Phil's Blog
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Feb 26 2010
If you are behind…
Someone recently said that although they felt they were having a good-ish start to the year, they hadn’t really laid the foundations for changing/ improving their business. They felt that they would still really be in the same position in 3, 6, 12 months time (albeit a little better off for having had a good year). They said they felt as if they hadn’t really laid the solid foundations. They wanted a bit of advice on how to quickly get themselves sorted out.
So, if like them you feel that you haven’t really got on top of it:
A. Don’t cry about it.
B. Set aside time to do something about it… set aside a day, two days, whatever it takes. Put that time in your diary for the next week… the most important meeting with yourself this year.
C. During that time, do the following
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Set your Values, Mission, Purpose, Vision on paper
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Evaluate your business: be able to describe it to a 12 year old!
- Set your goals for the current calendar year… on paper
- Set your immediate goals… on paper (your Awesome Special Missions)
- Evaluate your products and services. Where should the focus be? what needs improving? is the pricing and positioning right?
- Draw up a bullet point outline of who is responsible for what in the business/ team.
- Decide on your own KRAs (Key Result Areas), and decide on how to measure your performance in these areas.
- Time Planning: Draw up a year planner… and put it on the wall. Allocate all the Holidays, Hotel days, MPDs (monthly planning days), SoS (self organisation sessions), Focus Days. This will give you a clear view of the year ahead.
- Marketing Strategy: what do you do best, who for, and why you? Devise a simple Marketing Engine to attract the right kind of clients for you and what you do best.
- Brainstorm all your current opportunities, and decide which to pursue, and how by applying goals and an action plan to each.
- Draw up a Business Pie map… a mindmap of where you can sweep up business in the next month… from all sources
- Create a Business Upgrade list to turn around all those things, great and small, which need “sorted” in the short term.
This may take two – three days. If you feel you don’t have time during a busy work schedule, do it over a weekend. Whatever happens, just do it.
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People Types
Feb 11 2010
People types…
At my seminars I often explain the existence of a number of “People types”. Amongst others, these include:
Gonnas… They are always gonna do this, and gonna do that… in the end it’s too late…and they are a goner.
Excusers… instead of Producing, they spend all their time Excusing. The words “BUT” and “TRY” often appear in their phraseology!
Should’ers… they are always talking about what they Should have done… and often tell others what they should do. Yet when it comes to learning their lesson from the past and the things they should have done, they are blind. They can’t see it… or more likely they refuse to see it. I call them should’ers, because I shudder to think how successful they could be if they had done all the things they shoulda done.
Could’ies… they are always talking about what Could be done… about what others could do… (I call this “chewing the Could”). And they never commit to doing anything… they are always “keeping their options open”. By having lots of COULDs, it feels as if they have loads of opportunity, and enormous potential. This is delusion, because unless action is taken, they may as well not have any potential.
These attributes contribute to procrastination on a grand scale, and many people who suffer from these symptoms can even be seen over-planning, over-organising, over-deliberating.
You may already see a particular category which you fall into (honesty required here). It may be that although you are not blighted by it to the point of being paralysed, you do suffer from small doses of it from time to time. Or you may even recognise that you suffer from the traits of several of these people.
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Debunking a myth
Feb 09 2010
Debunking a myth
“It’s Day Nine of the Olympic Challenge, and Phil is pounding the streets again!”
Said in a Geordie accent, I’m sure that could catch on as the intro to a reality TV show…
The thing about the Olympic Challenge is that it reduces the “should I do this thing/ shouldn’t I do this thing” into a simple decision.
And along the same lines, I am sure many of you will be familiar with the story of the “space pens”, a story which is frequently wheeled out by speakers as an illustration of how people often miss the simple answer to a puzzle.
The story goes like this: the Americans wanted to develop a pen which astronauts could use in space to write in zero gravity/ upside down, etc. So NASA spent x billion dollars (the exact number being a function of the propensity of the speaker to exaggerate) in the research programme, and finally developed such a pen after 10 years of experiments, trial and error, and head-scratching.
Meanwhile the Russians provide all their astronauts with a pencil.
Ok. Great story. But it’s a myth of course.
Pencils are not used in space because they tend to break, and having particles of graphite floating round and contaminating space capsules, and so on, is not good news! So the Space Pen was in fact produced… and an online search will give you the full details.
But the essence of the original story is still important.
Simplicity is often the key. One of our clients calls it “Thinking in binary”, a term which I have adopted…
In business terms, it means being “black and white” about commitments, about whether you are really doing it, or whether you are not doing it.
