The party’s over.....

The party’sover.....or is it? I hope so, all that hype and nothing to show for it again. Let’s go back to amateur sports where all they had to play for is the pride of representing their country. Watching hapless hairdressers (no offence to real hairdressers) trotting about missing the ball then collapsing when any opposition player tackles them, is cringeworthy. Notice how quickly these fairies (you guessed it, no offence to those little creatures found at the bottom of the garden, only visible to those that may have over indulged in smoking something mixed in with their ‘baccy), recover once they have been ignored or they realise they have convinced the poor old ref it really does hurt.

The real game starts today at Headingly. Whoever doubts that test cricket can be exciting didn’t see the last 15 overs, last week at Lords. The game was heading for an uneven draw, when England started to knock over some hard fort for wickets. It then looked possible we could bowl them out and secure a win. Last over (6 balls) with two wickets remaining, first ball of the last 6, a wicket, 4^th ball (second to last ball of the 5 day game!) it looked like we had won with a plumb LBW, only to find out with a slow motion replay the ball had hit the bat first. No one cried, kissed anyone or fell over feigning injury, they just clapped the opposition and shook hands, fair play all round.

And that surely must be the theme of any relationship, employment or business deal? Anything else would fall under the heading of dodgy. When this happens (being lied to, or deliberately miss informed for someone else’s gain), doesn’t that make you feel let down and fed up?  But then if the other party realises what they had done, comes back, apologises, then puts it right, that sometimes has a stronger reaction in the positive direction. (Unless you have jumped your wife’s younger sister, apologies may not be enough!).  But in less tricky situations, you quickly shove all your cross feelings back under the sink and let that wonderful warm wave of relief wash over you. That person you had faith in isn’t a dastardly blaggard after all.

Don’t know where any of this came from, my wife doesn’t have a younger sister, so I am in the clear! Life seems fair at the moment, the sun has got its hat on, hip, hip hurray... and we are off to Solva for the weekend tonight. Solva in the sun is rare (Westests and wettest, West Wales), so when it is sunny it even beats the Maldives.  It’s nearly Pimms o’clock!

Here Comes The Sun

Here comes the sun, dodo do too, here comes the sun.... it just makes you smile when the sun is out and the warmth spreads through you. No I haven’t wet myself, I think.  All those stats coming out of the government, you would think we were piling up so much wealth now. Umm, well not yet. The orders are coming in a little more steadily, and some projects have moved along a little more, but no sign of that much used word BOOM. We aren’t going to boom until those lazy Euro piglets pull their snouts out of the EUtrough and do some work.

I like the word boom, and in fact Baldrick (one of the great philosophers of our time) made up a poem called Boom, boom, boom, boom. Well I hope that made you smile, that is my sole purpose in sending out these epistles. 

 While I am not a fan of Jim Carrey, as he makes me feel uncomfortable in the same way as a British farce does. But I did watch him give a speech at a Business schoolgraduation ceremony. Some of what he said I did like. I apologise right now if I miss quote him, as I scribbled down notes while I listened to the full 26 minutes of his speech. Here we go, 

“Love and fear, being at the two extremes of our emotions. Use love to dream, stop wishing, and get on and try.”

 I like that. 

“Fear, we use practicality, caution, logic (my word) to try to avoid what we fear.” 

He then told us about his father that didn’t think that he (his father) could make it as a comedian, so he became an accountant. (We all know some accountants that that are comedians.) After a few years, his father lost his job and had to re-train as something else. 

“You can fail at what you don’t want, so why not take a chance on doing what you love?” 

I like that one too. How many times have you muttered to yourself, bugger, I should have used my driver in the first place, as you watch your cautious 5 iron shot disappear into the woods?

And lastly:

“Hope is the beggar; its faith that will drive you to heap over your obstacles.” 

Not religious faith but faith in your own abilities.

Smile and make somebody happy!

Aaagh football in the summer!

Aaagh football in the summer! What’s worse, is that our cricket team is sliding back to less than mediocre again. At least we can stay outside and enjoy balmy evenings around a barbecue with a glass of vino, if it just stops raining. Whatever happened to global warming? I think it should be called global soaking.

It is so difficult to believe either side of the climate change argument, there seems to be campaigners on both sides with vested interests. Even University professors have been exposed as dodgy liars. Is it down to lies, damn lies and statistics? We do need to conserve our reserves, and so on that point alone I think we should continue to develop more efficient ways that will slow down the use of these precious reserves.

