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#9 Lunch and learn: The secret sentence that will change your business

By Julia Bickerstaff - Tuesday, February 28, 2012

What it is:

A tip to keep you focused on the stuff that counts

Why it works:

Being blunt, it’s an in-your-face reminder. Works very well if you are inclined to get distracted!

What you do:

This is one of those deceptively simple tips.

What you do is this:
  1. Write on a piece of paper “Is this leading me to my main goal?”
  2. Check your piece of paper many times a day and ask yourself the question “Is this leading me to my main goal?”
  3. If the answer is ‘no’ stop what you are doing and get back onto something that is leading to your main goal.

If you want a slightly more sophisticated version, I like this one:
  1. Decide your profit goal for the year
  2. Convert that profit into a target number of sales (so if you want to make $100,000 profit and on average you make a profit of $100 on each sale, your target number of sales is 1,000)
  3. Write on a piece of paper “Is this getting me to 1,000 sales?”
  4. Check your piece of paper many times a day and ask yourself the question  “Is this getting me to 1,000 sales?”
  5. If the answer is ‘no’ - get back to something for which the answer is yes!

I know this sounds to easy to be useful, but it’s got me back out of some rabbit holes and saved me from my mind-wandering self.

This was inspired by an article in Gary Bencivenga’s Marketing Bullets. In particular I loved the image of this super-successful guy and his little note:

“One of the most successful marketing executives I know keeps a framed sign over his desk and carries an index card in his shirt pocket with the same message—"Is this leading me to my main goal?" He checks that reminder numerous times a day and saves countless hours each week by staying on track—getting out quickly from time-wasting phone calls, meetings, gossip, etc., and relentlessly getting back to the big-payoff activities for himself and his company.”

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#8 lunch and learn: Make March a marvellous month - start it on the 31st

By Julia Bickerstaff - Friday, February 24, 2012


What it is:

We’re nearly at the end of February - that’s 16% of the year gone already - and hasn’t it flown by? This tip is to help you get stuff done in March (and every month thereafter) so that in ten months time you can be proud of 2012.


Why it works:

The human brain loves a deadline and goals, and this tip makes the best use of that.


What you do:

The idea here is that you articulate the things that you want to get done by the end of next month, 31 March.

This not about the outcomes (for example sales of $20,000) but about the activities you are going to do to achieve those outcomes (for example make 50 calls to past customers)

So what you do, which is really very easy, is:
  1. List the various parts of the business that you are going to work on next month. It could be everything (sales, marketing, product development, cash collection, delivery, .....) but most likely you have some key areas you really want to improve - in which case just list these focus areas.
  2. Pick each focus area as a heading and then list the activities* you are going to do between 1 and 31 March.
  3. Make sure all activities are measurable so that you can both track your progress and honestly do them.


I put a little * by the list of activities because this is where you need to put some thinking time. And this is what you need to do, over the weekend maybe,  to think.....
  1. Take the list of activities you would like to do in March
  2. Give them each a score of between 1 and 5 where 5 is a vital activity which must be done in March and 1 is an important activity that can wait until April if need be.
  3. Re write the activities in order starting with ‘absolutely-must-be-done-in-March’ and descending through to those which can wait
  4. Put a rough time estimate next to each activity
  5. Calculate how much time you can make available to do your March activities
  6. Do the maths - which activities can you fit into the time available in March!

Yes I know this sounds so obvious but we are all such hopeless optimists; and that’s why we get to the end of the month feeling a little deflated. We set off hoping to accomplish so much but we never have as much time as we’d like and then, when we are also a little undisciplined about how we spend that time, we fall in a heap.

So start with the end of March in mind, do a few key activities and feel great when you make real progress

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#7 Lunch and learn: How to keep a timesheet and get better managing your time

By Julia Bickerstaff - Tuesday, February 21, 2012


What it is

A basic time sheet to record how you spend your time


Why it works

We are hopeless estimators of the time it takes to do things, and the time - in total - that we work.

But if we want to get more efficient we need to start with a fairly accurate view of where our time is going in the first place.

This time sheet exercise give us, in gory detail, the places where we are haemorraghing time. Then we just need to work on fixing it!

What you do

I think this exercise is most valuable if, before you start the timesheet-keeping process ,you make a guesstimate of how much time you spend in all the areas of your business in a month.  

Then, when you’ve finished the timesheet-keeping, you will compare the actual time spent with your guesstimate. The differences between actual and guesstimate will tell you heaps about how accurate you are at estimating time and where in particular you over and underestimate the time tasks take in your business.