Often I see people shirk from the truth, shy away from just doing those things that make all the difference in achieving success, hiding behind clichés like “we need to think outside the box first”, and “we are going to do a bit of blue sky wotsname, and then come up with a great plan via our joined up thinking, that can be considered, possibly piloted, perhaps rolled out, maybe tested to destruction, probably destroyed, inevitably rethought via another blue sky, with a touch of cumuli-nimbus chucked in, and then once more piloted, rolled out, yadda, yadda…”
The Olympic Challenge is about doing, and not doing. It’s simple. It’s binary. And i love it!
What one thing in your business do you need to think in binary about?
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Forfeits and Rewards - Snow Joke
Feb 02 2010
Forfeits and Rewards – Snow Joke
And under normal circumstances, perhaps that’s the sort of thing to curtail good intentions for many people.
So when there’s a blizzard outside, and we have a run to go on, or a power-walk, or a trip to the gym, or whatever, we can get derailed. And the same goes for business related habits. There are always a thousand reasons not to make that call, or work on that report, or any number of pro-active business activities (particularly in the sales and marketing arena… and particularly for small business owners). Learning to overcome these is the power of The Olympic Challenge.
Which is where the forfeits and rewards come in…
The idea is to have things to motivate you, that make you just get on with the challenge on days when you would normally have given up. The forfeit is particularly powerful here, and certainly focuses the mind, especially if the prospect of paying the forfeit genuinely does scare the life out of you!
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Some Enchanted Morning
Feb 01 2010
Some Enchanted Morning…
“Regrets are a terminal pain
Discipline is a painful fix
Habits are a painless cure”
February is a great month to work on your habits. 28 days to form a new success habit is about right, and suits our purposes perfectly.
So, as always I started my Olympic Challenge today - and a number of clients have too-whereby we build 3-6 new habits in a month. That could be either stopping something (some are stopping snacks, chocolate, smoking, etc); starting something (many are doing something new each day in marketing, or fitness, or time effectiveness); or improving something.
I bet I wasn’t alone in starting the morning thinking “I must be MAD to be taking this on again”…
Good luck to everyone who is on this particular journey. Rewards and Forfeits firmly in mind, that’s Day One complete!
Highlight of my day was bounding along on a power-walk this morning with my iPoD on (“Blue Oyster Cult – “Some Enchanted Evening” album).
Cracking… Made even better in the knowledge that there are folk out there who are similarly shrinking waistlines, growing businesses, and having a brilliant month. On purpose.
For those who would like to join the fun, see website for more details of The Olympic Challenge.
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Building a Snooker Break?
Jan 29 2010
OK.
So I read it. And I was under-whelmed by all the talk of having “satisfied customers.”
Businesses shouldn’t aim at “good” customer service. Don’t aim at having “satisfied” clients/ customers.
Aim at having GREAT customer service. Aim at DELIGHTING your clients.
Now, this is something most businesses forgot, in the “good times”. Rather than building strong business relationships with customers and clients, with suppliers, with business allies and partners, they just got on with taking orders. That was it. Just “potting balls”, was the name of the game.
The break is over, many are no longer even at the table, and the opponents have moved in to clean up.
So, time to learn that lesson.
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Resolutions? Nah!
Jan 28 2010
Resolutions ? Nah!
Let’s have Revolutions instead
What one thing could you do in your business this year that would totally transform the way you work?
A new product?
A new service?
A new experience for the client?
A new approach?
A new market?
Not an evolution, or a resolution… but a Revolution.
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The Year Ahead: Getting off on the right foot
Jan 11 2010
Or is it grey, nondescript, no different to last year… in fact you feel as if you are already back to “business as usual”?
You can decide which it is. You can decide how you see the year ahead.
And the decision starts with setting your goals. It begins, of course, with taking the time to sit down and do it. No need for me to spell that lesson out, is there?
If you haven’t done so… I urge you to invest some time in doing this over the next 24 hours. It really is a must if you want to make this year your big breakthrough!
1. Remember this simple rule: begin with the long term, and go from macro to micro, general to specific. So only set goals for the next 90 days when you’ve got clear long-term vision, clear long-term goals, and clear goals for the current year. Then make these goals for this quarter very specific. And measurable.
2. At the end of the year, and looking back on the year, what will need to have happened to make it a brilliant year?
3. Imagine you are sitting at the end of the year and you have had total success… what sort of things will have happened… in all areas of your life, business, personal, financial, social and community, family… What will your highlights be?
4. Imagine you are in a radio studio being interviewed about how successful you have been this year, what will you be saying?
5. Don’t have too many goals… but make the ones you do have big enough to get excited about!
6. Write them down, clearly, on an Index card and read them every day.
7. Take immediate action. If you decide on a goal to complete a professional exam for example, send for the course material, and register for the exam immediately.
8. Create a “Butterfly moment”. Look for a big step you can take with one of the most exciting goals, and take that step within 24 hours. Even if it makes the butterflies do summersaults in your stomach!
