Geoff's Blog:

Fri 17th August 2007 01:48pm

Am I a miserable git?!

My book, Writing on the Wall, took a bit of stick from the critics who described it as, a bad tempered rant – particularly my less than optimistic look at the global economy. As so many of you have been enjoying my blogs, I would love to know what you think of it so I am giving away the chapter on the global economy for you to see what you think. Please read it and let me know your thoughts

Download it here


Mon 12th February 2007 10:56am

IF THE FUTURE’S ORANGE, I’M A SATSUMA

This is a tirade, but in it somewhere are some points about empowerment and the state of mankind, but mostly it is a frothing rant to relieve the total frustration I feel towards the ghastly gnomes at Orange.


If you are allergic to cats, the powers above dictate for their amusement that any cat within a five mile radius will head for you and climb on your lap. As your breathing fails, your lips swell and you slip into anaphylactic shock, you hear distantly as you fade away the old woman saying, “Isn’t that funny, Georgie never normally goes near strangers!”


Well dear reader, as a guru of customer care, empowerment and service, you can bet that if trouble is coming in the shape of mind-bogglingly bad service, it will come my way. But first a story about my new book which now won’t get written for reasons I shall explain.


A key to making your business successful is to encourage and enable the people who work with you to conduct the business successfully and profitably on your behalf. The management gurus describe this process as empowerment. That is such a nice juicy word. Like abracadabra, it was believed to have mystic healing and even magical powers. These powers were conjured by management simply by scampering about like headless chickens chanting the word “empowerment” out loud and including it in ever more vicious bollocking memos to the crushed and beleaguered staff.


Things came to a head for me when some lunatic rang me up and asked me to empower his staff.


“Empower them to do what?” I asked.


He replied that he wanted them empowered to do what they were told.


The real point of empowerment is closely tied to the whole entrepreneurial culture thing, where you share your ambitions for the enterprise with your people and they make the same profitable decisions that you do. This is where the one-person business gets itself into all sorts of trouble. The first hurdle is to construct profitable employment for yourself. The next is to expand by creating it for someone else. A true minefield of business-destroying mistakes, with lazy people, inappropriate people, untrustworthy people, or worse enthusiastic loyal people who don’t have the foggiest idea what to do because you didn’t train them, or you don’t allow them to do what is right.


My new book was to be another story to illustrate all this and had the working title of ‘Arming the Peasants’. It is the tale of a mediaeval prince who inherits his father’s lands and discovers big financial troubles, so he summons the consultants (Machiavelli & Co) much against the jester’s advice (the only intelligent person there). The consultants tell him to re-structure by getting rid of all the non-productive team members such as the army, the knights etc, leaving the peasants who, by simple labour, make lots of money for the prince and the consultants. A great idea until they are attacked by the wicked baron who has still got an army. The consultants decide that the solution is to arm the peasants (multi-tasking), but as the peasants are not skilful enough to use swords or bows, they decide to invest in new technology in the shape of the latest thing, guns.


“But the peasants hate me”, the prince points out. “If we arm them, the first person they will shoot is me!”


“Ah, we have the solution” say the consultants. “You give the peasants guns so to the outside world they will look armed, but we won’t give them any ammunition.”


This is not empowerment and the relevance will soon become clear, so now to Orange.


They have been a steady but unremarkable provider of mobile phones to my organization – so no reason to change. Our broadband was provided by Freeserve which became Wanadoo – also steady, also unremarkable, but with a sufficient level of technical support. Then Orange bought them, it became Orange Broadband and even became a little quicker. Then one day it went off – completely and utterly off! We rang Orange and did as instructed, the ‘switch it on and switch it off’ stuff.


“We will do a line check. Call back in 24 hours”.


One day later.


“What was the result of the line check?”


“There may be a fault. We will do another line check.”


This continued for four weeks whilst we rang them every day, sometimes twice, without any change in the standard reply or any forward progress whatsoever. Bear in mind you have to ring them on a premium rate line and are often on hold for up to an hour, listening to the same ghastly pop music over and over and over again, with – and get this – “We are very busy at the moment but maybe able to help you on our website.” With no connection, how am I supposed to do that? In the meantime we discovered with technical tests of our own, the fault was definitely on the BT line. We needed a BT engineer – Orange have to request one.


“There may be a fault. We will do a line check”


“Ring BT and get me an engineer.”


“I have no authorization to do that – I must do a line check.”


“But you have done about 25 line checks.”


Then, and this is what got me frothing, “Thank you for calling Orange. Is there anything else I can help you with, Mr Burch?”


This is not the operator’s fault. They are only an un-armed peasant. The “How can I help you” is the musket, and the “I am not authorized to do that” is the lack of ammunition.


We wrote directly to the Chief Executive and were totally ignored (if you are a CEO, never never do that, it is so insulting). We finally rang Offcom, the regulator. They were charming, brilliant, and armed. They bollocked Orange and BT and a few days later my Broadband was magically fixed (actually not that magically but the story of the BT engineer’s visit I will save for another blog on another day). Then, to add insult to injury, we got a fairly snotty letter from Orange saying that if we could prove the cost of the phone calls made to their operators (never mind the total disruption to my connection to the outside world and the grim hours spent in a cave-like internet café trying to deal with my emails) we could claim this cost back.


