Define Promise – Page 4 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

March 16, 2021

Family firms

Someone from a small, long-established family firm near me was meant to come out and install a new waste pipe to my washing machine yesterday. It didn’t happen.

Someone rang me this morning to say sorry, and re-book the appointment.

“I’m soooo sorry. One of our engineers was taken ill, and a family emergency meant we had to shut the shop suddenly too.”

“Well, these things happen, I guessed something must have gone wrong.”

We’ve re-booked. Hopefully this time the process will run smoothly.

The thing about family firms is that they are families, not machines. And that’s why I chose them.

I’d rather wait an extra day or two than turn someone into an overworked cog.

PS Only a man who’d never done a load of washing can have designed that machine!

February 23, 2021

Customer delight?

What’s more annoying than your bus arriving late?

Your bus arriving early.

There seems to be a trend at the moment for deliveries to arrive sooner than expected. I think this comes from an assumption that over-delivering on a promise is always good (something Royal Mail cleary don’t subscribe to). But what if I need to prepare for delivery beforehand? Arriving early messes up my schedule, makes my life more difficult.

Early delivery might be good – if you ask me first, and give me the option of sticking to the original plan.

Otherwise, it’s probably not my delight you’re seeking, but your convenience.

October 21, 2020

This was last weekend’s reading.

Strangely enough, they are related. I recommend reading them together.

October 14, 2020

Who and what and why?

A few good questions to ask of yourself and the people you wish to serve:

You	Your ideal client
Who are you?	Who are they?
What skills do you have?	What skills are they missing?
What do you enjoy doing?	What do they need doing?
What dent are you trying to make?	What dent are they trying to make?
What transformation are you uniquely able to deliver?	What transformation are they seeking?
Why do you want to do that?	Why do they want to do that?

Knowing that everyone really wants

Agency – to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery – to learn and master new skills.
Autonomy – to be free to choose how they make their dent.
Purpose – to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the sale.
Community – to do all this with ‘people like us’.
Status – to know their place in this community, and have others know it too.

will help you ask and answer these questions far more productively.

May 5, 2020

What is Marketing?

One benefit of this pause we’re in is more time to think about our businesses than usual.

Which makes books like the one I recommended yesterday particularly good reads, if reading is your thing.

Today’s book is “This is Marketing” by Seth Godin. I recommend it because unlike any other marketing book I’ve come across, it makes you think hard about what marketing is really for.

We usually start our marketing thinking from the wrong side of the relationship: How much do I need to sell? Who can I sell it to? How can I get to that is quickly and easily as possible?

This book challenges you to think from the other side: Who do you want to serve? What do they want? What do they really want? Can you offer that? How can you do that best for them? How does the word spread when you get it right?

The result is a business that may be very hard to get started, but which in the long run creates more, better, more appropriate value.

More, better, more appropriate value is just what we all need going forwards.

This is the book to help you create it.

April 8, 2020

Stepping into empathy

If, like me, your business-to-business offering feels a discretionary spend at the best of times, you’re probably thinking “Where will I fit in after this is all over?”

The answer? Wherever, whenever and however the people you serve are going to need what you can do for them.

The only way to find out where this will be is to step outside the bubble of your own concerns and put yourself in their shoes.

Not their shoes now, but their shoes down the line, when the urgent crisis is over, the extent of the damage better known, the time when the people you serve will be asking themselves the question “Where will I fit in after this is all over?”

For the right people, what you offer will never be a discretionary spend.

And we only find the right people with deep and deliberate empathy.

February 26, 2020

Who are you aiming at?

One of the best things you can do to make your business work better is to decide who you are for. It’s also one of the hardest.

When we start a business, the need to bring money in means we put off even thinking about this, and because it’s hard, we perhaps never get to think about it.

That’s a mistake. Even when you offer a universal product or service, you are not for everyone. One because you can’t possibly reach everyone, two because you have your own unique way of doing things that won’t appeal to everyone.

So it’s a good idea to think about who you are for as early as possible. How do you do that?

Well, start by thinking about who you are. What makes you tick? What are your personal values? How do you like to behave? What’s your watchword? The people you will enjoy working with, and who will be attracted to work with you are the people who share your values, behaviours and the things that make you tick.

Next think about what kind of people you want to work with. By this I don’t mean what shape or colour or age, I mean character. If that’s too hard, think about who you never want to work with – flipping these negatives tells you something about the positives.

Capturing this information about yourself and the people you wish to serve, tells you what kind of people you want to work with, it tells you how you can talk to them in their language, and how they might want to be served.

Next, get clear about what you are really offering. What’s the transformation people are able to make once they’ve bought from you?

Finally, identify where you are most likely to come across the kind of people you want to work with, who are also looking for the transformation you can offer them. This is where you look at things like age, location, industry, income. Is there a particular group of people in need of what you offer? Can you easily identify this group? Is it big enough? Can you easily find them? How can they find you?

This becomes your target market. And once you know what it is, its much easier to take aim. And that makes it more likely you’ll make a hit.

February 4, 2020

Why this? Why you? Why now?

Bernadette Jiwa has a real gift for encapsulating the essence of a problem in few words. I’ve had these 3 questions from a hypothetical customer running round my head for a couple of weeks now, as I work out how to apply them to what I doing.

My new book is out soon, so I thought I’d give answering them a go:

Why this?

Because all the small business owners I’ve met want 3 things:

to do a great job for their customers or clients.
to do right by the people who work for them and with them.
to build a better life for themselves, their families and their communities.

They need to make profit to do that effectively. This book gives ideas for how to approach the first two in a systematically different way, to get more of the third.

Why you?

Because I’ve used this approach to help businesses achieve all 3 of their goals, and I want to teach more business owners how to do it for themselves.

Why now?

Because if we want a better world for everyone (if we want a world we can live in at all), we have to find a better way of doing business. This won’t come from the top, so we small business owners must make it happen from the bottom up.

That was an interesting exercise. What would you answer?

January 6, 2020

Gifts

What’s your gift? The thing you can do better than anyone else. The thing you can’t help but do, even though it’s not what you get paid for?

Perhaps you feel guilty about wanting to be paid for using your gift on behalf of others. Perhaps the people you’ve met so far don’t value it, so you assume nobody will.

It seems to me that for the moment at least, life is about finding a balance between exercising ones talents, and making enough money to live on, and there are at least two ways to achieve this.

You can earn money in a field that doesn’t involve your gift, and exercise your gift outside it, when and where you can.
You can invest time thinking about what your gift really is, who lacks it, and who needs it most right now – to the extent that they will be more than happy to pay you for it.

Option 2 is always worth trying, because the worst that can happen is that you’re back to option 1, but the potential upside is that you get paid handsomely by people who appreciate your gift – perhaps even handsomely enough that you can give some of it away to those less fortunate.

Leverage doesn’t have to be selfish.

Thanks to the cool women at this morning’s Like Hearted Leaders for prompting this thought.

December 6, 2019

Dissecting the Promise, part 4: with the status you seek.

We humans don’t just want community, we want to have our own place in that community.

We like to know where we stand relative to our fellows. Which means that everything we do isn’t only about becoming the person we want to be, it’s also about being seen to become that person by the people we see as our peers, the people like us.

What can you do to deliver this as part of your Promise of Value?

Here’s a brilliant example of one way to do it. Here’s a different way, equally brilliant.

I’m sure you’ll think of others, now you know.

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Define Promise