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James Bennett

The art of conversation

The art of conversation 150 150 Cypher

The Art of Conversation

It is undeniable that throughout 2020 and 2021, most business conversations have happened over a screen of some sort. Unless you live under as rock, everyone is now aware of Zoom, TEAMS and Google Hangouts.

It has been interesting so see how quickly we have adopted these video conferencing platforms as the norm and, as Alan and I discussed it will be interesting to see how this practice evolves and how quickly elements of face to face meetings return later this summer.

Zoom has very quickly followed Google, Skype and Facebook, where the name of an application has become synonymous with the action of using it. But has this adoption been to the detriment of the art of conversation?

Actually, I think not!

What I noticed most about the world of virtual meetings was that firstly, I was having a lot more of them than I ever could face to face but, secondly they ran to time a lot more and I was getting a lot more action points from them. In short, my day is now more structured and I feel a lot more productive.

On the Time Management Paradox pod, we discussed that doing more of what drove a business forward and wasting less time on unnecessary and unregulated meetings was definitely a positive.

Zoomed Out
Overall, while I find the whole in, out, done, element of Zoom meetings really positive, I’ve also found them fundamentally more draining than in-person meetings. After a face-to-face meeting I would write up my notes for the client or the team and during that time I would decompress my brain. Now meetings are stacked back-to back, I decompress in one go at the end of the day, but by then my brain has gone, I am Zoomed out. I see the same impact on clients.

It could be the screen, it could be the volume, or that Zoom meetings are punchier, but I think everyone suffers serious Zoom fatigue from a day of video meetings. Alan likens it to a poker player after a long game. When we listen, properly, without the distractions of a coffee shop or a busy office, we are concentrating so much harder and our investment is deeper, which after 30 seconds of niceties at the start could last for anything up to a few hours.

It’s been interesting to see how quickly we have all adopted this technology and we discussed whether, in a Covid-free world, we would still conduct the majority of our conversations digitally or if ‘in person’ meetings would creep back in to our lives once we were able. For me the jury is still out. There may be industry biases, either way, and of course personal preferences will make a difference and not just because of on-going health fears. Some businesses – like Alan’s -thrive in this virtual world.

Time to thrive
As a business coach, Alan is a huge fan of virtual meetings. He finds it easier to help clients create the change they’re looking for during a series of Zoom meetings because he feels there is a deeper, longer investment in the conversations he has. Specifically, Zoom allows his clients to really focus on their objectives and desired outcomes.  Of course, this could be part of his evolution as a coach- as solution providers we all need to get better at this -but the focus provided by a Zoom meeting means that he gets to root causes, discovers options and identifies possible actions far quicker than when in person. The compound effect of carrying this on to the next coaching conversation means that the progress and the rate of change increases – dare I say it exponentially, and as business owners isn’t that what we are all looking for!?

I think this demonstrates that it’s not the fact that you’re sat next to someone that creates a worthwhile conversation. It’s the type of conversation you have, the investment you make it in it and the genuine focus on the outputs you generate. Whether you’re in the room or 300 miles away, nothing’s different. So I think now that people are used to it, it’s going to take time before we go back to how we were, and honestly we may never go all the way back.

Being productive was a key element for our Managing the Time Paradox podcast and with no lengthy commutes, a timely start and finish time means everyone gets more time back, but the bigger opportunity is that no-one is geographically barred from doing work with anybody else. If a series of Zoom calls is now the way we serve clients, then we can deliver this service wherever they are, whether that’s Manchester, Northern Ireland, San Francisco, Glasgow or Oxford, it makes no difference.

It will also be interesting to see what people’s new tolerance for drive time to a meeting is. Seriously, would you now drive for more than 30 minutes, if you could hop on a Zoom call instead?

The power of emotion
In any long-term business relationship, there is an undeniable human connection and emotional connection. It is an element of in person meetings one might expect to lose in a virtual space, but I think actually the opposite has been true. Conducting meetings with people at home, in their safe space, particularly during lockdowns 1.0 and 2.0 we have seen some serious emotions and emotional shifts, including anger and tears which demonstrated the level of investment being made by people in the meeting. So the accusation that you cannot get that level of emotion on a virtual call is simply untrue.

Better in person
That’s not to say that sometimes you feel you just need to be in the room. We have all seen the now infamous parish council Zoom meeting and the fabulous Jackie Weaver who had all the authority in the world. I wonder if that meeting was held face-to-face wherever half the people that we’re kicking off, shouting at her would have the balls to have done that. Conversely, the ease with which someone can be effectively thrown out of the meeting probably also had an influence on certain actions. My thoughts are that how dysfunctional must the meetings be in the first place to get to that point?

And we have all sat through Zoom meetings, professionally and personally, where people are muted, cameras don’t work, Wi-Fi is slow, or someone is sat too close to a camera so you only see half of their head. Thankfully that seems to be reserved for a certain age group, but in general of the thousands of meetings we have attended in the last 18 months, very few could have been better in person.

Every good conversation is 50% speaking, 50% listening.
I think we demonstrated on the Art of Conversation podcast that we are definitely pro-virtual conversations, but there is still a balance to find. We want to meet people, absolutely, but in this new world, the art of conversation has evolved, not disappeared. The paradigm has shifted; the Genie is out of the bottle but without loss of conversational impact.

Now I think there’s a linear relationship between the number of people on a Zoom meeting and the impact it can have. As you follow the curve of the imaginary graph, as the meeting attendees do up actually it is to the detriment of the meeting. But the business meeting with say one to five people is the sweet spot.

In summary, we talked a lot about the art of conversation, 2021 style. Alan and I dived in to what is different about a virtual conversation versus an in person one and I think we raised a number of positives for this new way of working.

Conversations are different now, but not in a bad way. If video calls enable you to structure your day better, have a greater number of more productive meetings, with clear outputs, if you are able to dive in, listen better, then your conversations are going to be better. It doesn’t matter whether they’re virtual or whether they’re in face-to-face.

