As a business coach and consultant, a lot of my time is spent helping businesses to develop a USP, a differential advantage, a value proposition – whatever you call it! – to answer that difficult but crucial question: what makes your business different so that I should choose to buy from you?

Now, once a business has developed a USP, once it’s developed a good reputation for delivering its product or service in its markets, and perhaps it has an interesting strap-line and a great looking logo, it’s well on the way to developing a brand. And that raises the question: how does it protect that investment, how does it stop a competitor copying the brand name that it’s building up?

And that’s the point, if you haven’t done so already, that you should think about registering a trade mark for your brand. You may be able to register your company name, brand and service names, your logos. (You may also be able to protect other aspects of your intellectual property with patents and registered designs, which can give a major commercial advantage, but that’s appropriate only for a small proportion of businesses.) If you haven’t done so already, you should talk to a Trade Mark attorney, like my client Brookes Batchellor. Many trade mark attorneys will give you a short initial consultation free of charge or for a small fee. If you don’t, and you find a few years down the line that someone’s copying you, passing themselves off as you, maybe even that they’ve registered trade marks that may interfere with you using yours, you’re going to kick yourself! A small amount spent early on may save you tens of thousands in a few years time.

Nick Dougan, business coach, advisor, mentor and consultant from West Kent discusses discontinuity marketing.

Today I had a meeting with Ian Morris of Steadfast Law, and he introduced me to the idea of “discontinuity marketing”.  This is an idea that I immediately recognised, although I have to thank Ian and his former partners for giving it such a great name!  I remember it from at least as far back as the late 1990s when I was the manager of a firm of solicitors, and we entertained prospects to lunch in the boardroom and talked about what might happen if their current solicitors had a “conflict of interest” – i.e. they found themselves in a position where they had two clients on opposite sides of a problem, and couldn’t represent both.

I discuss this idea in a more detail here.

The point about “discontinuity marketing” is that sometimes it’s necessary to wait for something to go wrong with a relationship between your ideal prospect and their current favoured supplier before you’ll get a chance.   You’ve got to have faith that the world changes.  Events happen.  Things go wrong.  One day that existing firm’s current client relationship will go wrong, and the client will think about trying out another provider.  It might just be a conflict of interest that gives you that first opportunity to show what you can do, it might be a major mistake, it might be an act of rudeness by a new assistant or the CEO, it might even just be that the preferred supplier is too busy and can’t take on the piece of work.  It doesn’t really matter. 

What matters is, if and when this “discontinuity” happens, will they think of you?  Will they know you because they’ve often met you at networking events, because they’ve received your newsletters, because they’ve come to your seminars or cocktail parties, because you’ve been recommended by a couple of people whose opinions they respect, because you’ve taken part in discussions in LinkedIn groups with them or maybe even because they’ve followed you on Twitter? 

In some business sectors you can change an advert, revamp your website or turn up at a few breakfast networking meetings and you’ll get more enquiries.  But in others you may have to plug away for years just to earn the right deliver your “sales pitch” – when that “discontinuity” happens and provides the opportunity.  The one compensation, at that level, is that once you’ve won that new client, and delivered a few pieces of exceptional work they can become your customers for life.  Others will begin to ask themselves – what could I do to win that great client, even though they seem so happy with your firm?

So, what are you doing to be at the top of the list when a “discontinuity” happens? 

And, at the same time, do you really have to wait until a discontinuity comes along?  Can you develop a value proposition, USP or differential advantage that will make you stand out?  Make that ideal client look at you and think “that’s a remarkable new offering, it makes my current supplier look rather dull in comparison, I really must check them out”!  This is easier in some industry areas than others, but if you can do it you may find prospects much more receptive to your approaches.  They may even come looking for you!

And if you’ve read this far, let me ask you a question.  I had professional firms like lawyers, accountants and patent attorneys I mind when I wrote this.  It may apply to banks and financial advisors too.  But I reckon that this is an idea that will gel with many other types of business too – and if you’re in one of them, I’d be delighted to hear from you and help you find new ways of doing it better.

Nick Dougan is a business coach, advisor and management based in Sevenoaks, Kent and working in Sevenoaks, Maidstone, Tunbridge Wells and elsewhere across the south-east of England.  He is also a Law Society accredited consultant.

