• Honesty
• Integrity
• Skilled
• Motivated
• Hard Working

They all came close.

Do you know what I ended up answering and on reflection still consider up there at the top? (enough to write a post about it! at least!)

Someone who ‘Accepts Responsibility’

What do I mean by this?

This person never blames anyone else, they accept responsibility themselves in a positive way and offer a solution which they learn from and better themselves with. In sales especially this is very important and easy to explain using the following example:

Sales person A returns from a pitch, and say’s the following: “Boss we didn’t get it because the customer doesn’t have the money just now – times have been tight because of the recession and the chips are down – it’s hard out there right now.”

Sales person B returns from the same pitch and say’s, “Boss I didn’t get the pitch for these two reasons – I didn’t qualify the person hard enough, so hadn’t realised they didn’t have the right budget for our product and I didn’t build a good enough relationship with the decision maker. I tell you what though, I’m not going to make the same mistakes again and I’ll nail the next one Boss.”

Who accepted responsibility in that scenario? Who would you rather have working for you? Yes of course, the second guy right?

This doesn’t just apply in sales, it happens in all areas of business and I personally want to surround myself with people who have the ability to accept responsibility. If someone comes to me and says they made a mistake but they’ve learnt or they know how to fix it then that’s a HUGE tick in the box. If they come to me blaming someone else or some external factor then it has the opposite effect.

There is a great article on the Livestrong Blog which goes into far more detail about the topic and is well worth a read if you agree with my points above: http://www.livestrong.com/article/14698-accepting-personal-responsibility/

Now Your Thoughts

• Don’t forget that when you employ people, you are looking for things like this from an early stage – what sort of questioning could you use to coax this kind of personality trait out of someone?
• What would you say the No1 trait you look for in your staff is?

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This week I spent some time interviewing friend and now supplier of my firms book-keeping services, Ben Didier about starting his own business earlier this year.

Why did you choose to go it alone?

I have always wanted my own business, ever since I was young.  For me it was the plan from the start – College then Uni then business and management experience – then my own business!  It has been far from plain sailing but that is near enough the route I have taken.  I actually wrote down the reasons for taking the step when I started, as I knew there would be tough days ahead and I needed to be clear about why I was doing it. Here they are:

1.       Create something of my own that I can build and develop.  I get a real sense of achievement from that and hopefully, eventually it will produce a strong income.

2.       Set my own terms of working.  I want the freedom to choose my own projects and working methods.  On the other side the responsibility and risk that comes with this it is not for everyone and not all circumstances – sometimes you can’t afford to take the risk.

3.       Direct risk and reward.  I want to get the direct benefit of my actions and decisions, and am also prepared to accept the consequences of those when it doesn’t work out.  Employment can shield you from both sides of this, to an extent.

What attitude do you think you need to go it alone?

The single most important part of starting out on your own is – Wanting it.  Resilience is the first quality of business – because if you give up before you have had chance to make it – then you wont.   People outside of business often focus on their service or product when thinking about starting up, rather than about winning work.  This can prove a shock when starting out, as business is primarily driven by winning customers – and looking after them!  Winning the work requires determination as it takes time, people aren’t always ready for what you offer at the time you offer it, and there are always many set-backs.  If you can’t get beyond those mentally, then business may not be for you.  As a bookkeeper I would always say you need to be interested enough in the figures to ensure that more money is coming in then going out!

What was the scariest thing about doing it?

The unknown market –“ is there the appetite for the services I want to provide in the area?”  You never really know until you actually start.  I had planned to get a part time job if the clients did not materialise quickly enough, and had cut my personal outgoings to the bone, so I had considered the risks carefully.  I knew sales may takes some time and wanted to survive long enough to be able to build a reputation and client base – the low overheads were crucial to this.

How you are getting on?

Fantastically!  Having started in January this year, after 8 months I now have 8 clients I provide services for every month and have worked on some other interesting projects.  I am independent and self-sufficient which is great.  One good thing about bookkeeping is the regularity of the work, this reduces pressure to get new sales all the time, so I can focus more on looking after the clients I have.  A commercial perspective on internal finance in producing the figures is really helping the owners I work with to make more informed decisions – so there the feeling of delivering something of value which I also get a great deal out of.