New editions of the Mind Your Business Podcast appear every Friday. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your choice of Pod provider to have it delivered straight to your device.)​

The Time Management Paradox

The Time Management Paradox 150 150 Cypher

The Time Management Paradox

Full disclosure Alan and I weren’t able to stick to time on this Mind Your Business podcast!

Did you know that the average human being lives for around 4000 weeks, which equates to about 77 years.  Measuring life in weeks is a sobering thought.  Obviously there are even less weeks spent building up a business so to make the most of our time, we need to use it effectively.

Hands up, how many of us have attended a time management course? I know I have. We all want to get the most out of our time and many of us feel we are failing in this regard. As business owners-or frankly just adults – we are all busy. But how busy and does our busyness bring us the rewards we want?

It sounds like a Star Trek episode, but the title of this podcast, The Time Management Paradox is actually a philosophy of Alan’s that suggests we can’t manage time, time manages us. Rather you can partner with time and therefore, you can use it more effectively.

Understand your life roles
Step one to mastering time is to understand all the factors in your life and how they fit into four distinct roles. We describe them on the podcast as Professional, Personal, Family and Community.  They broadly cover work, family, exercise and any other activities you undertake.

Let’s be generous and say we sleep for eight hours, so we are awake for 16. Create your own pie chart and decide what percentage of your time you commit to each of these roles. Every day is different so it is unlikely to be four 25% splits. Now ask yourself are you happy with the result?

On the Podcast, I gave the example of when in corporate life I would always try to be home before five o’clock to bath my daughter. In general I managed it more often than not, but a lot of the time, while she was in the bath, I would be on my phone to the office or to a client. In this example my daughter didn’t have a fully present dad, the client wasn’t getting my full professional attention and I felt a lot of stress and anxiety as I was trying to do at least two things- and doing them both badly.

To manage time, we need to be present. To do this we need to understand which role we are playing and commit wholeheartedly to that role.  It is better to do something well for 30 minutes than do it half-ar$ed for two hours.

Create parameters for your work life balance
Putting in parameters, around your day or blocking out key times, doesn’t give you more time but it gives you clear markers as to when you are playing a certain role and when it stops to make time for  another role.

If you work in a team then they need to be on the same page. They need to understand that it is ok not to answer an email at eight o’clock at night. You can’t switch your email off 5.30pm but expect them to keep theirs on all night. Creating parameters is equally important when we are working from home. We have all seen children creep into Zoom meetings or had home schooling wreck a planning day. If you were in the office that wouldn’t happen  but so many of us are –and maybe always will be- working from home, so setting clear expectations with our family stakeholders is as important as doing so with colleagues, clients and employers.

Being productive
Let’s say you work 830 to 530 every weekday to free up evenings and weekends.  In those nine hours, whether you work alone or as part of a team you want to be as productive as you can. As Alan says, you want to play all out and do the high impact stuff.  In his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey uses the concept of focusing on the ‘Big Rocks’ over the ‘Grit’.

I always think that a barrier to real productivity is the two or three jobs that a business owner won’t let go of. We all have them, mine is the bookkeeping for Cypher. I am probably the most expensive bookkeeper in the country.  In truth I have no business doing it and there will be a 100 tasks being done by business owners up and down the country that if they sat back and put an actual value on their time, and looked where they were spending it they wouldn’t do those jobs.

Prioritise
Here’s a useless bit of trivia: The word “priority” is derived from the Latin word prioritas (“fact or condition of being prior”), the word meant “the most important thing”, the “prior” thing or the thing with precedence.  When it was first coined, the word “priority” had no plural.  You could only have one priority.

At Cypher we use a diary system so we are able to set clear parameters and clear priorities for our time. We need to build in a level of flexibility as a degree of our work is responsive to client’s needs. We have set team times, meeting times, lunch breaks and triage times throughout the week to ensure we can focus on what’s important. Alan uses a simpler task list which is reviewed each day in order to set and achieve clear priorities. Whatever your method, it shouldn’t just focus on work-based tasks, include personal, family or community roles in your priority planning.

Lose your email
I could spend an entire Podcast episode and blog talking about the virtues of taking email off your phone. At Cypher a colleague manages all of our external emails and internally we use Slack to communicate. This means that when we are getting our heads down to prioritise a piece of work, we aren’t distracted by the ‘ping’ of a new message. it is life changing, believe me.

Summary
Time management is a paradox. Instead we should focus on partnering with time. We need to value it, especially as we can measure it in weeks, to try and make the most of the time we have for all of our important roles. The good news is that there are simple steps we can all take and behaviours we can  adapt to make sure we are present in any role long enough to achieve our priorities, whatever they are and make the most of the time we have left.

Ways to manage the time paradox

  1. Understand your roles – Professional, Personal, Family, community
  2. Be present for the amount of time you need to spend in a role to do it effectively
  3. Manage your priorities- be clear on what you want to achieve for the day, week year
  4. Always do the most important things that bring the most value to the business
  5. Cut-out the time stealing jobs and delegate them to someone else
  6. Say no more often

Take email off your phone

New editions of the Mind Your Business Podcast appear every Friday. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your choice of Pod provider to have it delivered straight to your device.)​

The Brilliance of Resilience

The Brilliance of Resilience 150 150 Cypher

The Brilliance of Resilience

Resilience is a term we have heard a lot over the last 12 months. It has become somewhat of a buzzword during lockdown. It is also a subject very close to Alan’s heart. He feels that if we can understand how to access it and use it properly, it can be a very powerful trait both personally and professionally

There are two definitions of the term resilience that I like. One comes from an engineering context and describes resilience as the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape. Another definition, perhaps more relevant to the current context is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.  Well, we have all had a few of those!

We are facing challenges on many fronts; home schooling, furlough, social distancing, remote working and endless Zoom calls, which can all nibble away at our resilience. Alan and I wanted to use the Mind Your Business Podcast to provide some hints and tips to help business leaders, owners and entrepreneurs rebuild their resilience.