Nick Dougan, an Action Coach Business Coach based in Sevenoaks in West Kent, reflects on creating the right environment for your team, with a particular view on the Leesman Index or Lmi, the “first unified and truly independent workplace effectiveness measurement tool”.

I had the privilege, at the end of last month, to make a presentation at FICPI’s Open Seminar on management in the patent profession.  (You can see my presentation on my LinkedIn page.)  One of my fellow presenters was Tim Oldman, one of the founders of Leesman (www.leesman.co.uk), a consultancy dedicated to identifying what people want and need from their working environment and thus to guide workplace design to maximise employee engagement and satisfaction.  I’ve run employee satisfaction surveys before, and have found them to be useful in identifying changes that should usefully be made, but the office environment was only covered as one of many factors.  Leesman’s tool focuses exclusively on the workplace itself.

Tim has a background in office interior design and planning, and set up Leesman with a small team who had worked on a number of projects to maximise the effectiveness of the workspace for a number of large corporates.  He pointed out the results of a British Institution of Facilities Management survey, in which 86% of respondents said that the recognised that the quality of a workplace impacts on the productivity of its users…while 58% are trying to reduce the space they occupy by increasing occupant densities! 

A conflict there?  Evidence of management cynicism?  Perhaps, but Tim told us a story which illustrates how just having more space per office user might not increase satisfaction.  I may not have all of the details exactly right, but these were the essentials.  A company with a call-centre type sales operation in the West End had “packed in” its staff – after all, the West End of London has some of the highest rents in the world.  As the company became more successful and more space in the same building became available, its directors began to think of spreading the operation onto another floor and giving everyone a few more square feet.  At this point Tim’s investigation of workplace effectiveness revealed that this was not in fact what the employees wanted.  They liked the buzz of working in relatively cramped conditions.  What they really wanted was a canteen and relaxation area.  That had not even been on the directors’ radar – after all, there were scores of cafes, sandwich shops and restaurants within easy walking distance, that’s one of the great benefits of being in the centre of London!  Besides, who wants to encourage employees to relax, to stop working?  In fact, their employees were not keen on routinely spending £5 on sandwiches and a seat out of the office.  They wanted to eat something that they’d brought in from home, possibly something that they could microwave.  And in fact, far from wishing to loaf around, they wanted to take a short break, have a chat with colleagues, and then get back to their workspaces quickly to earn more overtime and commission.  Result: desk densities remained the same, and the extra space was used to provide a rest area with appropriate facilities – and a more engaged and satisfied workforce. 

The Lmi aims indexes different aspects of satisfaction with the workplace and benchmarks them against a pool of data gathered from previous engagements – and Leesman’s plan is to get 25,000 individual responses from at least 100 project surveys by the end of 2011.  I’m wondering whether I have any clients who might get something out of this – the cost of the small firm (<250 respondents) survey is only a little more than £3,000.  For the very small organisation, of course, this will still not be cost effective – perhaps a team meeting to discuss improvements to the physical environment in an open minded way would be a good start.

Already the data is showing up differences between different types of office users, some obvious, you might think, others les so.  For example, “Upper age ranges” value natural light and low noise levels, while those workplace features are much less important to “lower age range”, who are much more interested in the quality of their computer and telephone equipment.  We had the opportunity to discuss the possible age discrimination implications of trying to provide different workstations for different ages of staff, and agreed that while it was important to bear that in mind, the point was to be able to meet different individuals’ needs and preferences irrespective of their ages. 

ActionCOACH methodologies emphasise the importance of creating the right environment for team members to thrive.  We all know, of course, that creating the right environment is about much more than having great working conditions.  I used to be in the Army, for example, and I know that great teams can flourish in the most inhospitable and arduous of conditions.  I’m also always inspired by stories and documentaries about, e.g. teachers who deliver great education in the most rudimentary of classrooms.  But we know too that the quality of the working environment can have a huge impact on how we think about our organisation – it’s one thing to work in basic conditions because there’s no choice or no money, it’s quite another to do so because the boss is mean or other people are prioritised for resources.  Moreover, as Tim’s story illustrates, it’s not just about the amount of cash that’s available, it’s about working out, with team members, how best to spend it.  Modern psychology tells us that the subconscious and emotional power of the way language is used is often far more important than its rational content.  The Leesman index may, similarly, equip us to design offices that are attuned to the needs of our particular teams and to make it easier for them to deliver the performance that we, and they, really want.  Excellent organisations need great leadership and individuals who are well suited to their roles and who trust each other and work well together, and all of these things may be made easier by having the most appropriate environment.

