December 11, 2023
Dodgy business
What they promise the sender: “Pay a bit extra and we’ll get it to your customer in 48 hours. Pay … Read More “Dodgy business”
Category: Keep Promise
November 28, 2023
Client feedback
Feedback isn’t just for your team. For example, the people at Zoe have really thought about how to use feedback … Read More “Client feedback”
October 24, 2023
Shopping around
Marketing a ‘brand’ is all about getting customers to stop looking elsewhere. To shrink each individual’s market down to a single option.
Once a customer trusts what the name stands for, the Promise it makes, that brand becomes their go-to purchase, saving them the time and effort of shopping around.
The temptation for the brand is to take that trust for granted, and chip away at the Promise that’s actually delivered, hoping that the customer won’t notice.
Properly functioning markets are better for customers, better for innovation, better for small players.
It’s part of our duty as good consumers to keep them functioning well.
That means shopping around.
Try it.
You might be surprised by what you find. You might find you’re being taken for granted. You might find a much better value option where you least expected it. The least that will happen is that your favourite brands are kept on their toes.
Discipline makes markets possible.
September 22, 2023
Promises, promises
We all make promises, all the time. And more often than we would like, we break them.
Life happens. The unexpected happens. Sometimes they were promises we should never have made. However painful, those breaks can be understood and accepted.
To make a promise you have no intention of even trying to keep is unforgivable.
September 11, 2023
What is this thing we call ‘The Boss’? The Monster’s view.
I am not a monster.
I’m a gap.
The gap between what you, Founder, have in your mind’s eye, and what you Team, have in yours.
Between you, you fill that gap with a monster. With your assumptions and presumptions, your takings for granted and second-guessings of motivation.
You make everyone owls when they want to be flowers.
You make everyone Hydes when they want to be Jekylls.
You make fog where there should be clarity and purpose.
You make mediocrity where there should be excellence.
You make a straitjacket where there should be a springboard.
You build a pin-factory where there should be an orchestra.
You make noise where there should be be music.
You focus on me when you should be focusing on the people and the world, you serve.
You, Founder, you, Team, between you, you make me a monster.
But you can unmake me.
All you have to do is share with each other.
Founder, share your system for making and keeping promises with the team. Team, share your ideas for doing it better with the Founder.
Everyone, share the work of doing it. Not just the concrete tasks, but the emotional labour, the feelings. Not just the technicalities, but the customer experience, the bit that wows..
Make everyone a Boss, and watch your floor become a springboard, owned by everyone. With enough give to support different people, enough resistance to help them really take off. Watch that pin-factory morph into an orchestra, delivering customer-delighting performances that have people coming back for more.
That thing you all call ‘The Boss’.
It’s not a monster.
It’s just a gap.
When you close it, ‘the Boss’ will disappear.
And everyone will be free.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
September 8, 2023
What is this thing we call ‘The Boss’? The team’s view.
‘The Boss’ is a monster.
It makes us Hyde when we want to be Jekyll.
It makes us owls when we want to be flowers.
It makes us angry and resentful when we want to please.
It makes us defensive when we want to improve.
It makes us sullen when we want to co-operate.
It makes us passive when we want to be proactive.
It makes us jobsworth’s when we want to take responsibility.
It makes us dot i’s and cross t’s when we want to be making a dent in the world. A dent that matters.
We can’t ignore ‘The Boss’. We spend all day watching it, second-guessing how it feels, how it will react, covering our backs by passing jobs up. It feels like we care more about ‘The Boss’ than we do about our clients.
It’s everything we hate about being employees – the workflows, the time-sheets, the endless check-ins, the inability to fix things we know are wrong, never getting to see the big picture – everything that gets in the way of doing a great job. Everything that stops us focussing on what really matters – the client.
No wonder we can’t wait to get away of an evening.
‘The Boss’ is a monster.
We know exactly who it is. And we don’t care who knows it.
It’s not a monster.
It’s just a gap.
When you close it, ‘The Boss’ will disappear.
And everyone will be free.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
August 7, 2023
Express yourself
Starting a business is largely about you. Expressing your passions, your purpose, your vision.
But it can’t be only about you.
The secret is to express yourself in a way that resonates with other people. That allows them to express something about themselves too.
Some will want to be customers, others will want to help you do more of it, still others will want to bask in the glow of your success.
Your business starts with you. But it mustn’t end there.
Building it as a system for making and keeping promises is an excellent way to remind yourself of this.
Discipline makes daring Possible
August 1, 2023
What if it doesn’t work?
It’s hard to Disappear from the business you started – although not as hard as you might think. After all, for a long time, you aren’t ‘gone’, you’ve just blended yourself in. The disappearance is gradual, so everyone has time to get used to it. Including you.
It’s probably better to say it’s hard to get started on Disappearing.
Why?
Because it’s step into the unknown. And what if it doesn’t work? What if this is the wrong choice? What if there is something better out there?
To which in all honesty, my answers have to be: ‘It might not work for you. It might be the wrong choice for you. There might well be something better out there for you.’
But if you know you want to change your relationship with your business, there’s only one way to find out what the right solution for you is.
And that’s to take a step into the unknown.
My job is to make taking that step as easy and as comfortable as possible. To show you as quickly as possible that what we do together will give you what you need. To make sure that even if you decide to stop, you still feel you’ve gained something worthwhile.
I can tell you till I’m blue in the face that it has worked for most of the people who tried it. In some cases spectacularly. Nobody lost by it.
But me telling you, or even me showing you, isn’t going to be as convincing as you having a go for yourself.
For that reason I’m going to start a club.
It’s called The Disappearing Bosses’ Club.
It will start in September with a 3-month experiment to find out what you really need, and put that in place.
I’m looking for pioneers to help me do that.
Let me know if you’re interested.
Thank you as always for being there.
Discipline makes Daring possible.
July 20, 2023
Making payment part of the experience
It’s a cliché that small businesses like me don’t like to ask for payment. That we somehow feel guilty about asking to be paid for the value we deliver – perhaps because we don’t altogether believe in that value ourselves.
The upshot is that either we invoice late, even erratically, or we seek to make the payment aspect invisible to the client, by using a service like GoCardless for example.
But what if there was a better way?
What if you could make payment truly part of the customer experience? In the way it often is for retail.
What if you could use every invoice to remind your client of how far they’ve come on the journey they enrolled on with you? Of how much they’ve achieved as a result of working with you? Of all the ideas and actions you’ve generated together?
To enable them to relive all the reasons they chose you, and the benefits they’ve gained as a result?
That might be a far from unpleasant experience for the client.
Of course to keep invoicing, you’d have to keep delivering value.
But that’s not a bad discipline to put yourself under.
After all, Discipline makes Daring possible.
July 7, 2023
This is gold
“There is literally no limit to the promises we can make. The only limit is to the number we are able to fulfill.”* Richard Murphy
So, if you have some energy, capability or capacity going to waste in your enterprise, get making some new promises.
Otherwise, concentrate on fulfilling the promises you’ve already made, and get building your energy, capacity and capabilities.
And if you can’t do that quickly enough, put your prices up temporarily to slow down demand while you build.
*The quote is about money of course, which is simply a promise to pay. A country like the UK, that issues its own currency, can make as many of these promises as it likes, as long as they can be delivered. It’s what Maynard Keynes meant when he said “What we can do, we can pay for.”