And so to the timesheet keeping:

At it’s most basic you can keep a time sheet on a piece of paper and do this:
  • Every half an hour (or shorter period if you are doing a lot of different tasks) note what you have been working on
  • At the end of the day summarise where your time has been spent. For example you might add up all the ‘half hours’ and find you have spent two hours packing product for shipping, one hour talking to suppliers, two hours in customer meetings and one hour doing invoicing.
  • Do this every day for a month (yes, a month!) and pop each day’s timesheet in a file
  • At the end of the month summarise how you have spent the month. At this point I think it’s really so much easier if you do this on a spreadsheet than manually, even if you are not a spreadsheet sort of person.
  • Look over the summary. What’s taken you by surprise? Where did you spend most of your time? What didn’t you do much of? How many hours in total did you work?
  • Now compare your summary with the guesstimate you did before the timesheet-keeping. Where have you spent more time than you expected? Where have you spent less? What does this tell you about how you estimate time?


If you are happy to use a basic spreadsheet throughout then the whole timesheet keeping thing becomes much easier. Just set up a workbook with a new sheet for each day of the month. That way you can easily sum the half hours on a daily basis and by week etc. Lots of opportunity to play around with the figures if you like, and you can do graphs etc if you want to get really carried away!

Of course there are time sheet apps you can use but for this exercise it’s all about simplicity and the discipline of actually recording your time, rather than anything fancy.

I still do this every so often and always get a sharp reminder of how even the little jobs take longer than I expect. And that’s enough to get me focusing again on being efficient!

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#6 Lunch and Learn - How to become an expert at anything

By Julia Bickerstaff - Friday, February 17, 2012


What it is:

A visualisation technique to help you become an expert in some of the important stuff you need to do in your business, but feel a little at sea with right now.

Why it works:

It gets you thinking through all the components to a task in a fun way. Visualisation get’s your subconscious brain firing - so your brain is more powerful. A little like your brain on steroids, I guess

How you do it:

This is easiest to explain by way of an example, so here goes:
  1. Let’s pretend that you are writing your blog and a little stuck on attracting readers to it.
  2. In that mode imagine that you are invited to speak at the world’s number one blogging event
  3. The invitation has come because your blog has been voted #1 in the ‘best small business blog’ category
  4. The event hosts want you to speak for half an hour on the subject “How I turned my blog from zero to hero in less than a year”
  5. Now, write that presentation
  6. You don’t need to write it out like a manual. Rather imagine you are reflecting back and prepare it along the lines of:
    1. A year ago my problem was that I had a blog but no readers.
    2. I started researching the world of blogging and I realised that the reason I couldn’t attract readers was that I didn’t blog interesting content, and I didn’t write well
    3. So I started......(and here’s where the magic is, your subconscious will take over and without you having to think about it good stuff will flow, believe me!)
    4. And now I have …... lots of readers
  7. This process works for any problem, I just picked blogging because it’s easy for everyone to relate to.
  8. So, in a nutshell you:
    1. Imagine you are invited to talk at a big event on your chosen problem area
    2. Outline the presentation you would give
    3. Start with the problem you have right now
    4. Dissect it to get to the heart of the problem
    5. Write about how you over came it



So it sounds a bit wacky, but it works, it works!

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#5 Lunch and learn: How to get your business back on track by falling in love with it again

By Julia Bickerstaff - Tuesday, February 14, 2012
What it is:

A way to fall in love with your business again

Why it works:

Once your business has been going a year or more, and you are frantically trying to keep up with all the bits that need doing, it’s easy to fall out of love with it.

This recipe is designed to rekindle the excitement you felt when you first started in business, remind you why you are doing it, and give you the enthusiasm to carry on.

What you do:

Ask yourself these two questions:
  1. What was my initial motivation for starting the business?
  2. What did I believe?

To get the best out of this recipe you should write out your answer. Just open up a word doc and get typing. Let your fingers loose on the keyboard. You’ll be amazed what your subconscious brain remembers and you’ll enjoy the flow of writing it.

Print out the doc, stick it on your wall (or a pinboard, I like to stick lots of stuff up visibly so a pinboard saves the paint and looks prettier) and look at it often.

Inspiration

This recipe was inspired by a post on the Andreessen Horowitz website. Although it’s about a rather large venture capital fund the story is well written, interesting and fun

Taste test

Not the whole story but here’s a summary of my motivation and belief:

My original motivation for starting The Business Bakery was to help the owners of ‘lifestyle’ businesses make a decent profit from their hard work.

I believe that, with good design, it’s perfectly possible to run a super-profitable business at the same time as running a family (or other time devouring activity!)




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#4 lunch and learn: do less hard work

By Julia Bickerstaff - Friday, February 10, 2012


This recipe is inspired by Jason Fried

What it is

A clever way to get rid of the work that you hate doing


Why it works

A sizeable chunk of running a business seems to be doing quite a lot of work that you really don’t like doing.  You don’t need me to tell you how draining that is!