So, if you’re a medium sized business coming up to moving offices, taking a little extra space or even just thinking of reorganising the space, you might like to speak to Tim Oldman.  If you’re a small business in Kent and you don’t think that your working environment is helping your team to thrive, feel free to call me or one of my colleagues!

Nick Dougan is an Action Coach Business Coach based in Kent.  You can find out more about Nick and the work he does, which includes coaching, consultancy, management training and business advice in general, at www.actioncoach.com/nickdougan.  Nick is also a Law Society accredited Lexcel Consultant, applying coaching and consultancy skills to help solicitors and other professional service firms achieve both higher profits and an excellent working environment; read more about that work at www.nickdougan.com .

Nick Dougan, a business coach based in Sevenoaks, West Kent, reviews one of the ActionCOACH system books on teams and leadership, Instant Team Building. 

The Instant Series by Brad Sugars, published by McGraw Hill and available from Amazon, makes many of ActionCOACH’s core ideas available in the public domain.  ActionCOACH believes in a spirit of abundance, and its willingness to share much of its systems in this way gave me a great deal of confidence about those system when I decided to join the network, as it should also give confidence to potential clients.  I’ve met independent business coaches who use these books with their clients and who rave about them!  (Of course, we have a great deal more material in the system that we coaches can make available to our clients when it’s appropriate!) 

The Instant Series books comprise system manuals, written in a language to which almost all business owners can relate.  I’ve read for an MBA, and let me say this:  Doing an MBA, or reading academic business textbooks, is generally not going to help the small business owner improve their business in the near future, even if they have the time and inclination to read them. 

The book is divided into seven main subject areas:

In Vision, Mission and Culture, the first chapter, Brad Sugars explains the importance of these factors in attracting and motivating yourself, and your staff.  ActionCOACH’s own ones are presented as an example. 

The second chapter looks at the value of DiSC psychometric profiling when it comes to understanding what makes people tick as an aid to one to one communications, team leadership and selection.  He also dips into Living Styles, based on Thomas Harris’ work “I’m OK, You’re OK”.

 Chapter 3 explains the “Six Keys to a Winning Team”, a core part of the Action system.  The keys – Strong Leadership, Common Goal, Rules of the Game, Action Plan, Support Risk Taking and 100% Involvement & Inclusion – are explained, and a number of supporting concepts are covered along the way. 

Sugars then explores how one goes about creating an environment in which people will enjoy working and be able to give of their best, including the “WIFLE” team meeting. 

Systems are mentioned briefly in Chapter 5 – an extract from ideas covered in more detail in Instant Systems – before Chapter 6 deals with recruitment.  I’d used group recruitment and selection before coming across Action’s approach to it, and while the “Four Hour Recruitment Format” will not work for all types of role, I have seen clients achieve great improvements to their selection success rate by using it – and spend significantly less time on the process too. 

In Part 7 a number of beliefs are challenged and some new models for thinking are presented, including the concepts of “above and below the line” to challenge one’s own and others’ commitment, the Reticular Activating System or RAS as a means of personal target setting, and a number of visualisation techniques.

The final section of the book is entitled “Synergy”.  Synergy is the fifth of the Six Steps, which are explained in another of this series of books, The Business Coach, and comes after Team, which was Step 4.  In order to explain what he means by synergy in the business context, Brad gives two case studies illustrating how the application of ActionCOACH systems can make a real impact on business performance.

Instant Team Building is a short book the core is 120 pages – so it’s easy to read.  It’s fair to say that whole books could have been written about each of the sections, and it does not go into great detail – it’s about overall principles. 

If you are a business owner or manager and you’d like your team to work better for you – and to enjoy themselves more at the same time – then this is a book that you should read.  You might then decide to talk to an Action business coach – you may well qualify for a complimentary coaching session – to help you apply these principles effectively in your business.

 By the way – I read business books extensively, and if you are interested you can read other books that he has reviewed on Amazon.  I haven’t reviewed the Instant Series there because, as an Action Coach, I am deemed to have a vested interest in the books – but if you’ve worked with a coach and found this book helpful, why don’t you write a review?  It’s a great way, as we say, of “locking-in the learnings”.

