Hire an (imaginary) chairman

When you work for a  boss and have some difficult news to impart - maybe a pricing issue with a customer or a negotiation with a supplier - you can always blame the boss. But when you are the boss, well it can all be a bit tricky.

On the one hand you want to play the good guy and be the warm friendly person, but you also need to address the issue, make the difficult decisions and say the hard stuff.

How do you do both?

Hire an (imaginary) chairman.

A friend of mine does this very elegantly. In a recent pricing negotiation, she explained to her customer how she had wanted to offer them a lower price but how, when she discussed it with her chairman (the imaginary one, of course), she realised that the business could really not afford to do such a deal. She emphasised that she had been very reluctant to agree with her chairman but had eventually come to realise that he was right and that this was the best deal she could do.

The client  took it very well, saying that they completely understood the situation and thanking  her for at least considering the lower price.

My friend continues to have a very good relationship with her client and  - yeah - they also pay her a good price for her work.

Sometimes, when you are the boss of a little business, you just have to have a few tricks up your sleeve. I’m collating a few more so if you have any that you’d like to share, please do!

Diarise it

Imagine you have a list of 88 potential customers and you want to have two face to face meetings with each of them next year. That’s a manageable 4 meetings a week for 44 weeks of the year -  and gives you a breather of a few weeks off to cover holidays and the unexpected.

Pick a day of the week for those meetings and block out that time in your diary, for the whole year, right now.

Of course the meetings will probably have to shuffle around in your diary a bit, but that doesn’t matter. Once a regular meeting is in your diary it reminds you to make it happen, becomes a comfortable habit and forces you to make time to do it.

I’ve been amassing, for about 3 years, a cupboard of ‘ebay’ stuff. It’s full of purchasing mistakes (rather a lot I’m ashamed to admit), unwanted gifts (yep, no excuse, it sounds ungrateful) and clothes the children have outgrown.

We moved house recently and I lovingly packed the whole cupboard up in a box -neatly labelled ‘ebay’ - and carefuly unpacked it into a new cupboard in the new house.

And there it was destined to stay.Because despite my grand plans, I had never actually sold a single item on ebay.

It’s not because I didn’t know how to sell stuff and it’s not because I was hopeless at selling, it’s simply that I never quite got round to it.......because it seemed like such a huge job.

Truly, I had the Everest of unwanted items.

The thought of photographing, writing the details and then mailing all that stuff made me feel ill. So it stayed in the cupboard, and I just felt guilty whenever I went near it.

Then a month or so ago my husband, rather alarmingly, discovered both the cupboard and all my purchasing mistakes. I had two options: divorce or sell the damn stuff.

I chose the latter.

I didn’t sell it all at once, mind, that would be too awful. I decided to do one piece a day, every day, until the job was done.

Today I went to my cupboard to do my daily piece and, joy of joys, it was half empty!

In less than a month my cupboard has gone from looking like a prop on Hoarders to feeling pretty much like the rest of our cupboards (we’re a busy family of 6 , we don’t do perfect).

And here’s the learning - ‘one thing a day’ works.

I have a friend who hates making sales calls (although honestly she is so very good at them that I can’t think why). She started doing the ‘one a day’ in October 2010 and last week she told me that she has doubled her income this year. Go girl!

Another small business I know does the same with debtors - they call one a day; and guess what, they now have cash in the bank.

So here’s my tip: If you have a job that you don’t like, and is repetitive don’t put it off until you can find the time to do it all at once. Decide to do it ‘one a day’. Try it for a month. See what happens.

In my early twenties I lived with my super organised sister. I was studying at the time and my files and notes were spread around the house in nothing short of chaos (actually my Dad, an RAF pilot, referred to my mess as the aftermath of an aircraft accident). Sarah ‘advised’ me to get organised. I ignored her for the better part of two years until I was coming up to my final accountancy exams and, desperate to improve my grades, I was happy to try anything. So I got organised and hey how (blow trumpet here) topped my class. Getting organised works.

Being organised still doesn’t come naturally to me so I’m always on the look out for tools to help me. To that end I’ve been experimenting for a couple of months with something to help me keep my financial paperwork in order: Bookzkeeper.

Bookzkeeper is pitched as ‘The accounting survival kit for small business’. Now there’s lots of stuff that makes grandiose claims like this so, to be honest, I started out a little sceptical. But I needn’t have been - it’s a great product. It’s easy to use, assumes you know next to nothing about accounting and complements MYOB and Quickboks (which isn’t me, I’m a SAASU girl, but that didn’t seem to matter).

Now of course I am a qualified accountant (Chartered, if you will, both in England and Australia) but I don’t practice as an accountant, and in terms of organising stuff, well I need as much help as the next guy (or should that be chick?) So hats off to Alycia Edgar - the brains behind Boozkeeper - for a great product.

If you’ve heard me keynote at a seminar you will probably remember me talking about my hairdresser, George Giavis. He runs a super-small business (The Blonde Room) and has designed his business in a cleverly profitable way.

Yesterday, while I was under the tin foil (yes, the blonde is no longer completely natural) he lamented about a recent marketing initiative for his hair accessories which had gone a bit pear shaped.

Here’s the story.

Someone from Channel 10s The Circle called George up and asked him if he would send over forty of his hair accessories which they would then feature and giveaway on their show. The Circle were doing a piece on Melbourne Cup - hats and fascinators - and it seemed like a good fit.

George thought forty hair accessories was a bit over the top so he sent twenty and excitedly watched the show as it aired on Monday.

His excitement quickly turned to horror. Watch the the clip (he video is quite long so just start at 3min 30.) and you will see why.


George considers his hair accessories (and brand) high end but the Circle popped his headpiece on some guy’s head, had a giggle and then did the giveaway of his 20 fascinators in the blink of an eye. The whole segment was flippant and cheap.

Understandably George was worried that the show had damaged his brand.

I don’t think so because it’s unlikely that ‘George’ type customers watch the show. And even if they did, I couldn’t remember the name of any of the brands mentioned once the segment was over (if you watched it, did you?) so there won’t be any lasting damage.

Except to George’s wallet.

I have no idea (and no inside info on) what the 20 headpieces that George gave away cost him but I doubt he had change out of $1,000. Ouch.

Being approached to showcase your wares on TV sounds great. But really.....is it right for you? As an absolute minimum, before you get carried away, ask yourself:

• Will they show my stuff in the right way?
• Will people remember it?
• Will it cost me more than I will get back in return?