Where’s your yacht?
Okay, let’s do a little bit of role play, sitting comfortably? Then we shall begin…
Imagine you are on a yacht, your yacht, with friends and family laughing by your side (or by yourself if that’s your idea of a holiday!) as you sail onwards over the ocean as you toast to the good weather with a cool glass of something nice…
Lovely isn’t it?
Now think about the business network that needs fixing because one of the staff can’t access her files when she jumps onto her colleague’s machine…
… where’s that holiday again?
Exactly.
I know hands down where I’d rather be so imagine your customer’s lack of delight when you sit them down and say how much it’ll cost them to get a problem fixed. It’s not as if you enjoy putting that frown on their face and it exasperates you to think that you are continually qualifying your charges against the time you put in.
Hands up those who don’t charge for the odd tweak here and there? And hands up who sighs quietly to themselves as the customer remembers something else they wanted you to do at the end of the day after you asked them repeatedly when you were sitting there watching the software updates load at lunctime…
You do know there is another way that will suit both you and the customer don’t you?
WARNING: NO SINGLE ANSWER TO YOUR PROBLEM
“Thank you for your order of 1x ‘answer to my problems’. Unfortunately, due to a marketing error, we no longer stock this product and this item should have been deleted from our site. Please accept the following suggestions as an alternative with our compliments.
Yours sincerely
SS “you can go on holiday without the business folding in your absence” and its crew.”
What you need to do is sit still for an hour at least every week and absorb some blogs and podcasts, why not go the whole way and read some books on the subject, or even better, get out there and talk to your peers?
You may be strapped for time because you’re running to stand still but you really do need to slow down to see that you may not necessarily be going the right way about things.
If you have Office 2007 running on your machine, top up your RSS feeds with some of the guys listed on this site - if too much comes through then put a filter on so that if any pre-set keywords pop up on the posts you can be alerted to them as a priority.
Download some podcasts that are available to you and play them in the car or when you decide to take pooch (or yourself) for a walk.
I like to find quotes that inspire me and I found this one just for you:
“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.”
Vlad and I interviewed Erick Simpson about his new book ‘The Guide to a Successful Managed Services Practice’ on the SBS Show for shows number 25 & 26 (they rock!) which focuses on Managed Services. Now don’t go buying books that collect dust on the side, make wise choices and don’t waste your money on ones you’ll never read. I do recommend books such as Erick’s and Karl’s because these guys have been in the thick of it and hopefully make more sense via empathy. They share their successes (and the challenges!) and give you some new angles on something we’re all doing now.
Jeff Loucks also commented on the three questions small business owners should be asking. So if they are asking, you’ll need to prepare the answers! If you class yourself as a technical bod, then splash out on a marketing basics book or have a look at who is in the business of helping you suceed. I warn you though, the first answer isn’t necessarily the right one and you may need to do a bit of cherry picking to get exactly what you are looking for - check with others to see what works and what didn’t for them before you go handing your cash over…
But don’t be a mushroom; it’s one thing to stay in the dark and absorb the information we offer you, but if you don’t do anything with it and don’t make your own way in life, how are you ever going to achieve? These guys got it right through drive, a knack for listening, and topped it off with a dash of luck - but they didn’t try to cookie cut anyone else’s design because it just doesn’t work like that… if it did we’d all be bumping into one another’s yachts!
[…] The big guys in retail are not going to sit back and let us play with all the toys in the sandpit for too long. Look at how retailers like the Dixons Group have had to re-engineer their corporate infrastructure to avoid further suffering based on a ’stack ‘em high, sell ‘em low’ theory. They want a piece of our pie… and because they do the sales turnover needed to keep their partners in business, well there isn’t any business reason for anyone to advise them otherwise. It’s exactly what I would do if I was in charge of DSG (I’d have that yacht too!). […]