We discussed two approaches to resilience; a psychological one and a philosophical one. Alan describes the philosophical approach as a state of mind he adopts each morning as he visualises his day ahead. He connects with the emotions he needs to take positive steps forward, regardless of the challenges he may encounter in that day.

In his book, the Miracle Morning, Hal Elrod describes the empowering effect of visualisation. He introduces visualisation as way to generate positive results in your outer world by using your imagination to create mental pictures of specific behaviours needed to lead to desired outcomes occurring in your life.

For him, visualisation is the process of imagining exactly what you want to achieve and then mentally rehearsing what steps you need to take to make it a reality. Elrod suggests that this turbocharges the programming of your subconscious mind for success. All before breakfast!

Alan and I agreed that when you visualise your goals daily, you align your thoughts and feelings with your vision, which makes it easier to maintain the motivation you need to keep taking the necessary actions to achieve those goals. It can also be a powerful tool to overcome any self-limiting habits such as procrastination or self-doubt.

Face the two imposters
I have tried to add my own philosophical viewpoint to this discussion. If resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, then a way to achieve resilience is to use every disaster as a learning experience.  In other words, if you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same, then you will have resilience my son!

My point is that when we experience even the worst failures, if, when the dust settles, we can make them positive learning opportunities we will become better and stronger for it. As a business owner seeing barriers as challenges can help develop a mindset that allows us to approach life in a far more positive frame of mind. This in itself helps to create inbuilt resilience.

Alan and I discussed the difference between introspection, i.e. looking for the learning opportunities in any given circumstance and rumination, which is in effect just a past version of worrying. We agree that there is a clear negative correlation between worry and resilience. Worrying-about past or present- effectively saps your inner strength and takes your resilience away.

Alan and I have talked much- see previous blogs- about the power of getting clarity over issues as a way of defeating worry. Worry often leads to writing a horror story for our businesses. Viewing what is worrying us in glorious technicolour can often expose it as a lie and upgrading a worry to a challenge allows us to take some more positive action.

Even using language such as ‘here is my challenge and I am looking for ways to solve it’, feels more empowering that ‘here is something I am worried about and it keeps me awake at night’.

Grow your Circle of Influence
In his book ‘The 7 habits of highly effective people’, Stephen Covey refers to two concentric circles. The inner circle is called the ‘Circle of Influence’ and the outer circle is called the ‘Circle of Concern’. What he advocates is focusing on your inner Circle of Influence and what you can control. For example, how you can improve, how you can get better at what you do, how you can make your service better or how you can create client astonishment.

In this way you are expanding your Circle of Influence and as your Circle of Influence expands, by definition, your Circle of Concern diminishes. Growing or expanding your Circle of Influence effectively shrinks your Circle of Concern.

Our final discussion topic was how optimism and pessimism are linked to resilience. I consider myself a born optimist I will always look for solutions, the actions I need to move forward. But there are people out there who are the opposite and consistently let worry become their driving emotion. I’m not a psychologist but I am confident that there are significant benefits of optimism versus pessimism. I suspect optimists are more resilient than pessimists.

Even if we are born as either a pessimist or an optimist and there is a direct genetic link to these traits, I am confident we can we can learn to be more optimistic and therefore more resilient.

For inspiration, I think we should look to our children, specifically pre-teens. They too have coped with many challenges this year but I still see them taking it on the chin and starting each day with optimism and the resilience to make the best of it.

Building Resilience
Like building a muscle, increasing your resilience has many benefits but it requires time and dedication. If you don’t put in the work, it might atrophy. People are conditioned to think of resilience as a personality trait-either you have it or you don’t, but this isn’t necessarily the case. With intention and practice, you can become more resilient, no matter your circumstances.

Top tips for building resilience

  • See everything that goes wrong as an opportunity to learn and be better for it
  • Focus more on your Circle of Influence and less on your Circle of Concern
  • Optimism and pessimism are both learned behaviours and we think there is a direct link between optimism and resilience
  • Visualise your day and choose to be resilient through whatever challenges it presents
  • Get real clarity in issues that worry you to change them into challenges

New editions of the Mind Your Business Podcast appear every Friday. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your choice of Pod provider to have it delivered straight to your device.)​

Completing v Competing

Completing v Competing 150 150 Cypher

Completing v Competing

Business owners will always try to understand who their competitors are, where they are stronger, where they are weaker, what their competitive advantage is. They will conduct SWOT analysis to determine relative strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in the market place.approach.

On the Mind Your Business Podcast, we like to go a bit deeper than that and look at other possibilities. One of these alternative realities is completing rather than competing.

As an entrepreneur starting out, if we spent too long looking at the existing businesses in our industry, perhaps those that are dominant; already have a decent market share, a range of good products- perhaps there’s an Amazon, a great restaurant or a wonderful accountancy firm already in their space- then they might not even get started and a lot of possibility is killed before it has chance to grow.

To avoid this scenario, rather than looking at the world through a competitive lens, why not try and view it through a completing one. There are 79 million people in the UK, all with different needs, meaning there is enough audience to go around. Instead of competing with all of the other established businesses in your sector, consider how your company can add value to what is already going on, how you can make an existing service better, or create something complimentary to what is already being delivered.

Side by side competition is healthy
As an example, if you were opening an Indian restaurant would you go to the town where there are no Indian restaurants or would you go where there are a few open already? A lot of people would go for the monopoly option, but I think a better decision would be to go where there is already a proven market for your product.  As long as your product is distinctively different; maybe it’s in a modern style, a high end location or a tapas offering then you can demonstrate your place in the market, identify where you compete and standout from other restaurants.

When customers consider competing in close proximity they will always do some quick comparisons. Sites like Amazon make that easy for customers by offering these like-for like comparisons on many product pages. The point is twofold; it may not be a decision of ‘EITHER’, ‘OR’ it could be decision of ‘AND’. If you are put side by side and your product does something slightly different or better, then it immediately stands out and the customer hasn’t had to travel that far to find that out!

