Today I had an astounding reminder of how to set and implement standards in a business which I think is worth recounting. I am staying at the One Aldwych hotel which if you are visiting London and want the ultimate in customer care and cossetting is worth checking out. I have actually stayed there 80 times so you can guess it is pretty amazing.

so… I am returning to my room after a business meeting in the lobby and the cleaner is still finishing her work. I go to the desk and switch on my laptop but just as I do so she asks to check the blotter. She then proceeds to count the pages and inserts another one. I watch amazed. Apparently the standard is 5 pages in every blotter throughout the hotel – 5 pages not 4 or 6.

You might well ask what is the point of all this. Well in many businesses every time they do something it is like the first time – there is no set standard and nothing is written down. It is therefore virtually impossible to scale up the business as everyone does everything in their own particular or maybe peculiar way. It is also jolly hard to take on and train new hires with any form of consistent induction or review staff against any benchmark.

Setting performance standards or KPIs for a business is not that hard you just have to make a start. Also once you have them written up you don’t have to write them again. Start by listing all your key processes from getting business to getting paid. Then every week write up just one process and train your staff on how to deliver this to the standard you require. This way, you will soon have a more consistent and scalable business where everyone knows what to do and to what standard instead of making it up as they go along.

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As anyone who has watched The Apprentice will have learnt making money in business is about buying not just selling. Every pound you save by negotiating a good deal is a pound on the bottom line. In my business we seldom paid the asking price for anything except the business rates and the tax bill. I limited the number of people who could buy anything and trained them to say the magic words and if they could not get a reduction I would pick up the phone and do it whilst they watched.

Ah so what are the magic words? Well there are only two. They are ‘How much?’ But they only work if you say them the right way and then shut up and leave it to the seller to respond first. Learn to deliver the two magic words with absolute surprise at the shocking price you have just been given. You just cannot believe it. Surely there must be something wrong?
If you do this every time and get the delivery just right followed by the necessary silence you will be amazed at how the seller will immediately come back with a price drop without you saying any more. The first one who speaks is usually the looser. If this does not happen then you can add ‘I am sure you can do better than that?’ and shut up again. If this still does not work then try ‘We need to see some reduction before we can proceed’ and you might then start to make some alternative price suggestions.

I was on the other end of this strategy the other day when a new prospect said ‘Blimey you don’t come cheap do you?’ and instead of telling him I was the best in the business I gave him a price reduction D’oh!

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Wow the first six weeks of 2012 have disappeared already and there are only 46 weeks left to achieve what you want in your business. However, the vast majority of small and even some medium sized businesses do not have an up to date written business action plan setting out their target revenues and profits for the year ahead and most importantly how they are going to achieve them. I have already facilitated the planning process with a number of my clients, but you can easily do this for yourself given a bit of time, consideration and structure. To help you I have written 100 questions which will guide you through the process of reviewing your business and writing an action plan – just email me and ask for them. SUGGESTED ACTION Schedule a few hours planning time in your diary now and improve your business focus and results for this year.

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I woke up this week to see an Asian business owner on BBC Breakfast handing over his wife’s golden wedding jewellery to a pawn broker as he sought to raise some short term cash to keep his business afloat. Things clearly had to be desperate to get his lady to part with such valuable and sentimental possessions and this was not an isolated incident. Pawn brokers are the fastest growing traders on the high street and many of their customers are small businesses in trouble.

Of course we all sympathise with any business which is going through difficult times but every one of these companies has debtors on someone’s books – maybe yours? The pressure on debt collection has never been greater. The old maxim ‘I know this company and they always pay in the end’ just won’t wash. Debt collection is a race to get your customer’s money in your bank as quickly as possible ahead of their other unpaid creditors. In this contest for cash every day counts so here are some key questions:

• Terms- are your terms of business too lax in today’s financial climate? What do your competitors offer?

• Process – what is your debt collection process and is it time you reviewed the timing, content and effectiveness of every engagement?

• Resourcing – Are the staff chasing your debtors really up to the job? Are they ‘blood hounds’ firmly focusing on their target accepting no excuses or are they ‘pussy cats’ going through the motions and having little impact?

• Reporting – what reports do you get on your debtors and are you just reading them or actioning them?

