How many repetitive problems in your business – Chartered Accountant in London
And what I would like to talk to you about today is the ideas that came out of a board meeting I had recently and this one was a problem that a client presented me with that suggested that they were having a frustration with their customers and their clients that just seemed to continue. What surprised me is that they had been having this problem for five, six, seven years, maybe longer and they had not done anything about it.
Well, one of the things that I am really good at – and I’ve got lots of weaknesses. But one of the things that we’re really good at is fixing problems so they stay fixed and that’s one of the powerful things I bring to businesses in the Profit Multiplier Program we run is identifying problems that they are experiencing and dissolving them.
One of the ideas that came up was this constant frustration that this client was having and I asked them what do they do about it and they said, “Well, what can we do about it?” and that again is therein the powerful question which was, had it occurred to me at that point that they probably hadn’t asked themselves the question, or if they had asked the question, in their mind’s eye, they believe that there wasn’t a solution.
So that was the opportunity I think available to many businesses around the country, around the world, because when I visited businesses in Australia and New Zealand recently, I found that I thought I was going to find something completely different because they have a different mentality. They have a different approach. They have a different psychology. Yet this problem was very similar to the businesses we have in the UK and some of the businesses in the US. Well, obviously in the US businesses there are, same principle, same problem. They have this – if you can’t really challenge or change the thinking using the thinking that lets the problem exist – I’m going to explain a bit more.
If you have had a frustration or problem that lasts a while – I’m also going to pull in here – if you are presented with a problem that came out out of the blue and you didn’t like the problem and if you fixed it, that would be the end of that problem.
But if a problem creeps up and gradually you just begin to accept it as the way it is, then my proposition would be to use that, a thinking that allows it to exist for a time and it may be three months, six months, a year or more. The longer it’s allowed to exist, the more stuck in your thinking the root lies, that it’s really difficult to then come out with a different solution because now your thinking has established that this is a part of the world. This is the way the world is. Like night follows day and day follows night. You begin to accept that it’s part of business’s rich pageant and has to be put up with.
I come from a very different angle. One of my strengths has always been to identify and root out problems, leveraging my time – I am a master at leveraging. I help clients with leveraging their time because it is the only way that we have of increasing our productivity because we all have 24 hours in a day. Richard Branson doesn’t have any different 24 hours than you or I. Yet he achieves a whole lot because he leverages his time through his team, through his methodologies, through his thinking and people will go, “Well, he doesn’t have the problems I do.”
No, you’re right. He doesn’t have the problems you do. He has much bigger problems than you do or I do. The more successful you are, the bigger the problems and it just comes with the territory. You still have to have the mental approach to build on them.
So what we did with this client coming back to this board meeting or case study I was telling you about is where you identify the problem and it’s a problem I had solved six years, seven years ago. It wasn’t a problem in my business any longer. It was at the time, seven years ago, but I fixed it. I didn’t allow it to happen primarily because I was explaining it to one of my mentors and he said, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” All right, I’m going to do something about it. Of course I do.
I thought of a way. I sat down in my quiet time that I put aside every week for my business and we worked out a solution for it. That solution has stuck and has worked really well ever since. It’s a solution that comes out of automation and education.
So what we did with this client, we asked them, “What are they going to educate their clients as to how they feel about the problem?” They said nothing. We gave them a piece of paper at the beginning of the engagement and clearly the clients just ignore it, don’t read it, don’t even see it. I said, well do you think – is that working for you? It was tongue in cheek. Of course it wasn’t working for them. So I said, “What are you going to do about that?” and they said “lightbulb”, of course, we have got to change how we educate the client.
The second thing was the automation and when it came to the automation, I explained how we do it, how we track these issues and then we bring into the clients’ attention. So do you think this is good business that we wait this long for – to help you? And was it good for you? If it is good for you, tell me how and in that way, it’s – it’s clearly not good to us. We’re not doing what we could do with you because we’re awaiting for all of this information and very quickly, the penny dropped. So education and automation are two really big allies in the fight against the time constraints, money constraints, frustration problems and we live in an age now that technology allows us amazing scope for automation and even technology allows us amazing scope for education.
Let me explain a little bit about that. We have online meetings and we share a screen. We use software available. There’s several software out there that you could use. Some of them are free. Some of them are paid for. We use the paid for one because of certain characteristics that give it the quality we want. But you can get it for free. So don’t let us stop you. Skye for example is completely free. You can have online meetings and we educate clients without having to spend two hours, three hours travel time, parking costs, car costs, running costs.
I bought this car about eight months ago, nine months ago and I’ve hardly done any miles in it now because we – and right now I’m driving a lot of miles. But we spend so much time at base just having conversations with clients and prospects online. They’re so much more effective both for the client and for us because they don’t need the extra travel time and I don’t need the extra travel time and yet you get things done. We have face to face meetings if we need to using laptop cameras. We certainly can share desktop space because I just showed them what’s on my screen.
This is what I would do in a meeting anyway. I would share my laptop screen on a meeting or projected on a board. They have it directly on their laptop. They can see what I’m pointing at. I can make notes in front of them. I can draw pictures in front of them using my iPad. Technology allows all of that to happen and automation using CRM systems make a whole lot of that automation possible that we wrote our own software 10 years ago to automate some of the – eliminate the frustration, the ones I was telling you about, and now there’s so many other problems. You don’t need to write your own software. You just need to plug in your principles into the software and away it goes.
So let me leave you with that, examine your frustrations and sometimes it’s hard to solve a problem with the mentality that allows it to continue. So outside, when you have the right process to identify the problems in your business, these things just come out and then they can be solved. As soon as they identify it, you and I can just quickly eliminate them. They just dissolve and they cease to be problems anymore. They cease to be bigger problems.
So let me leave you with that thought. How are you putting up with problems in your business? How many frustrations or on-going problems are recurring? Maybe it’s because your team don’t get things right and that frustrates you or maybe it’s your clients or your prospects or your suppliers that frustrate you. We’ve eliminated a whole range of those and certainly that’s what we share in our Profit Multiplier Program.