We see it in retail, FMCG, and the pharma sector, all the time. Go to any supermarket and there are a range of different colours, flavours, price points across the mix completing the offer to the customer.

Completing the offer.
An optician client of mine had five stores. Two were in relatively low-brow neighbourhoods a couple were out of town and he had a flagship outlet on one of Oxford’s hottest shopping streets. Both of the low-brow stores were next door to Specsavers. You would think he would lose 50% of his customers and his spend per head would be considerably lower than the more famous competition, but in fact the volume of footfall he received and the profit margins available on own-brand glasses versus designer brands meant that he made all of his profit from the two low-rent locations. His business model now is to go where Specsavers is. They spend millions on driving market awareness; he simply piggybacks work and scoops up the market they can’t service.

Know your target market
This story demonstrates that there is obviously a great demand for opticians in this town and despite their size, power and brand awareness, Specsavers can’t service the whole market themselves. Finding out what the competition doesn’t do can create a market for new entrants.

But even with this model, it doesn’t have to be seen as a competition. Cypher, for examples, doesn’t support a lot of private client work. If a customer asks us about detailed inheritance planning, we recommend other firms who we know will offer a great service. Conversely if they receive complex ‘Xero’ requests, they know that is our sweet spot and kick things over the fence to us. While we are competing in some areas there is enough to go around, making it a very lucrative completion model.

A central theme for this successful philosophy is to understand who your target market is as well as who it isn’t and be comfortable with that choice.

Co-opertition
Co-opetition is a bit of a buzzword in business. The portmanteau brings together cooperation and competition. Essentially, businesses decide to interact at some level because they have shared interests of reaching a higher value proposition. Samsung’s decision to sell Apple its new Super Retina edge-to-edge OLED screen for the iPhone X is a good example.

Apple has an extremely loyal customer base so are comfortable selling a product that is half Samsung and however much people find out that the whizz-bang tech screen, which is the selling point, is made by Samsung Apple fans don’t really care. if you’re willing to camp out at the Apple store to get the new I-phone, you won’t move, so Apple are comfortable in their own skin, they realise where their limitations are- and how to benefit from a little co-opertition.

The other benefit for Apple is that the money that Samsung make from Apple goes back into R&D which helps the Samsung products improve. Apply helps keep the supply chain healthy and the cumulative marketing efforts ensure the demand for smart products continues to grow.

Another example is in the car industry. Toyota, Peugeot and Citroen all combined to create what Peugeot call the 107. They shared R&D, shared parts, badge it up and market the product differently but have effectively all saved millions in NPD to get the car to market.

Give the customer what they want
There is a shift in power- consumers and clients are more informed, they know they have choice – Amazon has demonstrated that in spades. Rather than fight it, accept it and use it to your advantage.

Sky now includes Netflix and Prime in its packages. Sky know that consumers don’t just want a Sky TV dish, they have other viable options, so to make it easy for the consumer – and to retain a healthy percentage of the market spend Sky enables you to pay your Netflix subscription through your Sky package. It’s why Microsoft gave TEAMs away to compete with Slack.

Summary
In this blog based on a Mind Your Business Podcast episode, Alan and I tried to introduce the idea of completing rather than competing. It’s an alternative philosophy to the binary ‘us v them’ scenario. It is a way of coming to market despite large competition. We tried to demonstrate that some of the biggest companies in the world in the software, automotive and broadcast sectors have become the best of frenemies to make it easier for the consumer to choose both options. They know consumers can choose to go elsewhere, so facilitate their choices rather than block them.

New editions of the Mind Your Business Podcast appear every Friday. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your choice of Pod provider to have it delivered straight to your device.)​

Fail to plan, plan to fail.

Fail to plan, plan to fail. 150 150 Cypher

Fail to plan, plan to fail.

90-day planning session 24th June

 

You know the saying ‘fail to plan, plan to fail’. It’s true. And right now, there isn’t a better time to plan for you the future you want from your business.

Planning is fundamental to the process for knowing where you need to go. Planning helps to clarify your vision, your purpose and highlights whether you have the available skills, time or resources to complete your plan. A lack of a coherent plan often leads to confusion; it makes business owners follow the next shiny thing, which then causes them to deviate from their own plan.

Action Coach David Rivers uses the analogy of a using a Sat Nav to describe the planning process. Business Owners are able to choose their destination, whether that is for this year, next year or in five years, they can press ‘start’ and then Sat Nav plots a route back to their starting point and advises them to turn left, turn right or go straight on, in order to reach the desired destination.

Planning after Covid
Prior to lockdown 1.0 we helped create a number of very robust business plans, then Covid hit and a lot of them were torn up and thrown out!

While the business world has always evolved, Covid-19 has become the accelerator for one of the greatest workplace transformations in generations. How we work, exercise, shop, learn and communicate has changed forever.

Over the last 12 months business owners have seen more rapid change than ever before, which means we are entering another period of uncertainty and 90% of the previous ‘normal’ may now be totally different.

Change is inevitable and the challenge will be to pick a path, create a robust plan and stick to it. A 90-day plan can give you clarity on your goals, what you need to change and highlights what unnecessary distractions you need to filter out to provide a structure for where you want to go.

What’s included in a good plan?
A good plan will help business owners to develop the necessary mindset for setting a clear plan, accepting change where it’s needed and sticking to their original purpose.

A good plan will focus on:

  • Having a clear vision for what business owners want to achieve
  • Identifying whether they have the skills to achieve it
  • Highlight the resource needed for delivering objectives
  • Giving them the motivation for what needs to be done
  • Creating a plan to execute

If you don’t have all of these in place it can lead to a lot of anxiety and frustration.

Your plan should also answer the Have, Do, Be questions. As a business owner what do you want to HAVE from your business? What do you need to DO to get there? And in order to succeed, what sort of person do you need to BE?

