Public holidays are a drag!

Public holidays are supposed to be fun relaxing days off work where you can undertake the random arbitrary household projects that you have been putting off - things like watering the garden and washing the dogs. That's what they are supposed to be, but they aren't.

Being self employed changes many things in your life, one of the most painful is public holidays. Half of my clients are based in the UK and the other half based in SA. Therefore any SA public holiday that isn't a holiday in the UK means work as usual, and visa versa. I would be highly upset if it wasn't for the fact that my UK clients pay me in GBP which does ease the sting a little, but it is still quite frustrating.

If you are going to start your own business, just realise that there are more hidden pains than you think. For those of you who did take the public holidays, I'm very jealous!

Customer service language

Customer service talk translation

It's company policy - I have no actual reason why it happened
We'll look into it - Give me some time to find an excuse
It's in the contract - I'm making up small print on the fly
Are you sure? - You liar!
You must speak to someone else - I'm about to hang up
Who did you speak to? - I know you don't remember
We'll call you back - Go fuck yourself

The property decision is looming

Our little company is in the middle of a very big decision. We are growing and need offices - so what do we do?

There are 3 viable choices:
1. Rent office space
2. Buy commercial office space
3. Buy a house and use as offices

The problem is trying to work out which one is best. They all have pro's & con's but each seems to have a con that turns me off enough leaving me in no decision hell. Here is a basic intro into each...

Rent office space:
Pro: Relatively cheap compared to buying
Con: Zero investment in property. You're paying someone else's bond

Buy commercial office space:
Pro: It's an investment and this area of the property market is set to boom
Con: You have to pay a min of 15% deposit and the bond is 10 years not 20 (ouch!)

Buy a house and use as offices
Pro: Affordable compared to buying offices
Con: Transfer and legal fees will be more than a years rent under option 1. It's like burning money.

So this is where we are stuck. At this stage any decision will be a good one, even if it's wrong. I'm so stuck with which option is best that I'm happy to make a wrong decision because at least I'll then know and can take it off the list!

Frustrated!

Time to let go

So, something on the light side of life. A while back we found a wind tunnel in Midrand and gave it bash. This is a small clip of one of the better parts.

Creativity from the masses

I'm not generally classified as a creative person (although I'm left handed), but I do have my moments every now and then. My irritation is that they mostly go to waste. If I think of a cool advert idea for BMW or a funky event idea for Addidas there is nothing I can do except forget the idea.

Instead of creativity for the masses, how about creativity from the masses?

I wonder how receptive companies would be to people sending through their creative ideas/concepts. Some may be happy but I don't know any that would know how to handle such input. And where do we send them?

Now if there was a portal where anyone could load an idea for a company within a specific category my bet is it would be used a lot. The companies can subscribe and get notified of new ideas pertaining to them and if they like and implement the idea then they can give a small cut to the creative originator.

My next venture? Who knows! :)

The cost of customer happiness

Went to Wimpy recently and ordered my usual bacon & cheese burger. When the burger arrived it only had one piece of bacon on it. Surely not I thought, so I asked the lady who served me and she said one piece was all I got.

I politely asked if they would be so kind as to put at least one more piece on my burger because a solitary bacon slice seemed a touch stingy. She kindly obliged, took my burger back, and went to on ring up a R3.00 extra on the till. I was appalled and gave the lady a choice - give me what I had originally paid for (bacon on my burger and not just one piece) or lose me as a customer forever. The choice wasn't hard for her - she chose to lose a customer because she would get fired if she didn't charge me for the extra bacon.

Lets not try and calculate the cost of losing a customer but instead focus on the cost of making a customer happy - one piece of bacon. The cost isn't the R3.00 it's a fraction of that for a single slice of bacon (ignoring the fact that they should have used at least 2 anyway). This is such a minute cost. Wimpy will argue that the national cost of using an extra slice of bacon on every burger sold will be quite high, but isn't that what I paid for in the original price? And what is the cost of losing more customers?

My advise to Wimpy:
Give your customer facing staff more adaptable rules instead of laws
Give the customer what they paid for in the first place
Cutting costs within your product is always noticed by your customers - don't do it
Losing a customer for life over a piece of bacon is not a good trade

It always amazes me how cheap it is to make a positive impact on your customers, and how rarely companies bother to even try.

This attitude from Wimpy is in direct contrast to their marketing campaign which shows a customer getting old and still using Wimpy. Maybe the person in the advert is getting old while waiting for a decent amount of bacon on their burger!

It's more than a right

As we draw nearer to the launch of the new company I find myself thinking back over the last year as the idea grew and evolved. Yes there was fear and anxiety, doubt and dread, but that's all gone and now I'm left with excitement and wide eyes.

Too often people find ways of not making their great ideas happen in reality. Everyone has the right to see if their idea can be a success, but having the right is not enough - it leaves too many outs for people who don't have the self belief. When you have an idea that holds up to all possible scrutiny it is no longer your right to turn it into reality, it's your duty!