• Frequency – is debt collection something you do every day or irregularly? Maybe consider outsourcing to an expert?

Don’t let your business be strapped for cash due to poor debt collection or have to write off debts because of customer bankruptcies. Dig deep and get down to the ‘nitty-gritty’ of your ability to get your customer’s cash in your bank. Otherwise you too might be asking the Mrs for her bling and you wouldn’t want to do that would you?

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Do you ever wish the universe could create more hours in the day to get things done? Well we can’t easily change the universe but you can easily change your email habits.

I regularly come across clients and their staff with inboxes containing not tens or hundreds but often thousands of emails. The vast majority have either been responded to but not deleted. However, hiding amongst them are the ones which have never been answered or are waiting to be answered assuming they can actually be found. But, and here’s the point they have invariably been read. So to answer these emails they have to be read again and that is duplication and a waste of time.

Of course there are some emails which need further consideration but these are the vast minority. Most emails can be quickly responded to there and then if you have a mind to do so. So get in the habit of touching your emails once not twice or more. Read through carefully decide quickly what response is required and make it. If you don’t have time to answer your emails then don’t open them and wait until you do.

By touching and responding to every email once you potentially halve your time and without dithering probably make better decisions too. What’s more, huge inboxes of old communications are bad karma just like a cluttered desk or drawer. What do they say about you?

So set some time aside to clear out those inboxes and touch and answer your emails just once. You will be amazed at how wonderful it is to actually see white screen instead of lists of emails – it really is possible – many have done it.

Touch once and smarten up your communications today

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I have been chairing meetings for more years than I care to admit and those who know me would say I do it reasonably well. Everyone has a chance to contribute and most items requiring action have an action holder and a deadline. So why is it that a month later so many of the actions remain outstanding?

I have learnt through working with clients that running a business and building a business are two quite separate things. Running a business is largely more of the same. Delivering the service or products, carrying out the same processes and in effect reacting to what the customers require. Building a business on the other hand is a proactive, creative process which needs time and consideration – time which most hard pressed management teams just cannot or will not set aside.

I have tried reducing the key action items so that we only focus on moving forward one or at the very most two essentials at a time. This definitely helps but still the pace is spasmodic especially where writing processes, marketing copy, job specifications or similar tasks are concerned.
I have now found the ultimate solution – let’s do it now! Instead of sending people away to consider and write stuff which they invariably do poorly if at all, we all sit in the room and do it together producing an end result not a required action. The same in the room immediacy can be applied to anything even when phone calls might be required to get information or generate action.

Many of my meetings now have ‘discussion time’ and ‘do it now time’ so attendees go away having actually achieved something which is immediately usable – not just talked about it. In short a deliverable not a deadline. Try it for yourselves and let me know how you get on.

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Last week Mrs K and I had a stunning meal looking out over the London skyline on the top of the Hilton Hotel at Galvin at Windows. But this is a blog for business not restaurant reviews so what made this experience outstanding. One word service!

I have often wondered how the top restaurants and hotels can deliver such outstanding, attentive and intelligent service to their customers when most establishments can’t even remember you, no matter how many times you visit and frankly don’t care about you either. Surely it can’t all be about price? No it’s about passion and that old phrase ‘the pursuit of excellence’ rather than the acceptance of mediocrity.

The General Manager of Galvin at Windows is Fred Sirieix who, along with Restaurant Manager Andrew Sicklin, was an essential and inspiring part of the BBC reality show Michelle Roux’s Service which took 8 young people with little/low self-esteem and future and trained them to deliver the demanding service required at some of the world’s top eateries. So was all that care and dedication just for the small screen? Sit in Galvin at Windows for just 5 minutes and watch Fred and his team rather than the view and you will marvel at this smooth machine, which delivers an outstanding customer experience twice a day.

Fred talks about training and development of staff as if his life depended on it – well his business certainly does! Of course there were the extremely charming and highly knowledgeable waiters and sommeliers mostly from the Continent who clearly see delivering service as a worthy and rewarding profession. But alongside them were young people like the girl who served us who was only in her 6th week, having done nothing like this before. She was even allowed to take a small part in proceedings, placing and removing one of the delicious sweets but most of the time she watched. So ‘sitting by Nelly’ as we used to call it, still has a place in the training armoury. She laid a table half way through the evening and we watched fascinated as one of the waiters (surely there should be a more elevated name) meticulously moved by millimetres, the plates, napkins and other items into exactly the right place.

