A resource for 'Go It Alone: The Streetwise Secrets of Self Employment', Geoff Burch's business start-up book for those wishing to escape the rat race. This is his Blog http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/ en-uk 2008 enquiries@mediaeden.co.uk http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2007-08-17 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 http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2007-08-17 http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2007-02-12 IF THE FUTURES ORANGE IM 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 Isnt 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 wont 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 dont have the foggiest idea what to do because you didnt train them or you dont 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 fathers lands and discovers big financial troubles so he summons the consultants Machiavelli Co much against the jesters 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 wont 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 operators 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 engineers 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 caf 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 dont 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.Dont 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 dont trust you are an idiot. 4.If a customer is so frustrated that they are forced to complain further up the food chain dont ignore them. 5.Never use Orange Broadband. 6.When you apologise dont 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 isnt 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 dont get it. Dont get what I asked. Well the peasants didnt 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. http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2007-02-12 http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2006-10-26 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 hes in the lav at the moment. He was on the curry last night and hes 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 dont 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 doesnt know that you dont 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 Ferraris race mechanic in the 1970s. 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 dont be afraid to charge what you are worth. THOUGHT FOR TODAY A bad workman always blames his tools but isnt it funny that the good workman always has the best tools. http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2006-10-26 http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2006-10-17 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 its 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 doesnt. 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 hadnt 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 thats why we did it. http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2006-10-17 http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2006-09-29 JUST HOW GOOD ARE YOU If you have had the dubious pleasure of reading my stuff or listening to me you may have noticed that I classify certain business ideas as doomed. I have also noticed that certain business premises have a similar effect. There are one or two venues in our town that regularly play host to the dismal crushing of peoples dreams - tragedies of Greek proportion that tend often to be wine bars or restaurants with jolly names like Maggies El Tropicana or Guiseppes. There is one place in particular that destroys the aspirations of budding restaurateurs. It has been pizzas Indian Thai and even can you believe it traditional British. The latest lambs to the slaughter have opened an Italian restaurant and on their first night there were a few people in there. On the next night a few more and now a few months on it is so packed that you can rarely get a table. Well that is the old doomed predictor on the fritz predictor. Once I had had a little stamp about like Rumplestiltskin I do like to be right you know I had a think. If these people can succeed in that place there is hope for all of us and as it is my lifes work to help all you lot succeed I need to know their secret. Their marketing had been vigorous and clever but not earth shattering. They are located in a commercial district so they leaflet-ed all the local offices with vouchers that gave discounts and even free meals. If you ate there you would get a free bottle of wine voucher to use on your next visit. They are briskly raising brand awareness or as the marketing men would say increasing footfall more people coming to sample what they have to offer. But if what you offer is crap all that you can do is make people aware that you are crap even faster. This whole problem is brought into focus by my favourite story from Tom Peters who told how a huge US food giant decided to go into making dog food. They spent millions on can design. A psychologist burned the midnight oil deciding what colour to have the labels. Distribution was the envy of world logistics and the advertising campaign stunned the globe. A year down the line everything had gone horribly wrong and a mass inquest was held with all the employees involved. The CEO stood up and said The cans were great the colours moved me distribution was perfect the ad campaign was the best. What went wrong And a voice from the distant shadows at the back of the room called out The dogs hated it That is the secret of the Italian restaurants success. The grub is fantastic. It is consistently the most delicious good value Italian food I have ever eaten. So there you are it is simple. Be the best and be consistently the best. It is very easy for us self-employed to lean more towards the crap end of the scale than the excellent. I needed my house painting inside so I got quotes and one guy clearly a professional produced a reasonable quote and a good timescale and no this is not one of my hilarious disaster stories but he worked too fast. He obviously had been a contract painter and used a huge roller therefore he was a little bit careless and a little bit splashy I still pick the odd freckle off my windows. My plumber is great truly wonderful but tends to turn off his mobile phone when hiding from me. My window cleaner is kind funny and totally unreliable. Would I use them again Maybe. Would I recommend them Only with a warning. To guarantee your future you must be outstanding. To do that you must be brutally honest about your offering. If you cant be brutally honest then get someone else who will be friends and family rarely are. Get it right and you have the proverbial licence to print money. http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2006-09-29 http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2006-09-26 Thought for the day. If you are ever tempted to criticise anybody before you do you should be prepared to walk a mile in their shoes.nbsp That way when you do criticise them they will be a mile away and you have got their shoes. http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2006-09-26 http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2006-09-20 SILLY BANKERS When planning this site we went to the search engine a thing I believed to be a bit like Thomas but with better eyesight but my techno-trolls tell me it is in fact a way of finding the most popular things in cyberspace. Now my vanity dictates that I should be the most popular thing in any space so when we typed in small business self-employed work from home etc imagine my horror when the top scorers were all banks BANKS I ask you its like inputting childcare creche parenting skills and getting King Lear King Herod and Caligula. The banks obviously heavily promoted