This is a neat way of getting rid of at least a little of that hard work without resorting to outsourcing it (which costs!)


What you do

Well I guess part of this is easier said than done, but it’s worth having a go at nevertheless.
  1. Work out what some of the tasks are that you really dislike; this should be easy!
  2. Pick the worst task on the list
  3. Ask yourself:
    1. Would anyone notice if we just didn’t do this task at all?
    2. Who would notice if we didn’t do it?
    3. Would they care?
    4. Can we do a cut down, quicker version?
    5. Can we be a leader rather than a follower and do it differently?
  4. Trial ignoring or doing a skinny version of the task
  5. What happened - did the world fall apart or was it all ok?
  6. If need be revisit your skinny version and try a new one that’s still not as onerous as the original. Stuff like this often needs a few iterations
  7. Remember that even if you only shave a few minutes off each task, it all adds up to a happier you.



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#3 lunch and learn: If discipline matters more than talent what do you do if you find discipline dull?

By Julia Bickerstaff - Tuesday, February 07, 2012


This was inspired by an article I read on the success story of Stan Richards founder of  award-winning advertising agency The Richards Group.

What it is:

A reminder that we can pretty much achieve everything if we are disciplined enough to do it.

Why it works:

To be blunt  - and this is based on nothing other than the fabulous collection of entrepreneurs I know - discipline is not something that naturally goes hand in hand with those that are free spirited, ambitious and foolhardy enough to start their own business.

Discipline in business mostly means having the rigour to be consistent (like having processes in place and doing the bread and butter work every day); whereas entrepreneurs most often like the excitement of the new.

But if you are reminded regularly that discipline matters more than talent and you are committed to making your venture a financial success, it’s sure to give you a nudge in the direction of discipline!

What you do:

A couple of things here, the first is in grave danger of sounding a bit fluffy but it does work so give it a try!
  1. Type up the quote “Discipline matters more than talent’ and stick it on the wall. Simple technique but it really worked for me when I had a ton of writing to do but wanted to lose myself in exploring some new ideas.
  2. Select two areas in your business where you are at your least disciplined.
  3. Work out what discipline in these areas should look like. An example here may be cash collections. Few people enjoy chasing debtors so they simply don’t do it. If you felt you should inject a little discipline into this area then you could, say, commit to a regular time each week to make a phone call to every debtor.
  4. Set yourself a period of no less than 3 weeks to trial your new discipline. If it’s an activity that you do every day then 3 weeks should be enough but if it’s something like the example in 3 above where you only do it once a week then you will need to give it a lot longer - more like 20 weeks
  5. After the trial reflect back on the progress you’ve made. You should feel that that task feels pretty straightforward and has freed up some brain time for you to explore more exciting things
  6. Then it’s just a case of carrying on with the discipline in 3 above and starting, say, 2 more.
  7. I don’t suggest you go all out and disciplined you and your business in one fell swoop. Not only would it be painful, but I doubt you would last more than a few days and my guess is that you would revert to being even less disciplined!






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#2 lunch and learn: How to get effective with your to-do list

By Julia Bickerstaff - Friday, February 03, 2012

What it is:

A two -column to-do list to separate jobs which you need to do ‘on the business’ from jobs which you need to do ‘in it’

Why it works:

I’m sure you are completely at home with the difference between to-dos that are ‘on’ the business and ‘in’ the business, but just in case you need a reminder:
  • to-do’s on the business relate to the work you are doing growing the business and making it more profitable (like these lunch and learns for instance)
  • to-do’s in the business relate to the work of the business itself; serving customers, making product etc

Working ‘on’ the business tends to be brain ache stuff and falls into the ‘important not urgent*’ basket. Which means we tend to have it on our to-do list but never quite get round to it.

Working ‘in’ the business stuff always seems to be urgent so there is usually plenty of it on the to-do list and we move through it pretty quickly.

What you do

This recipe is achingly simple, but it works!
  1. Divide your to-do list into two columns. Head one column “On” and the other “In”.
  1. Categorize everything  - from now on- that pops on to your to do list under the appropriate column heading.

When you see the empty ‘on’ column you can’t help but want to fill it. And once it’s filled you will of course want to cross those ‘on’s off the to-do list. Before you know it you’ll be working more effectively (doing the right stuff....) because you will be working ‘on’ the business.


*Stephen Covey came up with this very clever way of looking at tasks in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

He divides tasks into four quadrants:
  • QI - Important and Urgent
  • QII - Important but Not Urgent
  • QIII - Not Important but Urgent
  • QIV - Not Important and Not Urgent
Steven Covey proves that highly effective people make time for the QII activities, and that doing so can reduce the time spent in other quadrants.  The book is well worth a read.

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