Colin Myles's Blog, page 20

Why The Hurry ?

Yesterday waiting in line to pay for a newspaper, a strange thing occurred.

Two people ahead of me and this young guy comes running up to a floor assistant, with two postcards in his hand. Asking could he pay her instead of going to till.

She explained the items had to be scanned and asked him politely to join the small queue.

He was two places behind me. Just as I was about to pay, he rushed around, dropped the cards on the counter and ran out the door. I found it slightly amusing this young man wasn't prepared to wait two minutes to finish his transaction.

This morning a piece from Robert Cialdini's book Influence came to mind. The experiment in jumping the photocopier queue. It would be ideal for this young man in a hurry and a lesson in influencing people. All he had to say was " do you mind if I skip ahead BECAUSE  . . .
I have a bus to catch
I am in a rush
My parking ticket is about to run out

Because as the piece in the book says all people need is a reason to do you a favour. Using the word " because " would have given him a 94% chance of his request been accepted by people ahead of him in the queue.

Next time you are in a hurry or need a favour remember " BECAUSE " is a powerful word to persuade and influence people

Colin Myles Author

8 Haiku Part 2

Here is another 8 Haiku's. Enjoy

1.
Teach or demonstrate
makes no difference until
a student appears

2.
Peruvian beans
sweet caramel aroma
today;s ambrosia

3.
A misty mountain
cimmerian atmosphere
sun illuminates

4.
Languorous soft waves
caressing the waters edge
tiny forager

5.
Water laps around
surrounded in solitude
ah Andromeda

6.
Rain lashes windscreen
patiently waiting watching
wondering how why

7.
Lone white house sparkles
over there the Atlantic
life tide flows in out

8.
Saturday amble
inhale exhale salty air
rooster in window

Hope and Fear

" Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self "
Tao Te Ching

What is a phantom ?  It is defined as " an appearance or illusion without material substance. "
When we think only of ourselves, the phantoms of hope and fear come out to play.

We start to hope for outcomes that benefit our self and nobody else. We stir up doubts and fears about what might be.

Leading us to be overly optimistic or rooted to the spot by fear. Yet, should we start to think of others as opposed to ourselves, a different picture appears.

The picture changes, when you begin to think of how you can serve others.
How can you serve your family ?
How can you serve your community ?
How can you serve your customers ?
How can you serve your employees ?
How can you serve your employer ?
How can you serve your students ?

Serving others as opposed to hopes and fears for yourself, will keep the phantoms at bay. The phantoms are always there, lurking in the shadow of your mind. Waiting for you to stop serving and start thinking of yourself.

The self is like a projectionist in a cinema. When the self comes to the fore in your mind, it hits the play button and projects hope and fear across your inner vision.

Take yourself out of the equation, replace the self with " Serve " and watch those phantoms disappear.

Colin Myles Author

P.S.
Hope is merely the title of an uncertain blessing"  Seneca

Financial Wizardry

" Nobody talks about entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking. Running that first shop taught me business is not financial science; it's about trading : buying and selling "
Anita Roddick

Financial science is the study of taxation, internal auditing and financial management. Dealing with assets and liabilities and their degrees of uncertainty and risk. Finance is them the science of money management.

Before you reach this stage, you must first learn to buy and sell. You are a trader. Buying components. Putting them together to make a product. Then sell that product at the right price, which enables you to pay for the components, the labour, yourself and generate a profit.

Looks easy ! One key word in the quote above is survival. Assuming people want your product, there are possibly three unknowns, which will contribute to your survival or failure ; customer experience, quality and fast passing trends.

There is no wizardry to trading. You buy at X price, sell at Y price and generate a profit Z. If you pay too high a price and charge too little, you make a loss. If you charge too high a price and no-one is interested, you have unwanted inventory and a loss. If you enter a market at the tail end of a passing fad or bubble, chances for survival are slim.

Let's assume you buy and sell at the right price. Next comes two of the unknowns, customer experience and quality. People will go elsewhere if their experience of being your customer is bad. Your loyal customers will desert you if quality drops. It can be tempting if the cost of your components have risen, to drop the quality a little to maintain your profit margin.