What about the poor old liberals, I do feel sorry for them. These, supposedly, honest people with no particular axe to grind are not wanted.  Why not have a party for faffers, sorry that is the liberal party. Politics has always been brutal and in Britain nothing has changed, there is no place for innocent, decent thought in that Punch and Judy show called parliament. I think that is why most of us walk away in disgust with the whole lot of them.

For once I support the media in overdoing something; all this D-Day stuff is a great reminder of what our parents had to cope with trying to overcome tyranny. Didn’t see many Germans though, and all those wonderful Stalinists are too busy elsewhere.

Not much mention here about work related thoughts, all quiet on the western front. Only to say we have to conduct long term relations on trust and honesty. Honesty is the hardest test, we try to be good but we all make mistakes. The true test is how do we put things right. In business there are few sayings that I think are worthy of repeating, sods law is the only law that works; if it can go wrong, it will; if you think you should do something, do it; listen to your gut feeling.

Be careful out there.

I'm Free.............!

I am free! The boot is off and I have been out seeing customers, and it feels so good. I love my job, it doesn’t feel like a job, going to see my old chums, enjoyer the banter, catching up. Of course there is pressure to win new business, but then we are hunter gatherers, so why not enjoy the chase?

That old chestnut, motivation.  Most of us need to work to pay the bills and so on, that is some form of motivation, but if we enjoy our work as well, that makes life a lot easier. So then we need a challenge, mine is not only to win new business but to keep current customers happy with what we do, and how we do it. As a salesman one needs to be a micro business owner. Your customers see you, not the whole of your company, you are the company. This was easy for me when I owned Trim Technology, but this feeling hasn’t changed one jot since going in with Darren and Dave. If anything it has helped me go to another level of satisfaction. What I can contribute now gives me the extra buzz one gets from sharing. It is a real buzz and you won’t read that any academic text book (they are full of salami sliced guff regurgitated over and over again, usually written by weird American academics that never left the cosy confines of their stuffy Universities).

I don’t want to take up too much of your time this week, just to leave you with the picture of me with a silly grin on my face.

Nearly forgot, if anyone is near the Celtic Manor this Sunday morning, some middle aged, over weight golfer may burst into song!

Slightly connected to this, Sally and I sing in a community choir, Cardiff City Voices. There are about 180 of us. We sing for charity and our main concert is on 28^th and 29^th June in  BBC Hoddinott Hall - Wales Millennium Centre.Some of the numbers we will be singing include Shine; California Dreaming; Both Sides Now; Creep; I say a little prayer for you; Fix You, and many more. Come along! 

Ditch The Boot!

2 more days to go, then I can ditch the plastic boot! The weather is starting to get warmer, little chicks are being persuaded to leave the nest, more of that later. But don’t cast a clout till May is out, you might know that this refers to May blossom, not the month.

I am going to break my own rule here and mention UKIP. I had a long discussion with someone, whose opinion I value. I started by saying I was thinking of putting in a protest vote by voting UKIP, to make the other parties sit up and worry that they can’t take us for granted. His reply was forthright and persuasive. If you vote for these awful people and they do well in these elections, they will bolster the extreme right wing standing in Europe and carry greater credibility towards the real election to come. I feel suitably admonished, and will not be voting UKIP now.

Since we are poking around the forbidden territory, please stay with us Scotland 

and yes ask for and get your own proper Parliament, with full tax raising powers. This way we all win, you get self rule but remain part of GB. We can reduce the numbers of free loaders in our Parliament.

Wouldn’t it be great if you couldn’t stand for a seat if you haven’t worked in a proper job for 5 years, and Universities drop silly subjects like politics and all those meaningless "ologies".  Law should be even harder academically to get onto, as we have too many ambulance chasers. We need more engineers and project managers, so make these free.

I am enjoying this rant, can we go back to educating children instead of showing them how to beat the system? I remember we had a pretty mediocre history teacher that had come from teaching at a local grammar school. We were in the 5th form, coming up for our O levels in the summer, he showed us what they were doing at the state grammar school, they would get the past O level papers going back 5 years and work out the likely questions or essays that will come up next time, then concentrate on 5 essays knowing 3 of these will come up. He was right, but we all failed as he had given us the wrong dates. We re-sat them in the autumn, using notes from the good history teacher we had in the 3rd and 4th Form. Most of us then got good pass marks.  If this was typical of state schools in the 60s what are they up to now?

