Category: Mental Models

Posted on

3 Critical Reasons Why Owners Let Their Businesses Fail

reasons-why-owners-dont-invest-in-productivity.png

Saturday 10:31pm

Sheffield

There is a problem – definitely in the UK and more widely in Europe and small businesses in the developed world – and it has to do with how much work we’re doing.

Many businesses are not productive enough – the amount of work done by each person in the business is flatlining.

And this is a problem for one very simple reason.

As more people look for work, including from the vast labour markets in India and China, the supply of qualified, skilled people increases.

Existing businesses will face more competition from more places – and if they’re not getting better at what they do all the time, then someone else will take them out.

So why do small businesses, in particular, struggle to keep up?

To start with, there are three things they can do to improve their businesses – they can invest in better systems, create better processes and hire better people. And this creates three problems.

1. They’re Too Busy Paying Rent To Worry About New Technology

Most businesses owners are neck deep in work.

There are customers to deal with, suppliers to shout at, employees to manage, rent and wage bills to pay and tax to collect and give the government.

Almost every small business owner is spending too much time working in the business to step back and make the time to work on the business.

So – wanting money out of them for something they don’t understand is not going to go down well.

However good a new technology – most business owners just haven’t got the time to get their heads around it and work out if they will benefit from it.

2. They’re Entrepreneurs – Not MBAs Or Accountants Or Lawyers

May people who start businesses have a passion for what they do, or they’ve taken over the family business, or they spotted a gap in the market for a product or service.

They’re creative opportunity spotters, risk takers and problem solvers.

That’s great when you need sheer force of will to convince suppliers to give you credit, customers to give you business and people to work for you in exchange for promises.

It’s not so good when you need to pass a security audit or comply with GDPR or file an environmental compliance application.

Often businesses don’t have the skills in-house or the contacts outside to get qualified advice on what they should do and how they can do things better – whether it has to do with improving sales and operations, cutting costs or having better contracts in place.

3. They Don’t See The Point Of Investing In Training

This is the hardest one for many business owners to get – and it’s the equivalent of shooting themselves in the foot.

You only have two options – you can hire someone with the skills you need, or you can train them to the level you need.

Many business owners don’t want to pay for training. They see that as an immediate cost and, once the person has been trained, what happens if they simply leave?

All that investment disappears. Instead, why not just hire someone that another company has spent a lot of money to train?

That’s Why They Die A Slow, Lingering Death

People don’t want to mess up their business – they just do because sorting things out for the long term is just so much harder than dealing with things right now.

But we should… think about these three sayings:

  • If you don’t make time to exercise, you will have to make time for illness.
  • Forewarned is forearmed
  • If you train people, they may leave. But, what if you don’t train them and they stay?

If you’re too busy to fix your business now – then it will be a lot harder when the competition has moved in and taken most of your customers.

Understand the value of good advice.

And – train your people. Having a good training system in place that takes inexperienced people and turns them into superstars is the best insurance against having to hire superstars that will leave you the first chance they get for a better offer.

It takes one set of skills to create a business. It takes another set of skills to keep it alive.

Posted on

There are three kinds of people in the world. Which one are you?

three-kinds-of-people.png

Friday, 8.56pm

Sheffield.

At the end of the week, do you feel like you’ve had a good one?

It started, if you remember, with Monday.

Monday is meetings day – lots of meetings. Not much gets done on Mondays.

Tuesday is an inch into the week. Perhaps we’ll do something on Tuesday. Open a file, make some notes.

Wednesday is rock bottom – can’t go forward or back. It’s right in the middle and the worst day of the week. Probably time to get some takeaway or junk food to forget it.

Thursday – perhaps that’s a brighter day, looks like we’re over the hump and it’s downhill from here.

Friday is a long day and, when it’s done, we can forget about the working week and get on with the weekend.

That sounds like a productive week – or not.

Now, hopefully, that wasn’t your actual week. You probably crushed Tuesday and spent the days around it getting some real work done.

But, however your week turned out, that isn’t the point.

This is.