Again we come back to the word trading. To believe you can drop the quality of your product and people won't notice is dangerous. You have heard the old saying " you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear ". Yet people will try.

When you are successful at trading and are looking to expand or for capital investment, this is where financial science comes in.

Until then, Buy, Sell, Trade and Survive

Colin Myles Author

P.S.
By selling products that people want to buy, the butcher, the brewer and the baker hope to make money. If they are effective in meeting the needs of their customers, they will enjoy financial rewards.
Adam Smith " Wealth of Nations

8 Haiku

In the last few months, I have started to write a haiku on a daily basis. Mainly to improve evoking emotions in as few as words as possible and also become the form is simple. Here are eight samples, hope you enjoy.

1.
Crunchy aging leafs
September autumn shiver
Still need sunglasses

2.
Blood tinged horizon
Birds chirping autumnal chil
Zip up my jacket

3.
Cigarette dangling
Furtive secretive shivering
Coffee becomes cold

4.
Watching every move
Security cameras
Nineteen eighty four

5.
Coffee shop is closed
Always friendly warm welcome
Tiger rents are back

6.
Black clouds sky weeping
Raindrop ripples on puddle
Miniature road lake

7.
Coffee aroma
Droplets all around the floor
Patience wait your go

8.
Grey rock dark white spot
Yellow bud flower peeking
Crushed cup discarded

Hope you enjoyed them
Colin MylesColin Myles

Premium Mediocre

Mediocre with just an irrelevant touch of premium, not enough to ruin the delicious essential mediocrity. " Venkat Rao

Reading the sports section on Sunday, I came across the term " Premium Mediocre " and the writer had encountered it in an article on Ribbonfarm [ read here ]

I got the essence straight away. So let's have a little bit of fun. Premium is described in the dictionary as " a sum added to an ordinary price or charge". For myself, premium can be used to describe a product where the manufacturer has added a " gee whizz " button that does nothing, which enables them to use the word premium.

Mediocre is defined in the dictionary as " of moderate or low quality, value, ability or performance ". See gee whizz button above.

And in the Urban Slang dictionary, mediocre is described as " something that was average but was expected to be much better ".

Ever eaten a steak described as premium beef and it tasted like cardboard. You just bought yourself premium mediocre.

Ever bought a premium upgrade at a concert and found yourself sitting behind a pillar, welcome to premium mediocre.

Ever bought a so called premium car and the only difference between it and the standard model was the " go faster stripes ", premium mediocre.

Would love to hear your suggestions on what you consider to be premium mediocre. Write your suggestion in the comment box below.

Colin Myles Author

P..S.
A haiku poem I wrote in honour of Premium Mediocre

Something alluded
Premium mediocre
We experienced

P.P.S.
My book How to avoid business failure
is Free on Amazon - offer ends midnight 19th September 2017 .. Download  Now

Date The Customer

Over the past weekend, listening to a HBR Ideacast, I heard the phrase " fight the competitor or date the customer". The podcast was with David Robertson the author of The Power of Little Ideas.

I loved the phrase and have started reading the book. The phrase stuck with me because over the years, I have seen people become so obsessed with blowing the competition out of the water, they neglect their customers.

Nothing is so damaging or energy draining on your employees and morale, as war readiness. It effects the corporate language to such a degree, you end up with mini Robert Duvall's whispering and shouting variations of " I love the smell of napalm in the morning ".

But your competition does not pay the bills. Sales generated from your customers pays the bills. So why would you ignore them ? Why would you create an artificial cold war, when you have warm blooded, warm hearted people who love what you do.

People want to see you stay in business. People who have an interest in your company. Now is your time to date them.

Find out where they are. What they like. What causes them sleepless nights. How you can make their life easier. Take away their pain and distress. Find out about their dreams and how you can make them like you a little bit more. Just the same as you did when you started dating your current partner. What did you do right to make them hang in there ?

It is much easier to go on a date with your customer, than go to war. With war you need a war chest. With dating, you just need to be open and listen to what the other person is saying.
How hard can that be !