POINTS TO PONDER


1.If you have a dreary, trudgey business that is OK, don’t get into a different discipline that you are so crap at you destroy your previous reputation and enrage your current (maybe foolishly) loyal customers.


2.Don’t train your staff to ask how they can help if they are then not allowed to help.


3.The first quick customer-delighting solution needs you to trust your people and will always be the cheapest one. If you employ people you don’t trust, you are an idiot.


4.If a customer is so frustrated that they are forced to complain further up the food chain, don’t ignore them.


5.Never use Orange Broadband.


6.When you apologise, don’t hold back or expect the customer to contact you. You are trying to save your business. Be generous in defeat and remember, ‘Finding and keeping customers is the only activity that generates revenue. Everything else will involve you in cost.


Finally, why isn’t the book going ahead? In the story the peasants get surly and resentful at being responsible for all the work, so they clearly need motivating and to that end the consultants hang a huge banner on the castle which reads, “Passionate about feudal agricultural solutions!” Oh how we laughed, until someone at the head office of the publisher rang to say, and I quote, “We don’t get it.”


“Don’t get what?” I asked.


“Well the peasants didn’t improve their attitude. If our CEO said he was passionate, we would shout a big WAY TO GO! and work twice as hard.”


What remains of the manuscript after I had jumped on it was flung into the garden and the pigeons have taken it for nesting. On reflection probably the best thing that could have happened to it.


Thu 26th October 2006 03:33pm

TRAIN YOUR MUM


A telephone rings; a withered claw-like hand picks it up and clamps it to a sucker-like ear.

“Ello!” cackles the crone.

“Oh” says the cultured masculine voice at the other end.

“Is that International Food Hygiene Consultants?”

“No” came the terse reply.

“I am sure that is the number Mr Peterson gave me”, the bewildered response.

“Oh!” The light dawns. “You want our Terry; he’s in the lav at the moment. He was on the curry last night and he’s been bad ever since. I reckon he could go through the eye of a needle!”

“Do you train your staff?” I ask, you reply,

“What staff?”

In this virtual world, you can be virtually anything you want. When your customers don’t know how big or how small you are, they only have that small point of contact to make their judgment of how professional you are. What would happen if you ring International Food Hygiene and get:

“Thank you for calling International Food Hygiene, this is Agnes. How may I help you today?”

“Oh, Mr Peterson, please”.

“May I tell him who is calling?”

“The name is Jackson of Super-Con Mega Bean Corp”

“Oh yes Mr Jackson, Mr Peterson is expecting your call. He is in a short meeting but I know he is eager to speak to you. I will try and put you through”

Pass phone under bog door, job done (in every sense of the word).

Yep, that was your mum, but a trained mum. When that is done, the client doesn’t know that you don’t work from a glittering fourteenth storey headquarters. But then you do as advised and still fail to make bucket-loads of money. Bear in mind that if International Food Hygiene did have a forty storey headquarters it would charge more than you do.

“But that is my trump card” you cry, “I am cheap”.

There is a row of timber garages by us and each one contains a small car repair outfit. Each raggy arsed mechanic charges about fifteen quid an hour, compared to the main agents who charge around eighty pounds per hour. They say they can be cheap because there is only one of them to do the work – that is apart from one garage where there is a grey-haired man with half moon glasses who used to be Ferrari’s race mechanic in the 1970’s. He charges £160 per hour because there is only one of him in the world and people with treasured cars queue up for his skilful hands to mend their beloved babies. Mind you, his workshop is like a surgical operating theatre and his business cards and headed notepaper have become collectible works of art.

So, become more professional and because you are unique, don’t be afraid to charge what you are worth.

THOUGHT FOR TODAY

A bad workman always blames his tools but isn’t it funny that the good workman always has the best tools.



Tue 17th October 2006 03:39pm

WHY DID I DO IT?


My techno-troll phoned frothing with excitement. Our free ‘Go It Alone Lite’ e-book was being downloaded in squillions, “Mega – overwhelming – huge – beyond our wildest dreams – world domination” he howled. So it’s doing well, then. I must admit I am hugely chuffed and seeing the numbers clocking up by the thousand has really made my day. But then my mother in law appeared – a truly terrifying person who could have intimidated Attila the Hun (and, because of her advanced years, probably did). “The e-book is doing well” she was told. “How do you make money out of that?” she asked pointedly, fixing me with a cockatrice stare. Well the answer is that it doesn’t. The only tangible financial benefit is that it has pushed the full fat ‘Go It Alone’ book soaring into the bestseller list. This has pleased everyone except my miserable publisher, who has complained that an unexpected and huge rise in sales completely cocked up his production planning and he wished I hadn’t done it.

It is this sort of risk-driven clear-headed thinking that has got British business to where it is in the world today. In cash terms the author of a book gets something like 0.000000003% so an extra million or so sales would leave me being able to afford a packet of Liquorice Imps.

Then why do it, why give away this book? As a project this is one of the most exciting and unexpectedly successful things we have done. This blog is about sharing business ideas, and the lesson I have learned with the e-book is that once you have earned a penny more than you can spend, the real joy comes from making things work. The thought that thousands of you from all over the world have downloaded and enjoyed our little book, delights and thrills me and the fact that people are passing it on to their friends is really the icing on the cake.

So thank you all so much and if anyone has found ‘Go It Alone Lite’ useful, please let me know. After all, that’s why we did it.