“The importance of planning is the process you go through, not the document you end up with”

The process of making a plan allows you to understand what you can influence and what you can’t.  But it can also be a good Kick Up The Ar$e (KUTA) time.

Reality check, you can measure the life you have left in minutes and days! You have limited time to have an impact so even less time to waste procrastinating.

How will you use you time? Planning for the next 90 days can be the blueprint for the next 1-5 years

Remember, the importance of planning is the process you go through, not the document you end up with.

To reserve a place on our 90-day planning workshop contact one of the team today.

How to Become Better Social Animals

How to Become Better Social Animals 150 150 Cypher

How to Become Better Social Animals

For this blog, based on a ‘Mind Your Business Podcast’, Alan and I took a slightly different approach.

I spoke to countless business owners throughout the various lockdowns, who all told me they were using their relative downtime to focus on their social media presence. Ahead of the pod, I Googled ‘top tips for social media use’ and then Alan and I discussed the results, critiquing the advice given based on our own experiences.

Unless you are paying for targeted advertising, access to Social Media is free. It enables the smallest business to compete with global brands. It can reach a large audience and create a direct connection.  Simple, organic content can build a brand and drive sales traffic. In short why wouldn’t you use it?

Here’s what the advice says you should do to make the most of Social Media.

#1 Start with a plan.
Too many businesses have a scatter gun approach to social media. They post sporadically, there’s no topic or theme to what they post and so it becomes a random exercise of effectively shouting in the dark. If you want to break into one of your prospect’s feeds, or show up on their timeline, then your content needs to be relevant, easily understood and demonstrate the positive impact you can have on their business or sector.

A plan brings clarity on what you are trying to do and the effect you are trying to achieve. The great thing about Social Media is that you can access a whole range of metrics to see what is working and what people are engaging with so you can set some SMART goals and objectives.  I would also suggest that before you set future goals you should first review your current position; the number of followers, the level of engagement, the amount of times you post and on what platforms. And understand what your competitors are doing, especially if they are doing it better than you.

In addition, Alan asks clients to measure their motivation to actually do the work. It takes effort to remain consistent and keep posting.

#2 Select a platform that’s right for your business
Not every business will get bang for buck out of every platform.  The basic rule of marketing is ‘be where your customers are. Currently, Cypher does really well across LinkedIn because that’s where the majority of our audience is. If you’re a funeral director or a trade business then maybe Facebook is better. If you are a florist, an artist, or a niche craft business, then Instagram or Pinterest might suit. If you create a lot of video content then TikTok is growing massively. The point is don’t try and be all things to all people. Don’t overstretch or pour too much energy into creating the wrong sort of content or attempt to conqueror a platform that isn’t right for you or importantly your audience.

#3 Build relationships
The clue to mastering Social Media is in the name. If all you do is focus on yourself, post about your business and your achievements, but don’t engage with anyone else’s content, then all you are doing is broadcasting yourself and it can be seen as a very selfish view of the world. Instead, show you’re listening; show you are interested in other people’s thoughts.

The post that has brought me the most direct success was one I made at the start of the first lockdown.  I ranted about the fact that I felt that accountants were letting their clients down by not being available when the business world needed them most. I picked out some direct competitors that I felt were going above and beyond and I tagged them. Obviously, they all thanked me, their client base saw the post too and the likes and shares drove massive engagement.

I wanted to vent but it was genuine and being authentic is important for a Social Media plan too. I was standing up for what I believed, I was happy to play nicely with the competition and although it wasn’t intended as a sales piece it created the right engagements at the time. Now whenever I get a chance to big up someone in my industry, I do it because I feel it always comes back to me.

#4 Focus on quality over quality
The Google top tips state that one strong post a week is better than five mediocre posts. I disagree.

You never know what your audience is thinking at the time they read your posts and you can’t always know what a good post is until after you post it. For your Social Media efforts to work you need to be regularly seen and heard. People need to know what they are going to get if they engage with you. So as long as you’re consistent in your messaging, you can spend time scheduling enough content, of sufficient quality, to be posting throughout the week.

Not long after my rant post, HMRC posted one of my clients possibly the worst letter I have ever seen. I posted that up and got 125,000 views. People liked it, shared it, I got interaction from HMRC and from accountants around the world! I have never seen anything like it. Did we get any work on the back of it- not a jot!  My rant post brought in three clients, my calling out HMRC- nada! So in my view quantity definitely beats quality, but you do need to adhere to a base level of quality and authenticity.

#5 Engage with people
I often annoy myself by just doing the bare minimum to engage. Even if your view is different, you should try and post something. Often the time you get most out of the author or content creator is when you have a different opinion. As long as you can articulate your point in a way that isn’t rude or offensive, then constructive conversations on other people’s profiles can be a great way of stimulating engagement. You can position yourself as an articulate thought leader without hijacking other people’s posts or being aggressive.

This wasn’t a Social Media masterclass; rather this was a real-life critique of suggested social media best practice. In summary, here are mine and Alan’s top tips;

  • Have a plan, start with where you are now, and set clear goals so you know you have achieved them.
  • Pick a platform, and be social, it’s called a social network, use it to build relationships.
  • My personal opinion is that quantity is better than quality but whatever you choose make it consistent with your voice.
  • Think of engagement as a way of demonstrating thought leadership
  • To remain authentic, pick three words you would like everyone to use to describe what you post.
  • Connect with your motivation to do it.

As a result of this podcast, Alan was inspired to commit to posting three times a week.

New editions of the Mind Your Business Podcast appear every Friday. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your choice of Pod provider to have it delivered straight to your device.)​

Best of breed or bundle strategy how to chase unicorns

Best of breed or bundle strategy how to chase unicorns 150 150 Cypher

Best of breed or bundle strategy how to chase unicorns

This blog from a Mind Your Business episode was inspired by the numerous stories we have read in the past 12 months about businesses having to pivot – some more successfully than others- in order to survive, and indeed thrive during the Covid pandemic.