Now Your Thoughts

Have you made the leap from a stable job to a startup? Want to add anything to the post that you’ve learnt along the way?

p.s. If you like what you’ve read here then you should sign up to my RSS feed and every time I update this site the post will be sent to your reader automatically

You can find out more about Ben and his services on his website: http://www.bookkeepingssw.co.uk/ or follow him on Twitter: @bookkeepingben – I can’t recommend him highly enough

You only have a complete deal when you’ve made a sale, done the work and then collected the readies. Don’t disillusion yourself into thinking that you’re doing amazingly well just because sales are being made – getting the money in the other end is just as critical and sometimes just as tricky

Its very easy when you’re new to business to let your clients get away with not paying you very quickly – don’t worry I’ve been there and done it myself. This, however is not a good strategy and will only leads to problems, here are just a few of them:

• The time you’ll waste chasing debts can become ridiculous – taking you away from your day to day work
• Clients can begin to ‘expect’ better terms
• Many companies have a ‘don’t pay until questioned’ policy – if you don’t ask, you simply won’t get
• As you get more established, older clients that have been with you since the early days will continue to pay you on the old terms you let them get away with – this is very hard to change down the line
• Clients will know those suppliers that are less likely to cause them problems when it comes to asking for money – you’ll be further down their priority payment list
• An aged debt is more likely to turn into a bad debt

If you’re about to start a business or are still fairly new to it all, make a strict policy for how you’re going to deal with the collecting of monies and stick to it.

Here are a few quick suggestions:

• Create regular statements – At least once a month – send your statement in the middle of the month when most other companies send theirs at the beginning or end, it’s more likely to get noticed.
• Try and make your statement stand out – We have a stamp with a picture of a man crying, saying ‘please pay this, it’s overdue’
• Keep a close eye on your aged-debtors list – At least  once a month
• Don’t be afraid to ask for the money – after all, you did the job, you deserve it
• Have a process in place for chasing debts that are older than your terms
• Consider if you can minimise your risk of bad debts and cashflow issues by putting in place deposits or at least stage payments
• If the debt gets really old, don’t be afraid of losing a customer by passing it to a collector, are they really worth having as a customer if they are putting you through this? I hear you thinking, ‘but yes Al that’s fine but they are so important to my company, I can cut them a bit of slack can’t I?’
  NO
  Seriously, it’s not worth the agro – get yourself a policy and make sure you stick to it religiously, whatever the size or importance of your client. No exceptions.

One last tip, if you employ sales people who are have any sort of commission, make it a condition of that commission that’s its only paid when the money owed from the client is in the bank. Give them the responsibility of getting the money in – this will make your life easier in keeping on top of aged debts.

How have you found getting money in? Do you have any further tips for business owners regarding this tricky issue?

p.s. If you like what you’ve read here then you should sign up to my RSS feed and every time I update this site the post will be sent to your reader automatically

OK so there are probably hundreds of things you need to be successful in business but I’ve been day dreaming this last week and working out my top 5 – I love a top 5 as you know

So here they are in no particular order

1). Passion – In bucketfuls. I spend an awful lot of my time with other businessmen and women. In my working life, networking constitutes at least half my time. It’s one of the key ways we build our brand and get our company noticed. From there, when people want a job done, we’re at least in with a chance. One trait of seriously successful businessmen and women I’ve met over the years is passion for what they do. Passion is catching; you know when you’ve met someone who is passionate about their business – you come away feeling good about yourself. Without this trait you’re going to start off on the back foot. If can’t get passionate about your business is it the right business for you? Think on that for a while.

2). Sales skills – Every start-up business needs to bring in sales. If you’re on your own then that’s you pal If you’re not and you don’t like selling you better hope you’re in partnership with someone that does. You could have the best product or service in the country but if no-one knows about it then you may as well give up now. Sale’s doesn’t need to be cheesy, it doesn’t need to be immoral, it doesn’t need to feel dirty! Much of good quality sales is about building relationships and making the customer want to buy (not be sold). I strongly suggest reading the book below (affiliate link) which will, without a doubt, help with your sales process. In fact, even if you’re not in sales or running a business, read it anyway because its awesome.

The Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness – You can buy it from Amazon here.

3). A good product or service – Not technically a trait, but the ability to either come up with or be involved in selling a good product or service is a trait that I see all the time in successful people. You make your own luck, you earn it. These people have a sixth sense for getting involved with projects that do well. They fail a lot as well but the difference is the ones that work, really work. I know there are an awful lot of people out there selling sub standard products and services in their business – forget that – it’s a short-term attitude if you ask me. It won’t be long before you’re found out and the churn rate on customers will be huge meaning you never build relationships with people, you continually need new prospects poured in the top of your sales funnel. If you ask me, without a good product or service that you truly believe in, just don’t bother. You need to believe that your customer is truly better off by choosing you over your competitors.

4). A head for numbers and in particular cashflow – Since I started this blog almost exactly a year ago I know for a fact the most blogged about topic has been cashflow. There is a good reason for this – because it’s so damn important Without cashflow you have no business. I’m not going to go over old ground again on this. I wrote quite a lengthy post about cashflow here and even gave a step by step guide on how to write a cash flow forecast – you have no excuse

5). The ability to accept help and support – Business is a lonely place sometimes, help and support is essential but how often have I seen business owners that think they know it all and therefore are not prepared to accept it fail – Too many is the answer!!! Friends and family without their own business may not understand quite what it takes to run a business and unless they ever do it themselves they may never understand. This doesn’t mean you don’t listen to these people or dismiss their input – it can be just as valuable. It’s important to build a network of support around you that you can bounce ideas off. I’m lucky to have a great business partner at Optix Solutions who I bounce ideas off and chat with about strategy regularly. We also have a couple of mentor figures who consult us on the business regularly and keep us on track. We also have supportive families and friends – all of which make the days when it’s not so fun, easier to deal with. The successful businessman or woman doesn’t know it all and is willing to listen to others…do you?