So what are the lessons here? Well certainly that young people are not a lost generation as they are so often portrayed. Also that they can be trained in a relatively short time to play an important part in any business, even ones with the most demanding customers like Michelin star restaurants. But what does it take to achieve this? The start point is setting a standard – an aim point. In this respect the bar is certainly set very high by Fred and his team. They then work tirelessly with passion and patience to get the trainees up to the mark.

Do you get the best from your staff and if not, might this be because you fail to set high enough standards in the first place and do not have a clear process for helping your staff to achieve them? Trust also plays an important part too. It is clear that Fred gives them just enough responsibility to stretch and test them, but not enough to have them floundering and losing confidence. We applied exactly the same principal in my company and actually trained everyone from 3.00 every Friday 48 weeks a year for 10 years.

Are you a training centric company or is this reserved for when you think about it which is not that often if at all? You don’t just need to go to Galvin at Windows to see the results of training in action. It is all around you and hopefully after reading this, in your company too?

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I am convinced there is a direct connection between a manger’s effectiveness and the size of their inboxes. The subject came up again at a workshop the other week, when it was revealed that most of the managers present had inboxes in the thousands.

The CC culture was rampant and everyone experienced the frustration of receiving emails which were of absolutely no interest or relevance to them. So what to do about it? We agreed they would email back their colleagues and tell them the email they had just received was irrelevant, but in a novel and irreverent way. The “E OFF” campaign was borne

Now, every time an unwarranted time wasting copy is received, the recipient sends an “E-OFF” message to the sender. This gets a wry smile and a reduction in CC traffic. One manger wrote to me saying ‘I told 3 people to “E-OFF” yesterday’. Maybe it is time you told someone in your organisation to “E-OFF”

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There is something you do every day which you take for granted which could be causing you unnecessary frustration, grief and even stress. I am talking about the simple email. I have found there is a direct correlation between my client’s ability to communicate and respond to emails and the way they manage themselves and their business – what a surprise?

The amazing figures in the headline were achieved by one manager in a client company who, using a very simple technique I showed him, reduced his inbox from a staggering 16,958 down to 12 in a weekend. He now keeps them reduced to a very manageable number every day.

With thousands of emails in your in-box no wonder stuff gets lost. Also, the time taken to find an important email can be huge. It is also extremely bad karma having thousands of emails just sitting there – an unseen but real burden piling up day after day.

The main cause of this email overload is skipping or skimming them for later reading and not touching every email once, which is the way effective people deal with their electronic correspondence. Of course there will be emails which require more consideration than I can give them immediately but these are relatively few and even then they get dealt with before the end of the day. An effective filing system also helps so I have the few very important emails for a particular client which I might want to refer to again all in one place. Couple this with achieving everything over a month old and your Outlook can be transformed.

Sometimes I even have a clear in-box with not a single email in sight. The sense of satisfaction and completion you get when this happens is just fantastic – try it and see.

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You often hear me banging on about responsiveness but for a change read how one of my clients has experienced the impact.

Since I’ve been learning from you about how to improve my business in small ways I thought I’d give you feedback. These little things are starting to get people interested in me. Only today I’ve had two possible referrals for possible small projects from people I helped out by being responsive and giving them something they wanted. One person wanted a testimonial to get a job, so I wrote one and sent it on. I don’t have a lot of free time running my own business but made time for this guy because it was important to him and he’s somebody worth it. It took me about 45 minutes to write a good testimonial and he was very grateful – he got the job. Fast forward to today 4 weeks on. Out of the blue I get a text to say the company he’s working for are looking for services that I might be able to do, and he will put forward a recommendation to the company for me if it was something I was interested in doing. Awesome! How cool is that?

It just goes to show that being responsive and positive in the right places can ultimately change how people want to work with me. I used to be slow and fairly unresponsive, and clients then tended to be slow and unresponsive. Speed up, and clients speedup and become more excited.

It’s great to get feedback on how my input impacted but even better when so well expressed. Come on everyone – if you think you could do with increasing your responsiveness do it today.

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