Being a duty removes the human excuse element which takes you that much closer to your idea becoming a reality. With the human element gone you gain the ability to factually re-examine the research, markets, and tests to decide if your idea will in fact make it in the big bad world.

Shake-up or wake-up at Telkom?

Duncan over at FMTech has broken the story that Telkom CEO, Papi Molotsane, has been axed by the Telkom board. Go over there to read the post, but what I want to know is what the impact will be on the consumer - me, and you.

Are we moving closer to cheaper broadband or away from it? As usual though, it's probably going to be the consumer that suffers from these changes and it gives Telkom yet more excuses for dragging their feet.

Whoever it is that takes the reigns I hope they have a grasp on how detrimental Telkom's business practices are the SA economy.

Telkom I don't want to touch tomorrow, I just was decent broadband at an affordable price!

Freedom for British soldiers

After a few weeks in a foreign country, eating top quality food, and working on their TV persona's, the British prisoners who have been held captive by the Iranian government have been given tailored suits and business class tickets home. The flight is in the air now and will land at Heathrow in a few hours.

The politics of the situation are unfolding in the media war that is raging.

The Iranian president has been parading the prisoners on Iranian television where the prisoners were made to apologise for trespassing, thanked their captors for being so hospitable, and generally asked to be forgiven by the Iranian people.

The western news services have been berating the British prime minister for not taking firmer action (essentially for not bombing Iran). The Daily Express even called the Iranian president EVIL. How terribly sad is that one monkey of a journalist with an idiotic editor allows such ignorant drivel to be published. Millions of brain-dead Brits will be downing their pints and running for their pitch forks and torches, preparing for the invasion of Iran.

The man is far from evil! He captured soldiers who we supposedly trespassing, he held them in good conditions, fed them well, used them for some good PR, bought them suits, and sent them home. He did well to make Tony Blair look like a tool and that's what he wanted.

So the PR battle has begun - my fear is that the size of the voice will determine the winner of this propaganda war, and that voice does not below to Iran.

It's about the Black & White

Many of you would have read that I'm starting a new business with Peas (and another as yet un-named partner). Well we're close to the launch - very close, and hell is it exciting!

The one thing that I am very happy about is that we are taking the time to get our agreements drafted, checked, agreed upon, and signed. It's awesome to go into business with people you know and are friends with, but it's incredibly important to get everything reduced to writing so that you have something to refer to when (I specifically didn't say 'if') you need to clarify a standing on an issue.

So to my partners I say thanks for doing this right - I've never been this excited. And to everyone else I say hold on to your seats - it's going to be a wild wild ride!

The sad tale of little Pietie

Little Pietie is a supplier of mine and has been for years. Poor little Pietie has been letting his delivery to my company slip somewhat over the last few months and the warnings and offers of help didn't seem to improve the situation.

Little Pietie has just learnt that consistently late delivery leads to delayed payment of invoices.

You shouldn't want to run your company like a bastard, but you do need to be strict and apply business rules to your management. I've always been a good and regular payer to my suppliers which generally elicits the best out of them - treat each other well and all that. However little Pietie pushed me too far. I was tracking the number of combined days he was late on delivery and that's how many days he is now going to wait to be paid.

Small business live and die on cash flow. If you don't deliver consistently then you can't expect to be paid consistently. No matter how many companies I look at, it's always the ones that falter on their delivery that suffer from cash flow problems. Poor work management equals poor delivery equals cash flow problems. Start at the source and fix your delivery and the cash flow will sort itself out.

Audi and their patents

It was with confusion and a small amount of horror that I watched the Audi advert for their new A6. You can see the advert on their website if you haven't seen it yet.

The advert compares the number of patents NASA has filed in it's history (6509) with the number of patents Audi filed during the development of the A6 (9621). I wonder if Audi did research into the public perceptions of patents before creating this advert. The average person may assume that more is better and thus infer that the Audi A6 is better than anything NASA has ever put together (better than space travel?!?). Then again the average person may think that patents are tools used to hinder innovation and kill off advancement in many industries.

My assumption (which could also be wrong) is that the average person equates a patent with an invention, something new and never seen or done before. The average person is going to see the advert and assume that Audi made 9621 inventions while developing the A6. Well what are they? Surely at least 1 of those inventions is so amazing that it is worth talking about? No? Can you then maybe name some of the 9621 changes you made to the car? That is a lot of change but it looks and drives the same.

What is so special about a patent that Audi has chosen it as a measurement of 'brilliance' for it's new offering? Not a single one of the 9621 patents is worth talking about alone, it's still just a car, and it doesn't fly into outer space (which would be pretty cool) - so all I can assume is that a ton of the money I spend on an Audi goes towards registering patents that aren't actually anything amazing and are instead little patents that Audi is registering in order to prevent anyone else from innovating in the field of engineering or motoring.

I love being an Audi driver but I truly don't understand the reasoning behind this advert. Can someone explain it to me?