Did you do one of these three things:

  1. Get some big projects away – do some work that made a difference to your company, your business or for the people around you?
  2. Get on with your job, the role, what you are paid to do. Go in from 9 to 5 and do what’s in the job description.
  3. Do what you’re supposed to do, while studying, planning and thinking about what else you could do to develop your career or improve your life.

This isn’t a trick question – the chances are you did all three in some way. Perhaps you worked on the garden and sorted it out finally. Perhaps the filing system is now better at work. And you’re through the first module of the accounting course you’re doing part time.

Did you do things that helped you get better, accomplish goals and get yourself sorted. Or did the days just pass by, and it’s hard to remember what actually happened.

We lose time without noticing. Life seems so long, until it isn’t.

We’d be horrified if we lost our life in an instant – but we barely blink as it ebbs away second by second.

What’s the answer to the question in the title – the three kinds of people?

There are people who make things happen. There are people who watch things happen. And there are people to whom things happen.

Which one do you want to spend the most time being?

Posted on

The Single Best Tactic to Use to Achieve Your Goals

no.png

Life is just too busy.

There’s always too much going on.

If you’re young, there are parties to go to, friends to meet, movies to watch and places to visit.

If you have a family, the kids take up all your time, and what is left is spent tidying up and trying to get some sleep.

If you’re older, perhaps the grandkids keep you busy. Or there’s holidays with the friends, cruises and charity work.

Is this a good thing?

Possibly. Many people have worse lives and struggle with daily living.

But the fact that others have it worse doesn’t change the reality of the life we live.

So, what can you do about it?

There’s a great ad that Saatchi and Saatchi did for The Health Education Council.

It just says No. And below, it says still the most effective form of birth control.

And this is good advice with almost everything we do.

The point is that we spend a lot of our time doings things others want us to do.

At home, we need to deal with asks from family.

We exchange our time at work for money, and get told what to do as a result.

And, if we want to be nice and useful and not get fired, we do the things we are asked to do.

But, at some point, we could lose track of why we are doing anything in the first place.

What drives you, what do you really want?

And is what you are doing every day getting you closer to or further away from what you want.

Perhaps we can’t remember – all the years have buried our real wants under layers of reality, demands and expectations.

A good tactic to peel back the layers is the perfect day exercise.

Imagine your perfect day. The one that would make you totally happy. What does it look like?

Where do you wake up. What is the room like, the bed, the view?

Maybe it’s not a room, but a hammock on your beach hut in the Caribbean.

What’s the first thing you do? Who is there with you? What is breakfast like?

How do you spend your morning? Do you jet off to a high powered meeting in NYC or LA or are you having brunch with friends in Paris? Or walking the dog in the highlands of Scotland?

Describe your day in detail, from start to finish. Write it down quickly, without censoring yourself. No one is going to see this, so be completely honest with yourself.

Then, look back at what you have written and compare it with what your life looks like now.

If you’re dreaming of being a documentary film-maker but spend your days doing forensic accounting for waste management companies, then something has happened along the way to nudge you off course.

It’s not a problem.

You have the rest of your life to get back on track – starting right now.

And the way to get started is by saying No to the things that take you further away from your perfect day.

Not to all of them, not all at once – that will just get you fired and ruin all your relationships.

But, perhaps – that’s what’s actually needed in some cases.

For most of us, we need to correct course, not sink our boat and swim, spluttering and flailing, towards a new one.

Try saying No to more things from now on.

Posted on

How afraid are you that you will leave no trace?

clutter.png

Tuesday, 10.06pm

Sheffield

We’re trusting our memories to others in a way that has never been done before.

We used to live in a world where we had stuff – diaries, papers, photographs. These objects held memories for us.

Now, we live and record memories using our devices – and those devices are merely a way to see what actually lives somewhere else – in vast data centres run by huge corporations.

This seems like a good thing.

We’ve replaced cluttered desks and bulging filing cabinets with clean, neat online storage.

Or have we?

Have we really just shoved all that clutter into a bottomless filing cabinet.