Nick Dougan is an Action Coach business coach based in Sevenoaks, Kent, and working around the South East of England.  He aims to coach a thousand businesses to achieve higher profitability, smoother running operations, and to build businesses than “work without you”, the business owner.  If you’re looking for coaching, consultancy, business advice or management training, give him a call. 

Nick Dougan, a business coach based in Sevenoaks, Kent and a world citizen, considers the business of making money, with a particular focus on green opportunities. 

Sometimes I meet business people who have a great idea and a clear plan of action.  They’ve seen the future, and they’ve seen how they are going to cater for a particular need that that future will bring.  They’re focussed, fired up and ready to bet the farm on it…

More often than not, however, when I first speak to people about business, they are not at that point.  They find it difficult to differentiate what they are doing from the competition.  They can’t answer the question: “So why should I choose you, what do you do that’s different to your competitor?”  And if they can’t answer that for themselves, what effect does that have on their potential customers? On the number of people who respond to their marketing?  On their sales conversion rate?   People talk about wanting to start businesses, but they don’t have a passion for any particular one.  I can empathise with that… for years I didn’t have a “brilliant idea”, and I thought that without one I couldn’t succeed.

The good news is, you don’t need the great idea like that.  In ActionCOACH we talk about “blinding flashes of the obvious”, the “light-bulb” moment, but in fact you don’t need to be a Thomas Edison and want to create a company around your own technological innovation or anything so completely different as that.  In many cases, in fact, as Michael Gerber tells us in “The E-Myth”, being a technician can get in the way of being an effective manager or entrepreneur.  As we say in ActionCOACH, don’t think of being in the business of printing, plumbing or patenting, think of yourself as being in the business of making a profit.  The sector doesn’t really matter - and too much passion for a particular area may get in the way of making those profits. 

I was reminded of this when talking to a new client recently and a few thoughts came together. 

He has a company that has grown rapidly offering high quality air conditioning systems, mainly in office environments.  He also installs air source heat pumps - a great way of getting both aircon and heating in an energy efficient way.  He’s not, I think, an “environmental crusader”, but he is aware that energy efficiency is important to many people for many different reasons, not least of all that it can save money.

This client’s also very well read on business matters, and brought up the idea of “Blue Ocean Strategy” (a book by Kim and Mauborgne). Now I like to think of Kim and Mauborgne’s idea of creating “uncontested market space and making the competition irrelevant” as being like creating the ultimate Unique Selling Proposition or USP.  Could, I wonder, the promotion of this “green” side of the business be used to create some “uncontested” space for his company?

That took me on to thinking about another book that I read recently, “Green Growth, Green Profit“, by strategy consultants RolandBerger.  It’s a great overview of the current state of green technologies and services.  As a Brit I was a little disappointed that the “regional spotlight” did not include a mention of the UK, but that aside (and maybe it’s because we are not as innovative here as others) it’ll get you up to speed on some of the significant, practical progress that’s being made around the world.  It’s a level headed assessment of the development of how green technology is creating new business opportunities - the opportunities for making profits. 

So how did these thoughts come together?  Well, for one thing, they reminded me that when you’re searching for a great new business idea, you shouldn’t do this in isolation.  I don’t agree with Kim and Maubornge when they go as far as to say that they don’t believe in studying the competition.  You may want to leave them behind, but you need to know what they’re up to as well!  You need to know what other business people are doing, and the more knowledge you expose yourself to the better. 

As for my new client, there’s almost certainly a green angle to the business that you’re currently in, or a new business that you could start by tailoring an established service for those looking for environmental benefits.   Green Growth, Green Profit has been written about companies with tens if not hundreds of millions of pounds, dollars or euros of capital to invest.  Those are not the kind of companies that I target as clients - small is beautiful! - but read this book and I guarantee you that - if you have an enquiring and imaginative business mind - that you will see some green opportunities for you.  And that includes the green of the notional pound note!

Nick Dougan is a business coach, advisor and management consultant, based in Sevenoaks in Kent and working with companies and firms throughout the south east of England.   He also reads and reviews many business books on Amazon.co.uk, seeking to write succinct summaries of what they have to offer business owners.  Feel free to read them and ask if you need more information to decide whether a particular book will help you solve your business challenges.