9. Mindchangers. If you are using the Mindchangers techniques, make sure they reflect your goals
10. Regime: make sure you have a regime which supports your goals. Create a weekly and daily “diet” that will allow you the time, the energy and the focus required to achieve them.
12. upgrade your state of mind by the way you think about these goals… just decide to be positive about them
13. upgrade the words you use (and particularly in relation to these goals). For example: avoid “In the next 90 days I’m going to try to achieve x…”
14. upgrade the way you act: in relation to these goals in particular. Make your physiology strong… straight back, chest out, stomach in, head high! Powerful body language.
15. Upgrade the way you look. It sends signals to you about the 90 days ahead.
16. Upgrade your environment: is it congruent? Consistent with the success you want? Have a clear out, and a clear up!
17. Focus… on what the achievement of these goals will be like. Focus beyond them.
18. Energy. Get active
19. Vision: create instant pictures in your mind’s eye of the positive achievement of these goals, as if it’s happened.
20. Reason and Reward… what will be your reward? How will you feel to have achieved such a great 90 days? And what will you specifically give yourself as a reward?
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Positive Transition to 2010
Dec 18 2009
Positive transition to 2010
December is the ultimate IN/ON/OFF month, isn’t it.
Time IN the business: finishing all the business for the year, seeing all the clients, and ending the year with a BANG.
Time On the business: recording, measuring, reviewing the year past, and setting up the year ahead.
Time OFF: recharging the batteries, rewarding yourself and enjoying Life to the full.
A time to balance the present moment, with reflection on the year just past, and looking forward to the year to come.
But, in all the flurry of activity around Christmas, many people tell me they simple focus on crossing the finishing line, and collapsing under a barrow of shopping and unmet deadlines. They find they do not end one year and get set for the next. They struggle to lay the foundations that will allow them to come back in the New Year fully refreshed and re-focused on the year ahead.
Here is a pointed plan for the next couple of weeks to ensure the transition from 2009 to 2010 is positive:
1. finish up 2009 ... clear away any overhanging/ niggly bits of work and admin.
2. clear the clutter: have a big clear out, and archive anything that is not relevant to 2010.
3. review of the year... all that went well, highpoints. write this in your journal.
4. goals for 2010. start an outline of the things you would like to do in 2010.
5. time planner for 2010: colour coded; with all hotel days/ strategic planning days marked, all focus days clearly indicated, (and protected!), all holidays marked (aim at 12 weeks… go on!), etc
6. lessons from 2009 - what did you learn? write these down.
7. rest and recharge - make sure you do enough of this.
8. revisit Vision - polish it.
9. goals for 2010 - firm up, write down, and commit to.
10. include a new, fresh exciting goal for the year- personal to you- something that really freshens your heart and that you are doing purely for happiness, because it pleases you.
11. self - upgrade and new groundrules, based on lessons of 2009. Write these down.
12. business development: plans for 2010 to grow the business – Strategic direction.
13. business opportunity brainstorm - areas for new business – Tactical options.
14. Performance standards for 2010 – improvements in Operational effectiveness.
15. ASMs for the first quarter of 2010. Write these down and commit to them.
16. For those who use them, new Mindchangers - cards, star, lift techniques in particular.
Have a great Christamas, and here's to a prosperous 2010.
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Defragging your Necktop
Sep 25 2009
Defragging your Necktop
You know when your computer has to de-frag?
OK. It’s a process that if it wasn’t done would mean the computer ran slow and operated ineffectively. Right, I guess you knew that.
Consider then what happens if you don’t defrag your necktop, as well as your laptop. What I mean here is that you feel that you are not able to function at full speed. Your mind is not really able to work at full power. You are not really “on top of your game”. You know it, you sense it, you can tell from the speed and vigour (or lack of) with which you are performing the most fundamental tasks. It may even affect your speech! Yes, one person said to me this week they were struggling to “keep an eye in every pie!” We both laughed. But you can see what has happened here.
So, when it comes to de-fragging your necktop, what would be involved?
• Clearing the clutter and refocusing on your objectives and priorities.
• Taking some “down time” to just … be. Perhaps a long walk and time to not even reflect on much, but just empty the head.
• Clearing your peripheral vision, your desk area.
• Making a hit-list of small but important tasks and blitzing them till done
• taking the In tray down to the wood
• zero’ing the email inbox
• returning over-hanging phone calls.
• de-cluttering your computer… your documents, filing, and even the icons on your desktop (do you really need so many).
• clearing any unanswered correspondence.
• drawing up a new regime/ timetable to reflect your renewed/new priorities and focus
Now, this may take a whole day. But if it means you get back to full operating capacity, that's a day well-spent. So, close the door, be unavailable for a short time, get your Friday music on, and don’t come out until de-fragging is complete. In fact, during the summer, I had time to do this for myself. It took about a week, not because I had so much clutter (far from it), but because there was lots to think through. And I feel great for it!
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