As we are still in the middle of Lockdown 3.0, it was interesting to debate the best strategy for businesses considering their own pivot as many may still make this decision over the next 12 months.

My co-podder Alan Clark introduced two useful strategies; one of ‘best of breed’ and the other of ‘integration bundles’ to use when considering the route to take.

As a best of breed example, Alan cited the recent acquisition of Slack by Salesforce. At $27.7 Billion, the deal is the Martech world’s most valuable integration ever and was seen as a good enough investment to meet the current work-from-home scenario and growing demand for 100% secured Cloud-based apps for the digital economy.

As the global leader in CRM Salesforce specialises in improving external relationships with clients and prospect leads, so its decision to buy Slack, a workplace productivity tool represents a pivot strategy that brought together two game-changing organisations and now provides Salesforce a platform to improve communication and productivity internally as well.

In 2015, just 18 months after it launched, Slack reported having more than 1 million daily users — a figure then unheard of in enterprise software. When it was sold that figure had reached some 12 million. In response, Microsoft, using a design similar to Slack’s own, added Teams to its 365 portfolio without increasing the price and used an integrated bundle approach to take Teams from zero to more than 115 million users.

That disparity and ongoing demand for the Microsoft product perhaps helps to explain why Slack sold itself to Salesforce in the end. At Cypher, we still use Slack mainly as a replacement for email. We let clients have their own channels and it means they can contact us very quickly whenever they need to.

For transparency, I feel that Cypher operates a largely integrated bundle model, insofar as we do lots of different things and our clients get a bundle of services that they pay a monthly retainer for. But I also want to be best of breed and we pride ourselves on client astonishment, that’s just how we roll!

It was interesting to debate with Alan whether there was room for a middle ground; a ‘best of breed bundle’ if you will. A model where you do operate an integrated bundle strategy but within that bundle each product is market-leading. That would make a very strong business offering. But is it sustainable?

One of the reasons I am so fascinated by this subject is that we have a lot of conversations with clients around the fact that the business they have now, will not be the same in 5-years’ time. It might do a lot of the same sort of thing, but there will inevitably be change along the way. Having a polar opposite perspective on the route your business might take on this journey can lead to the establishment of a whole new set of income streams.

A recent example was the creation of the Oxford Fire Door Company by our client Rowood Kitchens and Joinery. Business was good, but Nick Rowland the MD spotted a gap in the market and wanted to fill it – literally, with bespoke, handmade fire doors.

When this growth happens, and it does more often that you would think, we discuss with the business owners whether the new companies will sit within the current business or whether they will completely stand-alone. For me, the way to answer that question is to understand the risks your new venture presents to your current business. Two separate downsides are that the new business could blow up instantly and make you loads of money, side tracking you from the one that has paid the mortgage for all those years, or there is a risk that you go off, set up company B and it’s awful, it damages the current brand and basically comes back to bite you.

Take innocent smoothies.  They built their brand on being ethical, fresh and innovative. They were bought by Coca-Cola and whatever your thoughts are on the ‘real thing’ the acquisition absolutely tanked the Innocent brand. On a small business level, if you set up a new business but don’t stick to the principles that made the first business so strong, maybe you don’t treat companies right, don’t treat customers right, don’t do a good job, perhaps because you are stretched too thin, then it can only do damage to the existing business.

It is still too early to know for certain what plans Saleforce has for Slack, or how successful the integration of two very different cultures with be, but based on this pivot strategy, as a small business owner who is used to being best-of-breed, it does sound hard to integrate with another business as a bundle or as a new company without diminishing the value of one of them. It feels a bit like chasing unicorns.

Ever the optimist, however, Alan points out that the mere possibility of being a business owner who is able to be across four or five businesses and can keep them all at a very high service level for a period of time should be exciting for anyone and reason enough to try.

The decision for business owners to pivot may not have been so much a choice as a final throw of the dice as Covid has forced many to consider new routes for diversification. For those still considering their next business step, I think my main advice is to not make that next step too big.

Pivoting can be risky in a normal world; doing so in lockdown presents a whole new set of challenges. To pivot successfully, using the Ansoff Matrix model, for me ideally you would take a relatively small step and sell something new to your existing customer base.  Leverage the trust and competency that your customers associate with your current portfolio to offer them a slightly different, or better still, complementary product. I would certainly not advocate creating one that affects your ability to grow your current business in the future.

My second piece of advice comes from the recent ‘Everyone Competes with Amazon podcast. We also wrote a blog on that. Look at your new pivot business through the ‘Amazon lens’; what can you do better and more efficiently to delight your customers even more?

And finally, from a podcast on looking for Clarity, not Certainty, if you are considering a pivot for your business anytime soon, it doesn’t matter whether you want to pursue a best-of-breed or integrated bundle strategy. Whether you run one business or five, as a business owner, you can own the position they enter the market, you own the decision on the products and services you will offer and you own their quality, how well they are delivered and the level of customer service you want to offer.

Whatever your model, control what you can and knowing these two possibilities hopefully it will help you create a pathway for a successful pivot.

New editions of the Mind Your Business Podcast appear every Friday. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your choice of Pod provider to have it delivered straight to your device.)​

Cypher Helps Wallers Estate Agents Get the Keys to Business Growth

Cypher Helps Wallers Estate Agents Get the Keys to Business Growth 150 150 Cypher

Cypher Helps Wallers Estate Agents Get the Keys to Business Growth

Set up by owner Rowan Waller in 2014 as the antidote to a ‘typical’ Estate Agent, Wallers is an award winning, independent, Estate Agency based in Oxford and Swindon.

Whether buying or selling, letting or renting a house, flat, house-boat or commercial property, Wallers treat customers as individuals and offer a unique, tailored service that has built them a strong regional reputation.