their position on the net therefore by virtue of the way banks think they are doing this to make oodles of wonga. If one was charitable Im not you might think that they do this I dont to gently take the seeds of your idea and at loss to themselves fertilize it with the warm excreting of their spare cash until it flourishes into a huge global corporation that will be forever in their debt and repay their kindness a thousand-fold. I can go along with the concept of repaying a thousand-fold but the fertilization plan has a few flaws in it. Think very carefully about this. You are starting out on your own for various reasons love of mankind rebellious spirit great ideas or like me from every other real job but whatever happens an income is needed one that you may be loath to share with a fat greedy bank. I can see why banks support students for a couple of years with drinking vouchers because they will emerge from their stinky poly-cotton chrysalis to spend a lifetime as a respectable wage slave and then be sucked dry by the bank with mortgages credit cards pensions and over drafts. A good harvest by the banks you will agree and because we are too lazy to change banks a pretty safe one. But small businesses Some claim nine out of ten fail. Do you think students would be a good bet if nine out of ten of them died The question the banks have to answer is can you make money out of the poor and desperate The answer is of course yes If you are a nice fat fly that just happens to be wearing a t-shirt with poor and desperate written on it as you flounder in the sticky web called bank as the big fat hair thing with dripping jaws and a badge saying small business adviser creeps towards you you have to ask yourself was this a good idea Small businesses and banks also make some genuine-ish mistakes so in the useful bit of this tirade here they are. CRAP IDEA We tend to have flights of fancy when planning our businesses and breeding cannibal restaurant dolphin-walking service etc. If the bank refuses to lend on it the horrible prospect is they may be right. They will lend on crap ideas because they know they can have your house so if they dont lend it might be a very crap idea indeed Hurtful maybe but you need to be told. THE BUSINESS PLAN In some of the bank-issued guides they invite you to prepare a business plan and cash flow forecast to enable you to get your finance offer. Seems like a good idea until you realize that these plans are works of fiction that make Harry Potter look like verifiable British history. Dont believe me Consider this when did you last see a business plan that said something like this Initial capital investment 50000 to be followed by a disappointing first year and shockingly unexpected set-up costs. Second year to start with the remaining 19000 totter on with break-even or possibly small profit. Third year likely 20 decline in business. Fourth year product malfunction which puts a childs eye out. Fifth year do a bunk before creditors catch up with me. As we have said this actually happens up to nine out of ten times so why dont you ever see a declining cash flow forecast IM NOT A BUSINESS This one really gets me. If you are a wage slave you get a private account which gives you access to all sorts of yummy extra-interest accounts low interest loans and because of fierce competition even free banking. This is where I take issue. You may not want a business a place that employs people has a machine and a building you may just want a job. The only difference is that you give this job to yourself. The bank immediately classifies you as commercial banking with all the attendant costs and loss of benefits. It can also put you in the wrong mindset. Small businesses may fail but self-employed people rarely do. If you are self-employed you wont be unemployed skint perhaps I grant you but not unemployed. Just because you want to spend time with your kids you dont want a boss you want to keep the money your talent earns and you want a little joy in your life does not mean you want to start a business you just need to be self-employed. OK we need banks but watch them like a hawk and be ruthlessly realistic and truthful with yourself. http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2006-09-20 http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2006-09-14 Patience my arseI am often asked to talk to groups of people who want to start their own business. Whether they are right or wrong or their ideas are crap we can leave for another day but some fail simply because the work failed to materialize. Speaking as a relatively talentless person I find talent very intimidating and to be honest depressing. I look at my skill set to try and determine my future wealth I can wiggle my ears I am a demon on a pinball machine and I can make great owl noises but thats about it. Then I see a wonderful musician playing on the street for pennies and wonder why they didnt become a multi-millionaire rockstar. I hear all your great ideas and then see you broke months down the line. Why People often say to me these words Geoff for an idiot you have done really well. What is the secret Is it something that you have read Everybody has some life-changing book they can quote but my life-changing writing was on a teeshirt I had when I was a hippy. On it were two vultures and one vulture is saying to the other Patience my arse Im going to go out and kill something In other words go out and make it happen. When you had a proper day job you will have been recruited for your talent or skill. Your bosss talent or skill was to find work that would occupy you for forty hours a week and fill his pocket with wads of cash. Now the deal is you get to keep the cash but you have got to go out and find the work. Tout your skill from door to door talk to everyone you know and those you dont know about your business. Think of the vulture on the t.shirt and go out there and make it happen actually ask for the work. OK you wont have too many friends to start with but when people see you lighting cigars with large denomination banknotes you will have more friends than you can handle. GO FOR IT http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2006-09-14 http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2006-09-13 Welcome Stuff me Im blogging and it sure feels weird I am only blogging because I want a regular chat with all the Go It Aloners who are bravely doing their own thing or thinking about it and who have so kindly bought my books listened to my rantings and have communicated with me. I regularly visit a forbidding cave which is under a local public house of dubious reputation where dwells a nest of scary techno-trolls. They lurk there because their ever-increasing demand for alcohol has now become intravenous. On payment of coin they will let you enter and leave relatively unmolested. The reason for risking such horrors is that they understand computers IT e.commerce and the mighty mystic power they call the Net. We live in Gloucestershire in the UK where we are a little behind the times. Emails are delivered by a smocked yokel with a note held in a forked stick. He will throw rocks at your window and yell Emails for you Mr Burch If when you look out he is pushing a barrow one can guess that he has attachments but my IT trolls tell me that the only way to get in touch with you all is to blog. Apparently the Net is the place for every business to be so here we are the first ever Go It Alone blog entry. By virtue of my rackety life and dodgy way of thinking these entries by definition will be a bit erratic but I will try and produce regular and provocative nuggets on how to make it happen for you in a self-employed sort of way. http://www.geoffburch.com/goitalone/blog.php?d=2006-09-13