Tag: private income plan

Too many things to do? Have fewer, better customers?

Have a plan for less things to do, and looking after your best customers and ditch the rest – they cost you money.

Hi there again,

A lot of small businesses from time to time are overwhelmed by too many things to do. When this happens, customer service and general ‘looking after customers’ suffers. I have had this issue recently and decided the solution was to have fewer and better customers.

Really paying attention to our customers does help. It certainly gives a focus so that everyone knows what to do all the time. In the middle of an administrative task-fine, but let’s get this customer issue sorted out right now before it really eats up our time and gets very complicated. Sorting these out right away is always better than leaving it to fester.

Who is your best customer and why are they? Do they buy often from you? Would you like more like them? If so, what can you do to move some of your others customers closer to the best one you have?

How about treating them as if they are already your best customer and tell them that they are really important to you.

At the same time, why not ditch some of your worst ones? You know who I mean – the ones who won’t pay, complain all the time, have unrealistic expectations of you and your company or just want to try to bully you into giving in to their demands. Imagine how much easier it would be if you didn’t have them at all? Getting rid of them and just dealing with the best customers can be one of the most profitable things you will ever do in your business.

All this is not about giving a poor service but simply focusing on the customers who make you 80% of your profits. You might as well forget the rest, which means you have more time to get to know the goods ones better.

Why not give it a go and let me know how you get on.

have a good weekend. Roy Lewis

www.hebridean-liqueurs.co.uk

 

 

 

 

Why it’s worth meeting other business people just for a chat

Using coffee chats to get inspired with your busines and how you can do the same for others.

Hi there,

What an odd title for a Blog. Or is it?

All business owners get the business equivalent of ‘writers block’ from time to time. Your list of things to do stretches into the future with no end in sight. To make matters worse, you don’t have the information to hand to actually complete any of them either.

What you need really is not more things to do, but an injection of inspiration and surprisingly, this can come from just having a chat with another business owner. As you discuss how you are getting on etc and listen to their conversation, you pick up ideas from what they are doing right and then can apply this to what you are doing. Sometimes you will even get a terrific new idea of how to get more customers or sell in a different way – and all this just by having a coffee with a friend. In my experience, I have never come away from a meeting/chat like this without some new angle and one that I am keen to get on with – something that gets me up in the morning.

That’s not to say that all you do is pump people for information and then just copy their business using their inside knowledge – you would soon run out of friends that way. What I mean here is just listening to what is happening in their business, mulling it over and then applying the idea to your own, non-competitive business. In fact, if you then go back to your source and tell them that you have implemented and idea you got from them, tweaked it and applied it to your business, they are likely to take that as a compliment.

Remember, they may do the same for ideas you have too. In fact, what I try and do during these chats is to see what I know that I can give away to the other person without any expectation of a return favour. By doing it this way, usually something does come your way, but not from where you might expect. I know that sounds a bit woolly, but just try it for a few weeks and see what happens.

Let me know how you get on and what idea got you inspired again.

Have a great weekend. All the best. Roy Lewis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why it’s a good idea to have your ‘Top 5 things to do’

Make a list before you finish work for the day – time to sleep on it.

Hi there again,

Came across the famous ‘List 5 things to do tomorrow’ idea a couple of weeks ago. I used to do this all the time but ended up giving it up as the 5 things I choose turned out to be actions that took more than a day each so were never done. Bad plan.

This time round, I have restricted the list to 5 things that I can actually do during a day where the phones ring constantly and emails pile in. The results? Well I am getting through more of the big stuff that is important than just reacting to the latest call or message. Having help is good too, as at least you can look at what you do and decide if you really need to be the one to do it.

The way I have been looking at this is to decide what actions are the ones that only I can do – all the rest can be delegated. If not, why not? Writing this Blog needs me to do it – so far.

What is worth doing when writing your list, is to do it at the end of the working day – and write it down. Just by doing this, you will end up pondering some of the issues and hurdles involved in actually completing these tasks by the time you get to them the next day. It’s a classic case of sleeping on it and seeing what happens. Since I started doing my own list, I have managed to sort out some fairly complex issues, mostly by not thinking about them too much but at least having them there and mulling them over until some solutions present themselves.

The extra advantage of making your list in this way, is that if you don’t get all 5 items done, all you do is carry them over to the next day and then you have more time to come up with solutions.

It’s worth giving this a go – what have you got to lose?

All the best, Roy Lewis

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to waste time

Getting your priorities in order and keeping them so.

Hello there again.

Odd title but very appropriate is you find yourself going round in circles with too much to do. This happens from time to time to me too, so I know what it is like. Usually it’s because of:

1 Too many things to do that will take quite a bit of time to do, so they never get started and just pile up.

2 Constant interruptions so that you can never get anything finished.

3 A mounting number of tasks where you cannot complete them until someone else gets back to you or completes their part of the job.

Dealing with any of the above leads to a feeling of loss of control, increased frustration and high anxiety.

So how can it all be rationalised? This is what I do now:

1 Work out what only I can do and delegate the rest.

2 Allocate a sensible amount of time to a piece of work. If you know it will take 2 hours, give it that and take no calls or interruptions. Do not check email.

3 Stop checking email for more ‘must be done now’ actions. Learning to not react is the best way to sort out the things you really need to do right now. Most people don’t but lots of message senders want you to react immediately as it makes no difference to them if you have to abandon your work to sort out their issue.

If the above appears a bit hard on other people, that’s fine.

Having too much detail to sort out while the phone rings all the time will drive you to distraction. Have a good long think about how to prevent this happening and once you have a plan that will work and that will stick to, it all becomes  a lot easier to manage.

All the best-Roy Lewis

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