“When people ask me how we are different, I have to wonder how to answer that! We have access to the same tech as everyone else, we have a high street shop, but then so do the majority of our competitors… however what sets us apart, I think, is the way that we choose to use those tools, the level of service we offer, the people we employ and the attitude we bring to our work”, explains Founder and Director, Rowan Waller.

With a passion for customer service, a commitment to being a force for good in the local community and an early adopter of PropTech, it was no surprise that Rowan chose Cypher to be the accountancy firm for his business.

“I met Matt at a networking group a week after I opened and he has since been a godsend to me. Yes he does my accounts, but he is more than just my accountant. He is a friend, an adviser, a professional who clearly knows his business and has been generous with his time to go out of his way to learn mine. The way he bills me monthly and is available at all times has been a massive help over the years”, says Rowan.

What started as a one-man-in-his-bedroom operation has grown to a multi-office business, with plans for further expansion. This is in stark contrast to the real prospect of closure that Wallers faced just 12 months ago. After a turbulent 2019, caused by the uncertainty surrounding Brexit, cashflow had reached a critical point just as the Covid pandemic hit.

“In 2019 we barely held on by the skin of our teeth, but always felt that there was light at the end of the tunnel if we could just get over the Brexit hump – and this is coming from a blue-hat-with-gold-stars-wearing, trumpet-blowing European”, Rowan admits. “Sure enough, enter January 2020 and after that last general election result, the property market exploded into life for us.

“In the first two months of trading in 2020 we agreed half the number of deals we had during the whole of 2019 and had built an extremely strong pipeline, but then the first lockdown hit. In-person viewings and valuations were prohibited and transactions were stopped before any of that income had come through. We were in limbo”.

It was during this time that Cypher’s proactive approach was most valuable. Regular briefings, self-made videos and frequent client ‘lifeboat calls’ designed to ensure that each business owner knew their options, understood the support that was on offer and that made the Cypher team available played a massive role in helping businesses to consolidate, access funding and re-open as soon as possible, many with a slightly different proposition to reflect their version of the new normal.

“In the early stages of lockdown, Matt was proactive, he was available and worked with a WhatsApp group of more than 100 business owners to show that if we all rowed the same way, we could all come out of lockdown with stronger businesses.”

With in-person viewings still a barrier, Wallers strengthened their position using video technology. An early adopter of virtual tour technology Wallers extended this to offering video viewings on empty properties. While nobody buys a house they haven’t seen in person Wallers found that this wasn’t the case for the rental market.

“We agreed 10 lets during lockdown without conducting a single in person viewing, which along with a local authority grant, allowed us to tick over until we re-opened in May”, says Rowan.

“When we came out of lockdown I still didn’t know which way the wind would blow, but we agreed a sale on the first day, and then a second on day two and things began to snowball from there. We still had our paused pipeline of deals, which started to move at last. In fact, 2020 saw us grow by 33%, compared to 2019 in terms of revenue, despite not earning any sales fees for the two months of the first lockdown. Not just that, but our profits grew by over 300%!”.

“For me to become the business person I am today I needed three people in my life. Matt was one of them, my wife is another. That is how important Matt is to me. He was one of the people who helped remind me that the possibility to open 10 or 11 offices, which started when I was just one man in my bedroom in 2014, was still there for me.

“When I started out this wasn’t on my agenda, I was looking to be agile, deliver good customer service and make some money for myself, but Matt has shown me possibilities I had never imagined.

One year on, Rowan is considering expanding and with Cypher’s support getting the keys to some new office locations soon. House prices are expected to rise during 2021 and with the Chancellor announcing an extension on the stamp duty holiday on the first £500,000 of all house purchases until the end of June, Wallers is hoping its early year success will continue.

If you would like us to help your business as we did Wallers, get in touch.

Cypher clients get access to discounted managed live chat from Melu

Cypher clients get access to discounted managed live chat from Melu 150 150 Cypher

Cypher clients get access to discounted managed live chat from Melu

We’ve teamed up with Melu to offer you a special discounted rate for their amazing managed live chat service.

It’s the one we use on our own website, so we can vouch for how well it works at providing us fantastic customer service and improved lead generation.

Melu’s UK based team of operators look after live chat on your website, so you know there’s always someone there to look after your visitors when they need something.

You can try Melu free for 14 days, with no credit card details required and no commitment.

We’ve negotiated a discount on the monthly fees for our clients, so don’t miss this opportunity to get more from your website today with their free trial and discounted rate.

Option 1: Weekdays – 8am to 10pm Monday to Friday – £79 + vat per month (normally £119, save £40)

Option 2: 7 days a week – 8am to 10pm every day – £99 + vat per month (normally £139, save £40)

Option 3: 24/7 coverage – £129 + vat per month (normally £179, save £50)

To sign-up, visit https://meluchat.com/try-melu and type the code CYPHER into the promotion code field to get this exclusive discount.

For more information contact Melu on 0800 634 3551 or [email protected].

Everyone is Competing with Amazon

Everyone is Competing with Amazon 150 150 Cypher

Everyone is Competing with Amazon

Earlier this month, Amazon opened its first UK till-less store. Shoppers at the new Amazon Fresh shop now scan a smartphone app when they go in and are automatically billed as they leave.

This pivot to a physical store location represents a complete 180 from Jeff Bezo’s early dreams of opening an on-line book store to disrupt the established bricks and mortar brands, but it is yet another example of the constant innovation we have seen from Amazon since its inception in the mid 1990’s.

It will be interesting to see how this till-less offer develops and the reaction is elicits from other supermarket brands as Amazon starts to compete with their traditional retail offering. It also sparked a discussion that Alan Clark and I had on a recent Mind Your Business Podcast episode, that now every business, whatever their product, service or sector now competes with Amazon.

As most of you reading this will know, I run an accountancy business, so you might ask what right do I have competing with Amazon? I don’t sell products, I am not a distributer of goods, I certainly don’t package my advisory service up in a cardboard box with an A-to-Z swoosh on it and leave it in your greenhouse!