As part of my work as a business coach and business advisor based in Sevenoaks in Kent, England, I like to read extensively on business management.  I’ve just finished “China’s Management Revolution: Spirit, Land, Energy” by Charles-Edouard Bouee, President of Munich-based strategy consultancy RolandBerger’s Asian operation.  In it, Bouee identifies the emergence of a new, distinctively Chinese management style.  The financial crisis of 2007-2008, he says, marked the end of the “American experiment” of applying American business school thinking to the development of private enterprise in China, a process that had started in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping set the country on the road to modernisation.  No longer is the Western model seen as superior, now Chinese entrepreneurs are developing a new style of business management, built on their long cultural and mercantile traditions.

One part of this book got my particular interest as a Business Coach.  He references the work of HBS professors Datar, Garvin and Cullen, who in their critique of American business schools, “Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads” suggest that management can be developed into three components: knowing, doing and being.  MBA (the Master of Business Administration post-graduate degree) training, they suggested, emphasises the “knowing” at the expense of the practical complications of “doing” and almost entirely at the expense of “being”.  Based on my own experience of a British business school, it’s a fair criticism.  The emerging and distinctive Chinese style of management, Bouee argues, emphasises “being” a good leader and manager, and of “doing” the right things, while de-emphasising the importance of “knowing” too much. Knowing, he says, in the sense of picking up management techniques, is something that Chinese managers and entrepreneurs do “on the run”, as and when it seems relevant.

This makes enormous sense to me.  In ActionCOACH we have a model that we call BE, DO, HAVE.  One way of looking at this is to say that if you want to HAVE what you want to have, you have to DO those things that will get you them.  But if you want to DO those things, effectively, consistently, in sufficient quantity and with sufficient passion to make a change, you have to BE the right person.  That may require some people to change who they are, and that’s one place where a coach can really help.  But the point is that you have to get started on the DOING, and DO a lot of it. You only need to KNOW enough to get started - so don’t go to Harvard and get an MBA, rather, set up a business, read practical business books and find a business coach who can help you focus in on the knowledge you need to take action.   

So, perhaps the Chinese entrepreneur is a better model for the small businessman who is intent on growing his or her business than the Harvard-trained leader of a massive American - or British - corporation? 

Bouee also has some great insights into the Chinese approach to vision, strategy and business tactics, and I’ll develop those later.  Watch this space.

Nick Dougan is an ActionCOACH Business Coach and Consultant, based in Sevenoaks and advising business owners around Kent how to increase their profits, manage time more effectively and to develop highly effective teams.

We are always being told that the rate of change is faster than it has ever been, and you’ll all be familiar with sayings like “Change is the only constant”.  Though there may be some oases of calm from time to time, in many areas of life things probably are changing faster than they have been, especially where driven by technological changes.  Just think: it took a couple of hundred years for the shop to become the predominant means for businesses to sell to almost all consumers, displacing the market for the masses and the personal seller/delivery for the more well-to-do.  We can only wonder whether the internet might undo that development in less than a generation.

But what do we do if we want to make changes?  What do we do if we want to change the way people we lead work – but they don’t want to?  What do we do if the people we want to sell something to are reluctant to change their current supplier?  And what about changing ourselves?  Are those situations similar?

In ActionCOACH we have what we call the “formula for change” which provides a useful way of analysing the likelihood of you being able to effect change, and hints as to what you have to do to make that happen.  You can apply it when you are getting your team to change the way they do something and you can also apply it in a sales situation.  The formula is:

(D x V) + FS > R

Where:

D = Dissatisfaction

V = Vision

FS = “First Steps” and

R = Resistance to Change

So, to get change started, the term on the left, (D x V) + FS, has to add up to more than R, Resistance to Change.  Recognise that people’s resistance to change is at least in part, perhaps very substantially, for emotional reasons.  Many people just don’t like change.  (If you know about DiSC profiling – you may use it for recruitment or as part of your appraisal process) you will recollect that High “S” (Steadiness) people don’t like change at all.  High S is the most common profile in the general population in the UK – though much less so in those who own and manage businesses!) 

So even where people recognise logically that there is a need for change they may resist it emotionally.  They may prefer “the devil they know”.  They may suspect, even invent, that there are ulterior motives among those promoting change.  They may fear that the changes will leave them feeling relatively worse off. 