Most of us now probably have 10 years or more of emails, thousands of documents and tens of thousands of photographs.

We don’t need to throw anything away – there is no need to sort, sift, shred or save anything – it’s all just there – always.

And that creates its own problem.

When there too much of something, it’s accompanied by a lack of something else.

Too much digital clutter is accompanies by a lack of time to do anything with it.

I have a small box of thing that belonged to my grandfather. An Army service record. A name badge. A telephone book with the numbers of people he knew. A school report.

Most families have a few things that date from three or four generations ago. A photograph of the family on holiday. A portrait of the children. A wedding album.

Now – we have every second of our lives captured digitally.

If we don’t keep that information in a form that our children’s children can access, it will simply be lost.

And that’s the advantage of paper – printed photos, written documents.

But, we don’t need to think generations ahead.

Recently, I needed to find a reference number for a form. That number had been created ten years ago. I had no digital trace.

I had a paper record though. It took some time to find, but it was there and I could do something with it.

On the other hand, stuff that I stored digitally is gone. I created it, put it on a drive and it may or may not exist somewhere.

I wonder if we’ll wake up in ten years and find big chunks of our memories missing. Perhaps a company that holds them goes bust. Perhaps hard drives fail. Perhaps we just forget where we put stuff.

There’s a brilliant ad showing how all the things that used to be on a desk disappear and are incorporated into a phone – the calendar, the phone, the notebook – everything.

It’s clear that this is fabulous – the desk is completely clear. All you need is a computer.

But… imagine that desk without the computer…

What is left?

And is that all you really want to leave?

Posted on

The most important lesson I learned from a sales master

recipe.gif

I’ve spent a big chunk of my life in formal schooling. School followed by diplomas, followed by university, then work and back to university.

And, on the whole, this has not been too much of a disadvantage.

Being good at school has little to do with how much you achieve or how well you do in life. Robert Kiyosaki joked that A students worked for C students, and B students worked for the government.

There’s some painful truth in that.

But – my studies were always for a purpose. I saw a degree as the cost of entry to work – the basic thing that was needed before anyone would hire me for anything.

It was only after ten years in work, when I went back and did an MBA, that I studied because I really wanted to. I wanted to learn about business, and I devoured everything I could find.

The great thing was that all the theory I was learning made sense – it explained a lot of the experiences I had so far.

But, not everything.

I understood more about why I felt the way I did as I worked in an organisation that changed size and character.

I had words that could explain what I had seen and felt – and that was amazingly freeing. I wasn’t imprisoned by those experiences – I could learn from them.

And, more importantly, I could see and learn from others. But, in addition to seeing, I could also describe what they were doing. Theory AND action. Something sorely lacking in the world of business now.

And one of the things I experienced was working with a master of sales – a master of working the phones and getting to people.

The first thing he could do was get through to someone on the phone. He had been taught by the Wolf of Wall Street – Jordan Belfort – and knew all the ways to pick up the phone and get through to someone at the top.

That was incredible to watch.

But… it wasn’t enough.

He’d draw the picture in the animation above. In a phone conversation, for example, there are a number of things you need to say. Think of them as points between the start and finish.

You need to move from point to point to get from the start all the way to the finish.

If you start running up and then fail at one of the points, you crash and die.

There’s no coming back… if everything isn’t connected, you won’t get to the finish line.

For example, let’s say you start with an intro, then a brief presentation, followed by qualification and then a close.

If you miss any of the steps, it won’t work.

Going wider, let’s say you speak to someone and they ask for a proposal – if you haven’t got one to send, then you’re going to fail.

If you send a proposal, without a clear place they can sign and accept, you’re going to fail.

The whole point is that everything needs to work for your process to work. You can’t just focus on one end or one bit and expect everything else to fall into place.

It’s a simple lesson – but one that makes all the difference, especially when it comes to theory and practice.

In theory, you may know what you should do.

In practice, you need to follow a series of steps, things that you need to do that you can do again and again.

And, if you do them, you’ll get from the start to the end – and build a successful process in your business.

