No More ‘To Do’ Lists #8

No more ‘To Do‘ Lists item 8 is

DON’T CARRY A BLACKBERRY 24/7

The world will not grind to a halt if you are not there to take every call. In fact customers might treat you with a bit more deference if you ration your available time with a bit more respect for what is really important.


RELEVANT LINKS
Your Mobile Addiction! - blog entry
Blackberry Stats - blog entry

Lusaka, Zambia

Returning to Zambia has been a delight.

I did a 'More Profit' session to an audience that was predominantly members of ACCA (accountants) and members of the Management Express Forum. Again the issue of putting prices up was very controversial - lots of debate and discussion. How can this concept be applied in Lusaka? What would happen?

On the following day we did a full 'Kick-Start Your Business' full-day session. All the material was received with great warmth and enthusaism and again the pricing debate kicked in.
"How can Nando's charge three time more for the same beer and the same chicken as a local restaurant yet be full all night?"

And the answer is in the 'Kick-Start' and 'Bright Marketing' 'ologies':

- "Nature is brutally honest..."
- "Marketing is not a battle of the product but for the mind of the customer..."
- "Why should people buy from you when they can buy from the competition?"
- "Its all about branding..."
- "If there's a choice between being different or being better then different wins every time..."

At the end of the day, the MD of a fast food outlet as well as a local businesswoman came up to me and explained that they had both nervously put up prices in their businesses... there had been no noticable change in trade - if anything some of the difficult customers had left and some nicer ones had replaced them.


RELEVANT LINKS

Kick-Start Your Business - book

More Profit - seminar

The Leopard...

Just come back from the most amazing safari experience - three days in Northern Botswana (Okuti Lodge, Okakavango/Moremi Game Reserve) - while there I was shown this wonderful Zulu proverb. It sums up the whole Bright Marketing 'ology'.

'Ingw idla ngamabala'
The leopard eats by means of its spots
If one wants to succeed, one must develop characteristics that distinguish one from others

So maybe the book should have a leopard on its front cover!



PS All the webpages claim "Camp Okuti is enclosed by fencing and thus wonderful for the first time visitor to Africa who might need that ‘safety’ factor'" - I can assure that this is not the case!!! We were woken up by a hippo under our stilted bedroom/tent and we had a leopard come through the site on our first night! Not for the faint-hearted!



RELEVANT LINKS
Bright Marketing - the book
Okuti Lodge - webpage

(Photo taken in N Botswana)

Gaborone, Botswana

It has been great to be back at the Gaborone Sun meeting our old friends Clare and Zaa and taking in Botswana life.

Started with a day visit to a country school with whom we have partnered a local Bath school; we have raised funds via an African evening. Refilwe from British Council joined us to liaise and she will manage the spending of the funds locally.

Next an evening event. Some 70 delegates attended ‘Customer Is King’ as a 90-minute presentation, hosted by Stephen the Director of the British Council here. A real cross-section of fascinating businesses attended. Some real challenges locally regarding customer service!

And then a full-day ‘Magic Million’ seminar. For the audience, some of the concepts were challenging to say the least. The idea of deliberately putting prices up (to scare away the pond life and subsequently work with customers who are not buying on price but are buying for quality etc) was felt to be very controversial. Again issues around ‘how do you get you people to do what you want them to do?’

And on to Maun to the Okavanga Delta. Botswana has a premium priced/exclusive/limited access approach to wildlife tourism. Prices are deliberately kept high to reduce customer flow and in order to maintain quality of the experiences. They are proud of this fact in Botswana. So, why do they have such difficulty in translating this concept to their own businesses?

RELEVANT LINKS
Customer Is King – the book
Magic Million – the research and the workshop

PS photo taken yesterday at the delta - see the Bright Marketing book cover to understand the relevance!

No More ‘To Do’ Lists #7

No more ‘To Do‘ Lists item 7 is

DON’T BUILD THE BUSINESS AROUND YOURSELF

In the early days its great to see those emails and texts for you – you are important and wanted. However this excitement soon turns into an addiction. Your definition of success starts to depend on how much you are needed. Wrong! (unless you want to be the bottleneck in your business).

Try to design the entire business model with the sole intention of getting it to operate without you. (Or do you enjoy working 24/7?)

‘Start with the end in mind’ is what Steven Covey says. If you intend to get out of your business at some point then you need to design the whole thing with that endpoint in mind. Otherwise you end up as the tiredest person in the graveyard!


RELEVANT LINKS
Steven Covey
Steven Covey’s Seven Habits book

Airline Food

Just travelled economy class (airline not relevant) to Jo/burg with knees up under my chin and elbows digging into my neighbour. Sounds like I am getting too old. But… my point…


Economy Airline food!
- Question: “Do the air stewards and flight deck crew eat it?”
- Answer: “No way – they have more sense.”


- So, the next question is: “How come it is good enough to give to the people in ‘cattle class’?”.
- And the answer is: “Because the airline simply doesn’t care about these customers.”


Am I just a victim of my own ‘ology’ (sort customers between platinum/gold/silver/bronze offerings, sack pondlife customers buying on price, focus on giving premium service to premium paying customers)? I think I am and it’s not very nice.




RELEVANT LINKS
Bright Marketing – see the chapters on the 80:20 Rule

Heading Out Of Malawi

We are now heading out of Malawi towards Botswana via Johannesburg. We arrived with a big box of my books, which totally sold out (all revenues to a local orphanage).

In Lilongwe we ran a full-day ‘Customer Is King’ event working with senior managers from some of Malawi’s key businesses (banks, postal services, seed producers). A challenging day, where the highlights were a highly lively debate about how to apply the 80:20 rule (AKA ‘sacking customers’) and the use of the ‘same/better/wow’ index for measuring/designing the steps of your customer journey.

I met people from a bank, with a ‘no appointment/walk in’ policy, committed to giving clients responses to applications ‘on the spot’ with full decisions made within 24 hours. An impressive offering.

Next we drove down to Blantyre to run a Management Express Forum. A fascinating four-hour drive took us through markets and across remarkable African landscapes. One of the most densely populated African countries, you were taken aback by the sheer volume of people on the edges of the road. And so many of them seemed to be waiting – just waiting…

The Blantyre seminar, ‘Bright Marketing’, attracted some 70 or so managers from small, medium and large businesses and government organisations in this commercial centre of Malawi.

Key moments were the 'elevator pitch' and the 'business card' exercises, which were participated in with real relish. Great Fun. And the serious message was ‘Be Different!’

Highlights from Malawi have to be the friendly, warm people and their hospitality:
- Our porter at the Sunbird Capital Hotel greeted us with the words ‘Welcome to the best hotel in Africa – it’s a fact’ and he really believed this to be the case…
- A dinner with a UK theatre production (Moj of the Antarctic – an African Odyssey’) and our hosts from the British Council…
- The faces of local fruit sellers pressed against our car windows as they offered us their wonderful fruits and vegetables…
- Meeting up with Jason Agar (ex- Durham Bus Schl) who now runs a development consultancy in Blantyre
- My attempt to eat mushrooms in tomato sauce at breakfast which turned out to be ox kidneys!

We were sorry not to spend more time in this country. Rave reviews of Lake Malawi make me feel that we have missed something special.

Special thanks as ever go to our friends at the British Council: Patience, Muhte, Grace, Chank and Selemani.


RELEVANT LINKS
Bright Marketing – the book
Customer Is King – the book