So let me explain what I mean by this statement.

The way I see it is that, today, if you want to buy literally anything, at some point you will go to Amazon. In that Amazon world you will have a huge choice and instant access to a range of products in your search stage. Let’s say you want to buy some Bluetooth headphones. You use the search function, which returns hundreds of options-the algorithms are very clever, they make sure you see what you want – or what Amazon and its thousands of Bluetooth headphone sellers’ want- and when you make your choice, you can proceed to the checkout, pay instantly and have them delivered literally later that day.

Amazon has built a business that delivers instant gratification. It has built a proposition that whatever you want, you will be able to find and buy it, or get the answer to a question you need resolved within the working day. This proposition is now integral to everyone’s life. So, even though my business is in the professional services sector and it can take months to deliver a product or service, we now have to treat our customer experience like we are Amazon.

For example, when we talk to a prospect client, they can get a proposal from us instantly. It can be digitally signed, while we are in the meeting with them discussing it. When they become a client, our on-boarding process is digital and seamless. And since the start of lockdown we have also made the conscious effort to always be available. Clients can contact us whenever or however they want. Whether their preferred channel is WhatsApp or Slack or email or a telephone call, we will be accessible.

For too long, particularly in the professional services sector, a potential client will choose a firm, they all agree terms in principle and then nothing happens for a week. The client chases, and in return receives a tatty email which says, ‘yes we can put together your shareholder’s agreement, it will be £1,500 plus VAT’. In the meantime the Amazon generation has spoken to a competitor, who didn’t keep them waiting, has got a price, signed a deal and moved on. Boom.

That is the new ground we are all competing on; instant gratification, or at least a much quicker acknowledgement and follow up process.

To compete with Amazon we have to turn things around in real time. It’s not necessarily because we are flashy, it’s because our client base are young entrepreneurs. Millennials or Gen Z are used to being able to sign on the dotted line and immediately start receiving the service they have asked for.

If it takes more than an hour from meeting a prospect to give them a proposal and sign them up as a customer, then someone in your industry will get there quicker and you will be haemorrhaging potential sales.

And I think this is now true for hundreds of businesses.

Amazon has conditioned us to expect to be able to pick apart a product and put it back together the way we want it, at a price point that suits us. So your operations and sales processes have to evolve to match this expectation. If you have a business model where customers can buy various different versions of the same product or service, meaning they can select from a basic budget model right the way up to platinum, with 100 different options in between, then from their experience of Amazon, your customer is going to want to instantly understand all of those options, the costs, where the differences are, and pick a solution that best suits them.

The concept of telling customers that they can have any colour they want, as long as it’s black and that the car will be ready ‘when it’s ready’ is obsolete. With its first foray into a book of the week spotlight, Amazon first brought us standardisation, then customisation and now personalisation. That is what we are competing with.

There’s also the consideration of how you deal with something if it goes wrong. We purchased a monitor from Amazon- that we had delivered not to the office but to the home of a new starter, because we were working remotely which had a fault with the power pack. We contacted Amazon and requested a new one. They said they couldn’t break up a monitor and power pack set so they would just send out a complete unit. Importantly, the whole process took less than two days and came with no stress and no quibble. A problem was fixed and we are still loyal customers.

Every small business I work with has a built-in guarantee like this. One of our clients specialises in beautiful handmade kitchens and joinery. They don’t talk about their guarantee at all and the reality is very few people experience it because they make sure they get it right first time. But if someone spent £40,000 on a new kitchen that wasn’t quite right, they fact is that Rowood wouldn’t hesitate to fix it and wouldn’t leave the site until it was put right. That’s their guarantee but they don’t shout about it. Amazon has ensured that its vast customer base expects that when something goes wrong it will be put right, no hassle, no arguments. If your customer service doesn’t match this level, someone else’s will.

Amazon is also a great entrepreneurial story. When he started, Jeff Bezos was absolutely not an expert in distribution chains but rather a guy in his garage trying to create an online book store. In another blog we talked about skyscrapers and how easy it is to only see the final product and ignore the years of hard work it took to get there. If you look at the first iterations of the Amazon home page and its book of the week section you will see how far the platform has come. Amazon probably sells more books than anyone else in the world but the lesson here for every business owner is that the business you have today will not be the business you have in five years. Allow yourself to grow and evolve.

Amazon is also binary; you either buy the product or you don’t. There’s no hard sell. A lot of business owners, certainly in the first few months of trading, fall into the trap of needing to sell to everybody, all the time. As the saying goes, everyone with a chequebook and a pulse is a potential customer. We have a restaurateur as a client; he runs a top-quality restaurant and is very clear on his menu, his price and who his customers are. A lot of people think it’s too expensive, but he’s ok with that because the price reflects the time it takes to prepare the dishes and the quality of ingredients he uses, it is a destination restaurant.

We talked in a previous pod about looking for clarity, not certainty in a business. This is an example of that clarity. This restaurateur has never had certainty that people would flock to eat at his restaurant, but by getting clarity on what he can control he has built a core fan base and has developed a thriving business. Like Amazon, he presents you with what he thinks you will like.

We started off with quite a bold statement about how every business now competes with Amazon. It’s not necessarily their products or service, but rather in the way their customers have been trained, by Amazon, to expect certain standards from every other supplier they deal with.

Whether you are a barber shop, an accountancy, a funeral directors, a restaurant, or a professional services business, your customers have been indoctrinated by Amazon to expect that they can pull apart your product and put it back together exactly how they want it. They can get instant gratification in terms of receiving whatever they order, and can enjoy a really well-rounded guarantee of customer service, if something ever goes wrong.

Whatever business you are in, you need to focus on your customer touch points. Whether it’s your initial engagement and proposal process, how you on-board a client or how you package your product or service, take a look at your operation and then Amazon it, because as customers that is now the model we expect.

New editions of the Mind Your Business Podcast appear every Friday. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your choice of Pod provider to have it delivered straight to your device.)​