Back to business, and yes marketing is going to get it in the neck again. It was in the late 90s that Marketing as an industry was finally being exposed as the emperor’s new clothes it always was. So some bright spark came up with this astounding phrase, Relationship Marketing. No s**t Sherlock! People in sales know that people buy from people, so no one is going to buy from someone they can’t stand. So now they (Marketing Wallahs) jumped on this as the new way ahead. Nothing in the word of direct selling had changed from the time that Ug asked Og to have a chat over a skull of fermented apple juice while Ug shows Og his new product, a flat, round stone with a hole through the middle.


We all have to work, so why don’t we try to enjoy it, that is my raison d'être. Happy hunting! Or if you are a little chick, soft landing.

Sell in May and Go Away

Well looking at the weather, it does sound a good idea. I think the saying was from a bygone era, referring to city brokers taking the summer off to do the season (Cowdray Park, Ascot, Wimbledon, Royal Henley, Cowes Week and Glorious Goodwood) before the yobs from the East End (1980s) took over the City. Now it’s just a giant betting office, buying and selling jobs by the nanosecond.

You’ve guessed it, I am going through a serious bout of cabin fever, but I have been advised by my number one daughter  to keep clear of unions and teachers, hurrumph. I did promise to stay away from politics and soccer, so I will.

But as to the meaning of life, well, that’s another matter; we can all have a go at that. God botherers stop reading NOW.

I was telling you about Donna Tartt’s “The GoldFinch”, and what an enlightening read that was. Well I am half way through “The Universe verses Alex Woods,” by Gavin Extence. Not in the same beautifully written league but more like Adrian Mole finds insight through the eyes of a Vietnam War Veteran, living in Somerset. Nothing too strange there, but we get an introduction to the writings of Kurt Vonnegut. In fact if you Google Kurt Vonnegut, you can read many of his famous sayings, this one appeals to me, 

A bit deep perhaps, most of his work IS enlightening and funny, as you may well know. But I think I will have a go at reading one or two of his novels again, as we had to read lots different books at school, which were probably wasted on spotty, hormonal, teenagers. Like most things were. I do remember one of our more trendy teachers playing  us “Silent Night” by Simon and Garfunkel, which was a little haunting, as a couple of our class mates were due to return to the USA to enlist for Vietnam (that dates me), but I was alive in 1967, what a year for music! The next week he played us something about “All the good times we have wasted, having good times” (Animals) in evening prayers. He was too caring and left to have a nervous breakdown.

Back to work, we stopped half way through my rant against formal marketing originations / departments by recommending direct forms of marketing, as they can be measured. I was only just warming up when I realised I had gone into my third page so needed to stop.

We do make a dedicated range of products and therefore what I am about to describe may be interesting to those that do the same. And that is we started using “pay per click” on Google. Here are the figures (approximate). We started our campaign in 2011 and committed to spend £250 a month, and in our first year we landed £50,000 of orders, at no other sales cost. In 2012 we upped our monthly spend to £500 a month and returned £ 112,000. Last year we went mad and committed to £1000 a month and you have guessed it, we landed £220,000 of sales. Don’t reach for your calculators….that is 17 times our investment. We did try £1250 for a couple of months but we seemed to have peaked at just over £200,000 turnover from £12,000 spent. Happy days, it works!

Ah well, you must be making a wonder product that no one else has jumped on, I hear you muttering! Well, try bespoke ring binders. Not that exciting, but we do it well and get more than 50% repeat custom on these. Membrane switch panels are closer to 90% repeat custom. The point I am hoping to make is that this form of marketing, alongside more direct action does work, and most importantly is both measurable and controllable when it comes to expenditure.

Here endeth my 7th lesson. Nearly... we play a drinking game to watch the Eurovision Song Contest, it really is great fun, you draw lots for a quantity of countries and every time one gets 12 points the owner of that country has to down a pint or a large glass of vino, it really was over when the bearded lady sang, such fun!

What A Reply!

What a reply, please have a read of this one from last week’s instalment, it really made me chuckle:

“You can play some interesting tricks with Pareto's rule.”

