,

Driving along the other day, I was musing on why I have not gone for certain opportunities that have come my way and why I did for others.

It’s not that the opportunities were not good. Or that I couldn’t work out the risk element and how to mitigate it. I think it was mainly to do with fear of failure and fear of not knowing if I could do it.

Fear of failure is all part of all business enterprises – it takes you to the edge, where simultaneously there is the feeling of fear mixed with the excitement of getting it right. This is the part that entrepreneurs seem to love – the uncertainty of it all. Once you get past this, then the actual day to day stuff is dull. That’s where another opportunity comes along and off you go again.

If you are an employee, there is some degree of this feeling to with new projects etc, but there is usually a safety net, and of course you can always blame the process. If you’re on your own facing it, if it fails, the blame comes right back to you and there is no escape. Not everyone can handle this.

The other way of looking at all this is that to learn anything, you have to make mistakes. Thousands of small businesses close up because they make mistakes that they cannot recover from.  The benefit if having kept a business going for several years is that by that time, you will have worked out what the dangers are and how to avoid a catastrophic mistake.

Getting going early has a terrific benefit of giving you the opportunity to mess things up at an age where you are able to take it. Once you have a good job, mortgage and responsibilities, it is harder to give a new project a go, just in case it doesn’t work. You have too much to lose.

Once you have experience (messed up lots of times) you then have the confidence to go after opportunities and you become better at spotting them, working out how much can be made and how to set up a system to run the new venture.

So, what’s stopping you? Fear? Great, that’s the key.

Have a good weekend. All the best, Roy Lewis

Are you a business mentor?

The benefits to both parties of business mentoring.

Hello again,

This blog is different as it is all about other businesses.

A couple of years ago, I was approached by a local Chamber of Commerce to be a business mentor for a small local business. I was flattered and surprised. But mainly, I was perplexed as to why they had asked me. I did not consider myself as having any special talent for business and couldn’t see how my experiences could translate over to others.

Well, I was wrong on all of those ideas.

Several mentee companies later and I am happy to report that I really look forward to spending time with the companies I now see. It’s not really that I have experienced exactly what they are going through – all businesses have their own unique issues to overcome. I think it is more of a case of at least I have been going long enough to have survived all sorts of disasters and have come through it all with a sense of perspective that the mentees find useful. Or I hope they do anyway.

The other aspect that I find useful is that for an hour at a time, I have the opportunity to help someone out and when I describe how I am handling something similar to their struggle, it often happens that they too have ideas that I can bring to bear on the situations that I am handling.

Some business mentors have a very strict method of going about it. I prefer to chat through things and focus on one main issue at a time and then track it from meeting to meeting, checking progress as we go.

Why not help out another business local to where you live? Too busy? No time? Don’t know who to contact? All these and other excuses are just that. Give it a go and see how you get on. After all, what do you really have to lose?

Have a good weekend. Kind regards, Roy Lewis

Fuel price increases make mail order purchases even better value

Fuel costs and mail order business – one drives the other.

Hello again,

Like most of us, each time the price of petrol and diesel lurches upwards, I go through the angst of filling up while calculating that my expenditure per minute matches that of a footballers wife let loose in Oxford Street.

From January onwards, I limited myself to one day per week of driving about for work. This not only saved the fuel cost and time involved, but also forced me to plan better, just like we all should. Years ago when I started my first job, my boss schooled me in making each trip worthwhile. If I was going to Edinburgh, I had to try to fit in 4 meetings in one trip,  not plan four trips.

So using the same plan of cutting out trips this year, the result was that I got my fuel expenditure down from £200 a month to less than £100.

I now apply the same logic when looking at buying goods mail order and paying what might appear to be a high delivery charge vs driving, parking and buying it from a shop in Glasgow. To put it in perspective, it takes about 1 hour to get to Glasgow. The cost of this is £15-20 per trip, plus parking and the likelihood of buying more stuff that I didn’t plan to while I am there.

In comparison, buying an item online means that I get what I want and am not tempted by offers for stuff I do not actually need or want right now. It is almost always better buying online rather than wasting time and effort in getting the goods myself.

What I am really doing is paying other people to do things that I do not need to do myself.  It’s the old time and money issue. I am now totally used to having a quick look on Amazon and E-bay, working out the right price to expect, finding the item at that price and then just getting it. Instead of taking 3-4 hours and costing £20 to purchase an item, it takes usually less than 15 minutes to find it online and buy it.

Have a nice weekend – winter has returned to Argyll – keep warm and busy – all the best, Roy Lewis

 

Show Distributors

Booking events for the coming year…which ones to go for?

Hello,

The new season for consumer shows is almost with us. Our Show Distributors are busy evaluating the shows and fees for the coming year and booking up with the organisers. Working out the true cost of attending an event is one of the key factors in making it worthwhile. This sounds easy until you start to factor in the time taken to get to an event, the fuel costs, parking, time taken to get set up, overnight costs, meals etc.

What often happens is the when all the costs are added up, the more local, less expensive events are the more profitable in the long run. I can vouch for that too from my own experience here in last year.

I attended a number of high profile Shows in Glasgow – The BBC Good Food Show and The Country Living Christmas Fair being two. These are both ‘very prestigious  events’ according to the sales pitch, attracting masses of potential customers. They do, however, cost a lot to attend both as a consumer paying the entry fees and for the Trade Stand fees.

I am aways concerned if it appears to me that the consumers are being asked to pay too much for, when all is said and done, is just a different set of retailers. The more the consumer has to pay to go to the event means they have less to spend while they are there. In addition, the consumers can feel ripped off if the entry and parking charges are too high. Not good for business.

I also attended a local event here in Helensburgh. Easy to get to, easy to get set up, lower fees per day and low cost for the customers to attend.

The result? Well you can probably guess from the tone of the above – yes, the local event was more profitable once all the costs were added in. I sold fewer bottles but made more money.

About now, I am called by sales people selling space at the big, high profile events. Sadly for them, it is really not worthwhile us going to most of these as their fees, sometimes over £1000 for a few days, are so out of touch with reality that it is a waste of time even trying to negotiate with them. Perhaps these is a gap in the market for Consumer shows that do not charge so much for everything and that the businesses going to them , will all make a good margin and rebook for the next year. Now there’s a plan.

Have a good weekend – cold and wet here-horrible.

All the best, Roy Lewis

Customer Survey time

Customer survey coming soon to find out what else I can offer that will be attractive to our mail order customers.

January is normally fairly quiet for the Liqueur business. Most of the time, it’s just sorting out administration from last year. This year I’m thinking of ways to improve our mail order service and have decided to ask our regular customers via an online survey.

From about November last year, a paper survey was included with each order – a fair number have now accumulated and the results are very interesting. One of the most popular requests was for a ‘Free delivery’ option.  This was implemented in November and  resulted in more orders and happier customers, so that is top of the list for this year once I have worked out the best way offering this.

Another area I am looking at is how to ensure that the orders arrive in good condition. Some other mail order companies spend a lot of time and effort on this and I will be analysing what they do and then incorporating the best ideas for our own online and offline mail order business.

If you have any mail order experience as a customer that you think would be useful to me, please get in touch – all comments and ideas welcome.

From time to time I will be focusing on business tools that I come across that improve efficiency, cut costs or help sell more goods. Look out for these ‘tools of the trade’ especially if you too have a business like mine.

All the best. Wild weather here today – hope it calms down for the weekend as I’m off on the ferry from Oban to Coll.

All the best.   Roy Lewis