So, the key to achieving change starts with maximising the value of D x V.  What does that mean?  First, you need to make people aware of their dissatisfaction.  What is wrong with the current situation?  Why are they accepting the less than perfect situation that exists today?  Why do they continue to use a suppler that they don’t rate highly?  To get people to change you also need to help them develop a positive vision of how things might be in the future.  Depending on the situation, you may have to paint the picture of better working conditions, problems overcome, higher profits, dreams being achieved.  Very often helping people to see a vision of how things may be better is the key to developing the dissatisfaction in the first place.  They may say that they are content, but how do they feel when they realise that another individual or organisation is doing so much better than they are?  Recognise that just as much resistance to change is emotional at its heart, so is the greater part of vision and dissatisfaction.

What is the significance of the (D x V) term being a multiplication?  Well, first of all, it means that if either V or D is zero, the value of the whole term is zero.  How so?  Well, if someone is immensely dissatisfied, but cannot see anyway of things becoming better, then they just accept the situation – like a maltreated animal, they may know no better than just to put up with it.  On the other hand, if people have great vision, but are absolutely happy where they are, the vision remains an idle dream – why should they bother to pursue a dream if they are happy where they are now?

Without pretending that this is a rigorous piece of mathematics, consider also that if D and V are both built up to a reasonable amount, this is likely to lead to a higher result than if they are in imbalance.  If D = 2 and V = 8, D x V = 16; if both factors are 5, however, the result is 25.

What are First Steps?  First steps are whatever you can do to making the change easier.  In sales it might be about making it easy for the prospect to buy, to make the changeover from the previous supplier to you as easy as possible, to offer additional services to make it worth the client’s time. 

A great deal of conventional change management thinking seems to be limited to this area.  Finding a champion, briefings, training, goal setting, ultimately, getting rid of those who won’t change – you name it, it can all help.  But recognise that it may be a great deal easier to start with people’s emotional needs by building dissatisfaction with where you are now, and a vision of where things might be in the future, before getting stuck into the “tactics” of change management. 

How many failed change management programmes – or sales – can you think of?  How well did they address the emotional issues of vision and dissatisfaction?  Was that where they went wrong? 

Oh – and how often have you tried to change yourself, whether it was a New Year’s resolution, a decision to lose weight or get fit, a personal development course.  Were you really committed to making the change, or was it just a passing fancy?  Did you ground your desire for change in a clear vision of what it was you wanted to be, and did you develop a sense of dissatisfaction with where you were?  Did you revisit, repeat and reinforce your vision.  If you did, chances are you made the change and if you didn’t…what happened?

Are you looking for people who will really help your business out-perform the competition.  If you are, and we suggest that you do, then what do you look for?

A six-cylinder engine is powerful enough for most purposes, but is that really high performance?  Not compared to the 16 cylinders of a Bugatti Veyron or a huge truck.  What is the human equivalent of that?

Most employers just look, at best, for 6 cylinder employees.  3 cylinders are for the body – someone who turns up, occupies the seat, covers the job description.  The next 3 cylinders are for the mind.  Mind encompasses education, experience and training – all those things that are proudly stated on CVs.  But how often have you recruited someone who seemed to have the right background, experience and educational levels, and then found that they didn’t really rise to the challenge?

The missing ten cylinders come from heart and spirit.  The five cylinders of heart are about commitment and emotional involvement with a role.  The five cylinders of spirit are about vision, inspiration and having a “higher purpose”. 

What are the implications of looking at human performance this way? 

Firstly, at 10/16 cylinders, heart and spirit are more important than mind and body.  It follows that selecting people should be more about finding the right attitude than training and experience.  You can train new skills relatively easily, but it is very difficult to correct the wrong attitude.  But too many employers define the necessary training and experience of desirable candidates that they narrow the field of selection unnecessarily.  They end up selecting the least bad of a small pool of candidates while they overlook people who, with six months in the new job, might have far surpassed the more experienced candidates. 

Secondly, while you can find people with heart and spirit if you look for it, you won’t retain those valuable qualities if you don’t respect and nurture them.  People will switch off, and retain those qualities for friends and family, or they’ll just leave you.  Such people need to be led, not just managed.  They need to find a higher purpose at work than just turning up for the pay, whatever that might be.  Some organisations find it easy to offer the higher purpose that helps people unleash all 16 cylinders – in different ways social services, the NHS and the caring professions, teaching, the military and social enterprises can do it.  It is more of a challenge for profit making enterprises, but it’s not impossible.  Anita Roddick of The Body Shop got to employ talented people for less than their market salaries because they believed in what she was doing.  Arguably so too does Richard Branson, although the spirit of the Virgin group is very different.  But even having a vision about being the best electrical wholesaler in Gillingham and then in SE England may give staff enough to get engaged with.  The popularity of Corporate Social Responsibility is often linked to this attempt to create something more than a return to shareholders.