Date your customer

Colin Myles Author

P.S
" Without customers you have no business " colin myles

How Not To Sell ... One Easy Step

Last Saturday just gone, I had to go into the city to buy some items. I popped into one of the mini malls heading to one shop. On my way there was one of those stand alone displays selling a tech item.

The sign peaked my interest, so I went up to investigate. As I looked around the display, the sales person kept their head down scrolling through their social media feed. After thirty seconds I carried on.

On my return, I stopped again and looked at the display and all the items. Again the sales person was still engrossed in their social media feed. Not once did they look up. No greeting, nothing. For this sales person, I did not exist.

Now here is the kicker, I was interested and intrigued. But by been ignored, there was no way in hell I was going to purchase anything.

Guess what story I told my friends when they asked me about my weekend. I don't know if it was their own business or they were on hourly wage or commission. The only thing I know for sure, they had no interest in selling.

Compare this to Sunday. I went to the local Aldi to buy some fruit. As usual I picked up some extra items. On my way back to the car, the gentleman who collects the shopping trolleys said " bye and thank you for shopping " It was so unexpected, a delayed reaction before I said " thank you "

The one thing it reminded me of was the quote by Jim Rohn " one customer well taken care of, could be more valuable than $10.000 worth of advertising ".

Colin Myles Author

P.S.
" It takes six months to gain a new customer and six seconds to lose them. Six seconds of someone being rude,bored or uninterested is going to cost you a customer "
Colin Myles  How to Avoid Business Failure
Buy Now

Language & Sales

" if you can walk with the crowd and keep your virtue, or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch" Rudyard Kipling

There was a recent article from the Harvard business review on 7 reasons people can't close sales [ read here ]

The one that intrigued me the most was number 2, because I have seen this happen time and time again. Whether through fear or lack of training, it is sad to see.

A person selling a product or service has the skills to get through the layers of decision makers and build relationships. Then comes the final hurdle, a face to face with the ultimate decision maker.

Everything that has gone before is null and void. Here you must be able to speak their language. You can talk benefits, pain of loss or fear of missing out. But it can fall on deaf ears, because the language used is foreign to the decision maker. A language they don't understand or speak. And the sale is dead in the water. Because when you reach the C-suite, being able to communicate in their language is what will set you apart from the crowd.

It is a foreign land. To survive there, you must learn to speak their language. Failure to do so, will leave you scrabbling along the bottom rung with many others.

Here are three ideas that will assist you speak the language of the C-suite,

1.
Buy and read the weekend edition of the Financial Times or Wall Street Journal.

2.
Watch CNBC or Bloomberg and listen for the words and phrases used, when they interview people from the C-suite .

3.
Read good biographies of these people. Where they came from and how they achieved their goals.

Know your customer, know their language, know and understand their world. Next time you are invited into the C-suite, come prepared. The outcome will be different.

Colin Myles Author

P.S.
" Life is all about selling. Being able to exchange knowledge and move people to co-operate. "
Colin Myles Life Positioning
$2.99 Buy Now

The Federer Principle

Roger Federer won Wimbledon 2017 after five years in the wilderness since his last win in 2012. In his post match interview he said " I kept dreaming, I kept believing and kept working.

The principle, all three need to work in tandem. Believing and dreaming without work, leads to frustration. All work without a dream or belief attached, becomes meaningless and dull, people soon give up.

All three combined makes the whole. He kept dreaming and believing he would win another grand slam and away from media glare, he kept up the practice, working to improve his game.

Sometimes when people hit a drought in their success output, they quit. They stop dreaming, they stop believing and stop working. My favourite definition of work is " to be engaged in physical or mental activity in order to achieve a result.

Behind the scene, Federer worked on his game [physical]. He also put thought into what was the cause of his injuries. He thought about his body, the recuperation time between tournaments, his injuries and the time when his body was at it's peak. What type of surfaces he liked  and didn't like playing on [mental].

After winning the Australian open in Jan 2017, he stayed away from the clay court season. He rested. He came back in April for the grass court season. The rest is history.

Never did he stop believing, dreaming and working [ physical and mental ]. The next time you hit a slump, remember it is the combination of all three that makes the whole.

Colin Myles Author

P.S.
Work is to be engaged in physical or mental activity in order to achieve a result
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