Since you’ve read this far….

I hope you’re finding the stuff in this blog useful – and it’s stuffed full of models for getting better at management and business. I write it as much to learn myself as share with you.

Please post a comment and let me know what you think, how you’re finding it, and whether there is anything you would like to read more about.

Or – drop me a line at karthik@karthik-suresh.com and let me know what you think.

Thanks in advance.

Posted on

What is the secret to getting started

getting-started.png

Saturday 12.23am

Sheffield

We’re all somewhere right now – somewhere that we are because of all the decisions we made on the way.

Every choice, every act has led to one inevitable place. Looking back, we can see how we got here with total clarity.

If we’re honest with ourselves, that is.

We carry the impact of those choices with us. Possessions weight us down, if we have any. If we don’t, envy weights us down even more.

Or perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps we are content with what is.

Do you have children? Imagine that you’re trying to talk to your rebellious teenager about career choices.

The kid wants to be a musician. You’d rather she were a dermatologist. The chances of becoming a successful musician, in your eyes, might be low and is accompanied by a variety of exciting risks.

Dermatology, on the other hand, is a safe career and she’ll have patients for life – as treating skin problems is hardly a dangerous career, and skin issues rarely clear up entirely.

How would you approach making the decision? Would you stand your ground and insist that you know more about her career? Or give her the chance to make her own choices?

Let’s say you didn’t. She became a dermatologist. Now, 20 years later, she’s successful, with patients. And she’s miserable.

What should she do?

She’s invested years of her life in this career. It’s given her safety and security, just as you predicted. Perhaps she has a mortgage, a family, car payments. All the trappings of success.

Maybe she feels trapped. The things she owns have ended up owning her. What can she do? And when?

The when question is easier to answer – and it’s a trite response – a joke almost.

When’s the best time to start something? 10 years ago. When’s the second best time? Now.

Actually, the what question is not that hard to answer either.

What should she do?

Anything.

Anything that gets her moving in the direction of what she once wanted. Anything at all.

There’s a but.

But, it needs to be something she does every day from now on – perhaps for the rest of her life.

Perhaps she practices singing or her instrument five minutes a day. Or a hour a day. Every day.

When she commits, life will change. Not quickly. As the saying goes, people overestimate what they can achieve in a year, and underestimate what they can do in ten years.

She needs to stop looking for reasons why she can’t do what she wanted. And ask questions like how can she do what she wants.

What does she need to do to take the first step?

Then start. Take the step.

Posted on

The one surprising state of mind you need to call on to succeed

samurai.png

Thursday 8:27pm Sheffield

Did you do what you were supposed to do today? Go to work? Follow the rules? Keep your head below the parapet?

That sounds like a good day’s work. Let’s say it was better than that – let’s say it was a great day’s work.

You finished your todo list, helped a co-worker complete a few more jobs and got a large contract signed. Everything is fabulous.

You go to your manager, bursting with excitement – you’ve got all this stuff done, it’s time to pick up some praise and a well-deserved reward.

So… what do you think you’ll get?

  1. A huge cash bonus.
  2. An all-expenses paid trip to Bali with your family, with everyone flying first class?
  3. More work.

Most of us spend our lives working on other people’s priorities

We live in a world where the education system teaches us to fit in – to be good workers. And that’s great for lots of people.

But not for everyone. And the system doesn’t know how to cope with those people in any way other than putting them in straitjackets.

So we get contracts and rules and policies and training – all things designed to squish us into a role where we do what we are told to do and nothing else.

In other words, we act like pragmatic, reasonable people – agreeing what we should do and doing what we agree, most of the time.

What would a Samurai do?

Hagakure is The Book of the Samurai, a collection of conversations with Yanamoto Tsunetomo, an 18th Century Samurai who became a Buddhist priest.

The Samurai point of view that comes out of these writings is not pragmatic, not reasonable – and it’s not a philosophy. It’s a state of mind, and not one that is easy to understand.

In one of the stories, a warlord attacks and kills another one. When this happens, the soldiers of the dead warlord are ronin, masterless Samurai. What should they do?