Thirdly, be very clear that leadership is a 16 cylinder activity, while management may just be a 6 cylinder one.  Only 16 cylinder people make great leaders.

Fourthly, what does the employment market value the most?  It usually values the mind element the most, even though mind – education, qualifications, sector experience.  So if you recruit people with the right heart and spirit, treat them right and have systems in place to deal with any initial lack of experience, they may actually cost you lower salaries. 

Finally, it is not impossible to train heart and spirit.  Organisations that acknowledge their importance, who want team members to bring emotional commitment, passion and a sense of real responsibility to the job and use it positively, who cherish and acknowledge those qualities and which don’t only reward knowledge, logic and technical skills, will develop the heart and spirit of those working for them.  But it has to be genuine or it is likely to be counter-productive – how many people have you met who are working on organisations that espouse high ideals but who are entirely disillusioned by their own reality? 

Who are the 16 Cylinder people in your organisation?  For that matter, how many cylinders are you firing on yourself?

How do you find and develop these people?  Can you develop a recruitment process that allows existing team members to show their own emotional commitment to their jobs?  Can you use behavioural profiling or even emotional intelligence analysis better to understand those areas?  Can you define what 16 cylinder performance looks like in someone’s job description and contract so that you?  At ActionCOACH we think you can – but that will be the subject of several future postings.

Benjamin Franklin said “time is money”.  But if he meant “time = money” he was selling himself short, because surely Time > Money: if you spend your money, you can make some more, but once you spend your time, it is gone forever!

And how much time do we have?  Of course, we can never know for sure, but if you are 40 now you have just 25 years until the current, normal retirement age of 65.  That’s 25 years, or 300 months, or 1300 weeks, 6,500 working days, or 52,000 hours if you work a 40 hour week (and take no holidays!).  What are you going to do with your 52,000 hours – how many do you want to spend at work – and to what effect?

There are two broad approaches to time management. 

Efficiency

Can you use my time more efficiently – can you get others to do so?  If it takes an accounts clerk one hour to process 20 invoices, what could we do to get someone to process 40 in the same time?  Systems – and especially technology-based systems – may allow you to do so, and it would be silly not to do so if it can be done.  But too often this approach is something “done “ to people, putting them under great pressure, and if the original task was worth just £10 per hour at best you might make it worth £20 per hour.  This will rarely be the way that business owners and senior management should think – and if they do they may work themselves into an early grave!

Effectiveness

More importantly, ask whether you are using your time effectively.  In a way, we cannot manage time.  If I remember my physics correctly time is a constant – unless we approach the speed of light, and I’m not sure that that is a yet a practical time management technique!  But we can manage what we do with it, and a great way to do that is to consider the value of what we do with that time.  Make that a financial ratio, consider - what do you want our hourly rate to be?  How much do you want to earn in a year – or how much value do you want to bring your organisation?  Divide that by the number of hours you wish to work, and that’s your desired hourly rate. 

Is the value of any of the hours you work less than your desired hourly rate?  A question I often ask clients is: “What would you have to pay someone to do the 25% of your tasks that have the lowest hourly rate – or the least value?”  And what I usually say after that is: “So why are you doing that?”  Clearly for each hour that you work that is worth less than your hourly rate you have to (a) work another hour with correspondingly greater value, (b) you have to work more hours, or (c) you have to accept that you will not get the income or increase in value that you want. 

Now ask yourself: what was the “hourly rate” of each of the hours I worked in the last week or month.  What, then, was the hourly rate of the bottom 25% of those hours?  If it is lower than your desired average rate, could you employ someone to do those tasks for you and so to free you up to do more higher-value activities?

How many tasks do you have which are actually quite low value but where only you, or other senior people, know how to do them?  Or jealously guard them for a variety of reasons – confidentiality, perhaps, or because they are enjoyable, or because you’ve always done it and you haven’t got round to training someone else to do it.

