Rushing To Wait

 No Responses »
Jan 272012
 

Our doctors’ practice has recently combined forces with another practice and moved to a huge, purpose built, ultra modern building. The two practices continue to operate separately so each has its own waiting area. Ours occupies a very large and spacious area with dozens of seats. But why? With an appointment system, why do you need such an extravagant use of space.

When this building was at the planning stage, why didn’t someone take a look at the reason that they end up with a full waiting room. I can think of two reasons only:

  1. The doctors don’t start their surgeries on time. Not hard to fix!
  2. Consultations take longer than the allocated time. OK, so make the slots 12 minutes say, rather than ten. Or leave a catch up ‘blank’ appointment every so often.

These simple expedients could have saved a huge investment in unnecessary waiting space and reduced the frustration of appointment times having no relationship with the actual time of the consultation. Surely this is a classic case of devising a solution before/without considering the problem and its causes. A missed opportunity.

Share

Seductive Pricing

 No Responses »
Aug 082011
 

Ben Kinnaird’s comment against the previous post, Working For Free, has caused me to think some more about how we charge for our services. Ben recently ran a series of workshops under the banner of his Rather Inventive business. The first was free to attend as a ‘taster’ in the hope of encouraging people to sign up for subsequent events where there was a fee, but this approach didn’t work out quite as well as had been hoped.

I am inclined to think that a better route for the next series of workshops will be to charge for all but at a price level that doesn’t deter the many people who are self-employed or from small businesses where there is very limited funding for discretionary spend. One problem we face when promoting this type of activity is that it is discretionary spend. It is helpful to our business and may well make a significant contribution if we take on board all of the learning. However, many (most?) of us tend not to be particularly rational in our approach to purchase decisions.

If you disagree with my view about your rationality (is there such a word?), then I invite you to consider your purchases over the last few months. Frankly, my defence wouldn’t survive past last Friday! So if logical persuasion doesn’t work, what do we do? Step on stage the advertising man! A good advert appeals to the emotions. It might be backed up with facts to help us to feel we have been rational, to help us justify the purchase decision, but it is targeted fairly and squarely at our irrational side. It aims to seduce us into parting with our money.

Having written all this, it has now prompted me to consider how we market our future Successful Speaking workshops! Not sure how good I’ll be at the seduction though!

Share

Working For Free

 4 Responses »
Aug 042011
 

Talk to people who are self-employed or run small businesses and they’ll often say, “Oh, it was only a small job so I did it for free”. Sometimes, particularly if they are offering a new service, they do work for free or heavily discounted to gain exposure, to have a base from which to gain referrals. Large organisations spend vast sums of money on projects for so-called ‘strategic reasons’. In reality, more often than not these are vanity projects or pet schemes of senior directors. An objective view would say that these schemes will only ever lose money.

Are any of these activities justified? In the case of vanity projects, almost certainly not. But what of the small business, the self-employed? There is an argument that says most people only really value what they pay for, so this would suggest that the discount route is preferable to the free approach. And clearly there is a limit to how much we can do for free. But I wonder whether we sometimes do free stuff because we lack the confidence to ask for payment. Which is kind of odd. Would we go into a newly opened shop and ask for free products so that we can ‘increase their exposure’? Whatever approach is taken, it should be part of a business plan that includes free/discounted as part of the marketing budget. And as with everything, the effect and benefits should be monitored.

Share

Noughts In Context

 No Responses »
Nov 192010
 

Today the government has released online details of its spending. The problem is that without the context it will be difficult to judge whether money is being spent wisely or otherwise. I recall when I first joined the Prince’s Trust as a volunteer business mentor. I was to mentor a lad who was setting up a garden maintenance business. In my corporate life I’d been used to looking at business cases where the numbers were in the millions. This lad’s investment request was a couple of thousand. I spent more time going through the numbers and the rational behind the forecasts and worrying about them than I had ever done before. He wanted an investment so small that it wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow in my previous life. But for him it was a major decision. It’s all a question of context.

I think it was Tom Peters who said that he’d worked for a US admiral who always insisted numbers were written out in full. The admiral’s logic was that his team would be much more careful about spending the tax-payers’ money if they were signing cheques for a $1,000,000 rather than $1m. All those noughts have a powerful psychological effect.

Last week I purchased more than £100 of stationery and related items. I wonder whether I may have been a bit more thoughtful in my buying if everything had been priced in pennies? And I wonder whether my trip to Majestic Wine yesterday would have been less costly if I hadn’t been seduced by the glowing descriptions on the labels!

Share

Printing Money

 2 Responses »
Nov 122010
 

I’ve just been printing money. But before you dial 999, I should point out that it is for a school enterprise day I’m running next week as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week. But talking of printing money, it reminded me of a presentation that I attended given by the Deputy Governor of the Bank of England. The subject was Quantitative Easy. Riveting! Or it might have been if he hadn’t delivered a world-class demonstration of how not to make a presentation. A particular highlight was the slide accompanied by the comment, “You probably can’t see that at the back of the room”! So why the ***** did you use it then?

I am fed up with seeing dismal presentations. I have to do something about it. In the New Year I shall run some short training sessions. Or maybe I should stand up during poor presentations and utter the immortal words of Victor Meldrew, “What language are you talking in now? It appears to be Bollocks!”

Share
 Older Entries

site tracking with Asynchronous Google Analytics plugin for Multisite by WordPress Expert at Web Design Jakarta.