The answer is clear. They must take revenge. The way of revenge is simply to force your way into the other warlord’s house and be cut down.

Don’t stop and think. Don’t consider details – like how many soldiers guard the place or what you need to attack. When you do this, the time goes by, your start to think, and then you give up.

It doesn’t matter if the enemy has a thousand soldiers waiting to fight you. You go in with the mindset that you will start with the first one and cut them down, one by one.

Even if it looks like you will lose, take action – recklessly, irrationally. Go in, cut them all down, or be cut down.

Don’t wait and think. Act. With no regard to reason or outcomes.

Would you attack a warlord guarded by such people?

Sometimes life needs that kind of attitude. Was Steve Jobs reasonable about removing all the buttons from the iPhone? Was Elon Musk reasonable about going to Mars?

George Bernard Shaw wrote “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

To win, you need to be the kind of person that will fight, even when it is absolutely certain that you must lose.

When the time comes, you do not reason – you must only act.

Posted on

How to come up with a pitch that doesn’t suck when asked “what do you do?”

diving-pitch.png

Everyone’s heard of an elevator pitch, where you get in with a total stranger at the bottom of an elevator and during the ride up deliver a pitch that gets them to fall in love with you and give you lots of money.

Except that never happens.

What I’d do is ride up in silence and try not to let my breathing get too loud while avoiding all eye contact, which is the right and proper way to do things.

Anyway…

Let’s assume we’ve actually had this ridiculous conversation up the elevator – what do people suggest you say.

Well.. here are a few examples. And some more here

Now, there’s nothing wrong with them, except that few people could actually deliver most of those sentences and not come across as a bit OTT.

There are two things to think about really in these situations.

1. Who is asking the question?

Is it a new acquaintance? A possible customer? A friend trying to understand more about you?

What we say in the first few seconds creates an impression – and what we often want to do is come across in a particular way.

The context in which we’re asked the question matters.

2. What do we want the listener to take away from the pitch?

Many of us find it hard to reduce our lives to a few sentences. We identify with work, with hobbies, with families and with communities.

So, to a new acquaintance we might want to talk about how we fit into the community, while to a customer, we want to talk about our business. When joining a sports team we might want to stress our passion for the game.

We should think in headlines rather than pitches

Say we’ve gone up the elevator in silence. And (for no really good reason) we both decide that we’re going to take a dip in the outdoor pool and bump into each other. And, in the embarrassed period that follows, we end up introducing ourselves.

So, what would you say if you were asked that question just as you were about to jump off the diving board into the pool?

There isn’t time for the big build up to the paragraph you were planning on saying. You need to describe what you do in a sentence.

What we should do is borrow from John Carlton’s playbook. His formula says:

We help [group of people] do [benefit] even if [believable worst case scenario].

For example, we help small businesses file their accounts on time even if we have to spend all night sorting receipts in a shoebox.

Could you say that?

Might need some work – but it’s still easier than some of the longer ones out there.

Now, I need a few of these…

Posted on

What to do when you’re struggling for ideas

becoming-unstuck.png

Sometimes I’m out of gas – running on empty – and the ideas just aren’t coming.

I want to write, I’m sat waiting for inspiration to strike. And I’m still waiting.

What am I doing wrong? And what could you do differently?

You wouldn’t be here at all

The first thing I should have done is kept the hopper full. The hopper is the collection of jottings, the notes from the day. The things you noticed, the things that stood out, the things that made you stop.

And the hopper doesn’t need to be that full. Say you write once a day, like I do, all you need is two or three ideas in the hopper and you’re sorted.

If it stood out in the first place, it’s probably a good one – good enough to get a first draft out anyway.

You’d look around for inspiration – go wide

We’re surrounded by stuff that could inspire us. All you have to do is pick up a book, or do a search and see what else is out there. The chances are that something will catch your eye.

The trick is taking an idea and making it your own. It’s not enough just to copy something that someone else has done. That’s no use.

Instead, it fusing a few ideas together and coming up with a new one that creates something interesting.