So what are your top 5? Maybe you just want to add in a couple? I’m keen to hear from you

p.s. If you like what you’ve read here then you should sign up to my RSS feed and every time I update this site the post will be sent to your reader automatically

There is, however, a problem with this strategy when in start-up mode – it gives you no time for reflection, and reflection is essential. This is the time you need to step back from the business and take stock of everything. You’re too close to things on a daily basis to reflect and plan properly.

So this weekend, while you have some time off here is my suggestion:

Reflect on your overall business

Reflect on your sales and sales processes

Reflect on your company’s relationships with customers

Reflect on your brand

Reflect on your staff & what they do for you

Reflect on your finances and how you can improve them

Reflect on your internal processes for getting work done / products delivered

Reflect on yourself – are you working efficiently? What could you do differently?

I find it useful when doing this kind of exercise to write things down. The danger, if you don’t, is that the ideas you have get lost again as you get busy. Mind mapping is a very useful technique to learn for visualising this kind of information.

Now here’s the thing – When you’ve done all this and you go back to work on Tuesday – action some of the things you’ve reflected on. Don’t let this list form part of your ‘never read’ pile. Make sure it’s somewhere you can see regularly and ask yourself whether you’re making the changes and trying the new things at least once a week.

Good luck and have a great Easter

P.S. We’ve partnered with the forward-thinking team at Like Minds (including Olivier) to produce a White Paper on how businesses are (or aren’t!) using Social Media and we would love for you to be a part of it! All you need to do is take a few minutes to fill out the survey here: http://bit.ly/9FUt8W.

p.p.s. If you like what you’ve read here then you should sign up to my RSS feed and every time I update this site the post will be sent to your reader automatically

1). Apple Shop – Exeter – Ok so it doesn’t need to be Exeter but that’s the one I go to regularly. From the moment you walk in the door you are greeted by two members of staff, this makes you feel welcome and in the mood for buying…how easy is that for a retail business!  Then, if you’ve not been to a store before, on your first purchase, you find that you can pay for your goods with any of the roving shop assistants – yes you don’t even have to walk to a till anymore (and they email you your receipt)! I’d urge anyone that’s not been to an Apple shop, even if you’re not an apple fan to go in and experience the whole model – I believe that any business owner can learn a lot from Apple and the store model is really quite something.

2). Reiss – Exeter – I popped into Reiss the other day to look around. Admittedly there were only a few people in the store but the member of staff gave me his full attention and rather than the boring, typical, ‘are you ok there’ and getting the just as typical ‘yeah I’m just looking’ response he started to suggest what might look good on me and what goes with other things I’d shown an interest in. He asked what sort of thing I was looking for and then helped me with suggestions – needless to say, he made a sale! It constantly amazes me how many staff in retail shops are from the same mold – if you want to make sales, differentiate yourself and watch your numbers go sky high. In this case, I was so impressed with this guy that I purposely asked for the manager of the store and told her about how well treated I’d been and how good a member of staff that guy was – I just hope it made it back to him.

3). Appliance Care – Exeter – Some say that if you take your broken TV to a centre like this then you expect to have it repaired Yes, I agree, but it was the circumstances around this visit that amazed me. Samsung suggested I used this independent company. They didn’t know I was turning up. I arrived at about 9:30am on a busy Monday morning and they asked me to leave the TV with them. To be honest I thought it was likely to be gone a day or two but at 11am I had a phone call saying, ‘Mr Banks, your TV is ready’ – Awesome.

4). The Georgian Townhouse – Newark – When I’m travelling on business I’m not fussy about where I stay – generally I’ll get to my destination late, be up early and off again. All I need is a clean place to put my head with breakfast in the morning and decent parking. I travelled up to Newark this week to see a client near Nottingham and Linda, my PA, booked me into a Georgian townhouse. It was absolutely lovely! All the little details had been thought of: outstanding quality beds, amazing linen, spotless/minimalist decor, a breakfast fit for a king with a choice of everything you could imagine, a communal room for working/reading in (which I used in the morning), bottles of mineral water in the room when you arrived, good quality soaps and shampoos (not that cheap tat you often get) and lovely hosts. That night (B & B) cost me just £65! I will now tell everyone I know going to Nottingham/Newark to stay there and all because of the small details….look out for them in your business, they can mean the difference between someone passing your name on or not.