There are a number of exercises that you can do to focus your mind on this issue.  One of them we call the time target:

Let’s have a bit of interaction – apart from overcoming the graphical limitations of a blog, it will help you remember this.  Draw a target with a bullseye and three concentric rings.  The outer ring is for those tasks that are neither urgent nor important, the next one for those that are urgent but not important, the inner ring for urgent and important activities and the bullseye is for those tasks that are important – but not urgent.  

In the outer ring we have those tasks, events and activities that are neither urgent, nor important – not important for you to do, anyway.  Do you have your email on receive all of the time, and do you tend to respond to every incoming email, important or not?  These are distractions.  Senior people tend not to spend too much time in this area – well, except for that email one, maybe – but where are your staff?

In the urgent but not important category we have those actions that are not really important, but which are urgent.  If you are ever going to do them, you have to do them now.  Unmanaged interruptions often come into this category.  These are the activities that mean you leave work thinking that you have been very busy, but, when you review the day, you realise that you haven’t really added anything of value.  We call this delusion – you delude yourself that by doing these things you are working effectively.

Busy, effective people in the middle ranks of an organisation will expect to spend much of their time in the Urgent & Important Category, dealing with demand as it arises.  Some people’s jobs will be all about this type of work.

But in any organisation, some people, usually the most senior, should make sure that they spend at least some of their time “in the zone”, working on the most important tasks.  Strategic planning, developing key relationships both within and outside the organisation, training and developing people, developing and educating yourself, listening to clients and scanning the environment for new opportunities, all come within this category.  Indeed, these are activities that we should devote some time to for ourselves, irrespective of what job we hold or our seniority in an organisation.

So what can you do to identify where your time is going, and maximise the time you are creating real value?  Why not comment on the blog?  Or give me a call if there’s something that you’d like to discuss further.

The idea of the USP or “Unique Selling Proposition” has been around since the 1960s.  The original definition stressed the need for a single distinctive benefit to consumers from choosing your product, but more recent thinking, like ActionCOACH’s, recognises that a USP may be achieved by offering customers a distinctive mix of benefits.  Indeed, several contemporary marketers have adopted expressions, e.g. Differential Advantage, for a similar concept, but in ActionCOACH we prefer simply to refer to USP because it so widely understood, at least in outline.

So, how do you create a USP?  Start by defining your target market segment.  The more precisely you can differentiate a market, the more accurately you can identify a combination of benefits that will give your product or service a unique appeal.  Look at what competitors are offering them and see if there are any gaps for you to exploit.  Does your company have strengths and resources that allow you to offer that combination of benefits?  Think outside the box!  Brainstorm with your teams and see what you can come up with.

Many businesses think that they have found uniqueness when they identify higher quality or attentive service.  A good test of a draft USP like that is to ask the question: “Would one of my competitors take the opposite approach”? No one claims to offer low quality or inattentive, impersonal service, so such a statement is at best a weak part of a USP. 

The USP concept arose when considering the success of nationwide marketing campaigns for top selling branded products, and small companies serving a local market may think that it’s just not for them.  My experience suggests, however, that you can always find a USP if you look hard enough, and if that means doing things a little differently, embrace the change!  Don’t forget that as a smaller business you are much better able to offer one type of uniqueness than the big corporate – the uniqueness of dealing with individuals, real human faces, that they know, like and trust.  Are you doing everything you can to build on that strength?

In ActionCOACH we have found that one type of benefit that can reinforce an otherwise weak USP, or further strengthen a good one, is a guarantee.  We are familiar with various standard guarantees, often passed down from the manufacturers.  There’s no harm reinforcing your message with such guarantees, or indeed those imposed by statute or regulatory bodies, especially if your competitors are not doing so.  But what really makes the difference is to offer your own guarantee, designed to address the fears and frustrations of your target market.  What do they worry about when they buy from you, and what can you do to allay those concerns?  If you can find something, and incorporate it in your marketing message, how much more likely is it that a prospect will respond, and, when you’ve explained it further, decide to buy from you?

So, to choose a simple example – if you’re a plumber, don’t just guarantee that the pipes won’t leak, as that much is going to be assumed.  But if your client is most concerned about plumbers always arriving late or making a mess in their house, can you come up with (commercially realistic) guarantees about that? 

Nick Dougan

ActionCOACH Business Coach