Still stuck? Focus – go deep

Robert Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance tells the story of a student who came to him, wanting to write a 500 word essay about the United States.

He had a sinking feeling, and told her that might be too much – to focus instead on their town.

She came back and was still struggling. Narrow it down, he said, to the main street of the town.

Still no joy – she couldn’t think what to write.

He was furious now, she just wasn’t looking.

“Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street”, he said, “Start with the upper left hand brick“.

She came back with 5,000 words.

Narrowing it down and starting with the smallest detail had finally unlocked it for her.

Finally, step away – but only when your forehead starts to bleed

Much advice on becoming unstuck says to take a break – but when is the right time?

Not straight away. Not right at the beginning.

First – spend some time just staring at the screen. Focusing. Willing yourself to have an idea.

Just sitting.

Why is that important?

Because what you’re trying to do is get your mind to move, like a stuck screw. And like that screw, you can’t just try once and walk away. You need to try it every way, apply some pressure, hammer it, scream a little – try until you’re exhausted and can’t do any more.

Then you walk away.

Then… you’re brain does its magic thing and moves and unlocks. When you come back, it happens – the screw turns and the ideas come pouring out.

And when all else fails?

Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.

Posted on

The one thing you need to do to make a plan successful

godfather-scene.png

Coming up with a plan is simple, isn’t it?

Make a list of steps, work on them, think about them, tune them and act on them.

Once that’s done, we’re done and can get on with life as usual. Success is bound to come, isn’t it?

What do you think is missing from this process?

Imagine the last strategy session you were part of. The chances are that a bunch of people got in a room – minds on the things that they were working on earlier.

There is an agenda – everyone gets ready to go through it. Someone manages the discussion. Everyone gets a say. And the hours pass by.

Ideas go on the flipchart – mindmaps sprout with lines weaving across the page. Everyone is watching the MIPITR – and it’s not you.

The MIPTR is the Most Important Person In The Room. That person has power. What they say goes. So, everyone watches the MIPTR and says the right things to stay on the right side.

That’s not fair. Some people don’t. Some people have the guts to stand up and say what they think. They make good points that go on the flipchart and everyone nods, and some people hate them for being so brave.

The day goes by. In the last hour, someone starts to work through the actions and put together a list. The hard work of planning is over.

Then what happens? The plan gets emailed around. If it’s a very organised organisation, there are regular catch up meetings. Everyone makes sure they’ve got no unfinished actions. It all looks good and on track.

The months and quarters go by. It’s Q4 – what’s happening? Has the plan been successful?

Don’t know. If there is an organisation that’s still tracking its actions and plan nine months later – it needs a medal. That’s not how things usually work. In reality, after the first couple of months, the plan is no longer top of mind, and people forgot all about it.

This is not new. Dwight D. Eisenhower talks about something he heard in the army – *plans are worthless – but planning is everything.

So, what’s the missing ingredient?

The secret is found in a scene from the Godfather. Michael and Don Corleone are going over their plans and say the following words:

VITO CORLEONE (after a long pause) I don’t know – your wife and children – are you happy with them?

MICHAEL Very happy…

VITO CORLEONE That’s good. (then) I hope you don’t mind the way I – I keep going over this Barzini business…

MICHAEL No, not at all…

VITO CORLEONE It’s an old habit. I spend my life trying not to be careless – women and children can be careless, but not men. (then) How’s your boy?

The secret is to keep going over the plans. In the open, with your team. To talk about them – remind everyone what the plan was in the first place. Tell everyone else about the plan. Tell the people working for the people in the room.

A plan on paper is worthless. Actions alone are worthless. A plan will only be successful when everyone knows what the plan is and what they need to do.

And doing that is harder than it looks. That’s because one person, usually the one who came up with the plan, is completely clear on the plan.

Everyone else is trying to catch up. Talk with them about it. Let them restate it in their own words. Let them ask questions. Listen – and tweak the words in the plan to answer those questions up front next time.

The more you talk about your plan with the people you need to execute it, the more likely it is to be successful.