5). Giraffe – Exeter (and other outlets) I enjoy dining at Giraffe in Exeter – Its one of my favourite choices for coffee if meeting people and the food is great if you want to eat as well. However, its not so much the experience of the outlet I want to mention today – its the experience of the marketing that Giraffe’s (obviously clued up team) carry out. They have embraced the power of the web for one – They have a great website and twitter feed (where they actually engage with their customer base). They understand the power of email marketing, regularly sending out offers for dining – two for ones are not uncommon. Most of the guys in my office subscribe to these updates and when the offers come in, the guys are out the door and down to the local outlet for a spot of lunch – that’s what its all about. I tell you what, there are not very many places doing this kind of thing out there, lets hope more wise up to this clever and cost effective marketing soon. Well done Giraffe

I hope you’ve found my top 5 excellent experiences fun and useful – I would strongly suggest that you see if any of these ideas can be rolled out in your business and one day, someone like me, might just blog about you – After all, if you have a website you want to get listed in the search engines, you’ll know its all about the link juice baby!

If you’re interested, Nigel also posted on his blog about the event entitled, ‘Are you a Winner or a Whiner?’. Well worth a read.

Now I’m not going to try and break down a whole day into one post, so I thought I’d pick up a few of the key points for you, especially if you’re in sales yourself or are starting/just started a business.

People buy people – we know that right? Well I guess most do but I’m sure sometimes we forget. Jeffrey pointed out on MANY occasions that ‘sales’ is quite simply about being friendly – to EVERYONE!

It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you!

If you make yourself an industry leader in your sector, so indispensible that people want to buy from you, then the time spent doing that will be far better used than making sales calls and giving people your brochure (Jeffrey refers to this as puking on people lol – he also has a fantastic New Jersey accent which I really wish I could convey in this article). So the main premise of the day was to stop thinking about how to sell to someone and starting thinking about how to make them buy. I’m afraid though that this isn’t easy, it takes hard work, something many sales people simply aren’t willing to put in. Do you think just because it’s a Saturday it means I’m not going to blog about work! If you have that mentality, this probably isn’t for you – and neither is a career in sales!

A few top tips from the day that I’ll certainly be actioning myself in the coming weeks:

>> Get creative – Your business card should be a talking point – If the person you give it to doesn’t say ‘wow – cool card’ rip it up and start again!

>> Get video testimonials from clients – This is 100 times more powerful than saying how great you are yourself. If you can walk into your prospects and show them other happy clients waxing lyrical about you you’re on a winner.

>> Talk to your customer’s as if they were your Grandma – I personally love this one. He literally says, add ‘, grandma’ onto the end of any line you’re about to say to a customer and if it doesn’t sound right, don’t say it!

>> Use Social Media – It ain’t going away – THANK YOU JEFFREY – ‘nuff said! J

>> Become your client’s friend – if you make a sale, you make a commission, if you make a friend you’ll earn a fortune. A nugget of gold.

If you get the chance to see Jeffrey then don’t question the money – you’ll make it back 100 fold. You can see and get more information about him on his website here: http://www.gitomer.com or follow him on twitter here: http://twitter.com/gitomer or become a fan on facebook here: http://www.facebook.com/JeffreyGitomer

I have already (before the event) purchased a number of Jeffrey’s books and would whole heartedly recommend you consider buying them.

The Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness – You can buy it from Amazon here.

Little Gold Book of Yes! Attitude: How to Find, Build and Keep a Yes! Attitude for a Lifetime of Success

I’m now off to buy these other books in his range (I didn’t even know these ones existed until yesterday!):

The people I mention here are more often than not in Sales or sometimes applying for jobs (Still selling themselves)! Now this is what amazes me the most – if you can’t even be bothered to spell my name correctly, you’re unlikely to get my business or at the very least you’re going to have to work a whole lot harder for it!

One of my earlier posts about networking picked out the importance of using peoples first names in conversations with them – both face to face and over the phone – its a fantastic way of building up a closer relationship with an individual – well this is my equivalent piece of advice for the written word! Spell people’s names correctly – especially where you are selling to them. It takes very little or no effort to read someone’s email and make sure you double check the spelling – make it the last thing you do every time you send an email from now on and you might just find that sales become easier for you. If you’re reading this wondering what I’m talking about then you probably don’t have a tricky name to spell but this will hopefully still be sound advice because maybe, just maybe you don’t check carefully enough when communicating to others?

Another important aspect of this is taking down names over the phone when you’re going to send something to them. Never assume! Always double check the spelling there and then so when you follow up in writing you have it down correctly.

I’ve probably opened a can of worms now and will receive emails from people that I’ve accidentally spelt their names incorrectly but in reality I’m not really expecting this because something so personal and important to them as a name should be spelt correctly and I make it my business to get this right every time, make sure you do also.