Assuming you only did the 20% most productive tasks next week. Your productivity would be 400%  but  your production would only be  80% of its starting value. By applying the same rule repeatedly you could achieve similar status to the proverbial professor who ' learned more and more about less and less until finally he knew everything about bugger all!' . 

While this is a great reply please don’t be distracted from the law of 80/20. These examples may cheer you up or not...... 

80% of people die from 20% of the most common causes. 

80% of your headaches come from 20% of your worst customers. I think we are nearer to 95/5. 

Let’s leave that idea alone for a moment as I would like to take swipe at Marketing. My ankle is getting better but I am beginning to get stir crazy. So let me tell you a story.... 

 Going back to my early days I worked for a large paper company. They were a big company with thousands of staff and millions of Turnover. They had 120 reps, 40 Sales Managers and 15 Branch managers, not to mention all the other staff working in the 20 paper mills. As well as this, they had marketing people that were employed to “back sell” each of the different paper mills products. This often proved less than helpful as the idea was to make a profit. Two points here, if you couldn’t get a job selling at the front line, because you were too scared to go and see customers, you could always get one of these “soft” jobs. This meant resulted in engendering a feeling of resentment amongst true sales force towards those pathetic idiots in Marketing who were being paid without having to hit targets. The second problem was these reps weren’t able to tell us which paper from which mill returned the best profit margin. So as Salesmen we had to ignore their message as it was of no use to us at all. In other words marketing was a drain on the company. 

I am glad to say nothing I have read or experienced has been able to change my complete contempt for anything labelled marketing. Oh I am enjoying this, getting all my venom flowing for these feckless people in a fraudulent industry.

To cap it all, we had a module on the part time degree course I went on, mentioned earlier, called Marketing. 

 Can you image the blood thirsty thoughts I had brewing at the very start of this? Well I was not disappointed; our lecturer had taken an extended holiday on the end of the summer break, they do have such a tough time having to make do with just 8 weeks summer holidays, and in doing so had forgotten to change the course assignment details from the year before. This meant that the first 4 weeks of a 10 week module was spent trying to work with literature that didn’t match the course notes, with a temporary lecturer that had never covered this type of course.
The responsible Lecturer eventually turned up and came in to face the music, he was genuinely bewildered and then deflated by some of the tough comments put forward by some of his annoyed adult students. He left and never returned. The only shame is these useless creatures will never get sacked by their colleges, as the college administrators have their hands tied by trade unions (another institution that has come to my notice over the years and will not get off lightly). Why would any school or college take on a member of the NUT, surely there is a clue in the name? 

Having got that off my chest, the principle of finding out what companies/people want, and what are our potential customers prepared to pay for these products is vitally important to all of us. We have looked at (and taken on board) the premise that innovation is the one way we know that will get us ahead, on the proviso we know that this innovation is relevant and  that our customers or potential customers will want it. This comes under market research.
We don’t work in huge conglomerates with massive marketing budgets. Let them waste their money; we need to be a lot more careful with our precious hard earned cash. So how can we make sure what we spend will work. Forget Branding, Market place presence and other useless catch phrases. Here are the three simple words we need to think about:- 

RETURN ON INVESTMENT (ROI)

Put simply, we are here to make money. And we only have our own hard earned cash to use, so don’t set aside a marketing budget; remember there are plenty of these feckless idiots and charlatans ready to squander your money. It won’t be easy. My old rowing coach would bellow through his mega phone “nothing great is ever easy” when we started to flag after an hour and a half of rowing at steady state (90/95% max heart rate). 

Only venture what you can measure. Direct marketing can be measured by spending a certain amount on direct mail shots with a return card. This will work for some enterprises,   but does need a lot of thought. Is your business the kind that would benefit from this approach? Do you make specific products, do you know who to target and what will they respond to? These are tried and tested, quite effective, a little dated but can be measured. 

What about using the World Wide Web?! I can just imagine Rob Brydon’s raised eye brows as this gob-smacking thought hits him, as if he is the first one to think it (Gavin & Stacey.2008)

Sorry this is going on a bit so in the tradition of a Charles Dickens' instalment I will continue next week. 

Nothing to add about the mad house elf, he is getting away with it, so far. The Tar Tars don’t like the Russians and don’t have a history of surrendering.