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A Busy Fool, running about like a headless chicken, desperately trying to please everyone who asked me to do anything. A Busy Fool, petrified to turn down any work that came my way, regardless of whether I’d enjoy it – in case nothing else came along. A Busy Fool trying to grasp every single opportunity that passed through my radar, and never quite having the time to do any of them well. A Busy Fool, spinning my wheels and wondering why I could never seem to get any traction. That’s all changed for me now – read on to see how it can change for you too |
The Busy Fool Newsletter – September 2009 In case you don’t remember signing up for this newsletter, you probably signed up on either the Opportunity Matrix or the KAMpro (Key Account Management Process Review) websites – they are both aspects of the same thing – Opportunity Management, making the most of your best opportunities. This month, I’ll be looking at the difference between being focused and just plain stubborn, and the issues around allocating the right resource to your Key Accounts. In Entrepreneurs, I’ll be asking about the difference between being self-employed and being a business owner, and a great time management tip on understanding where your time goes. The newsletters come out each month, and each newsletter contains articles, tips and tools to help you to get focussed on the opportunities, ideas or customers that will best get you where you want to go. That will range from prioritisation tools to articles on how to maintain focus in a world that is constantly changing and rapidly becoming unfamiliar. And they will contain recommendations for things you can personally use to stay ahead of the game. If you come across any ideas you find useful, I’d be delighted to include them – just submit the details to newsletter@thebusyfool.com – anything I use will get a free 3-month subscription to the Opportunity Matrix online prioritisation tool. |
In this Newsletter:
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FOCUS: ENTREPRENEURS: KEY ACCOUNT MGMT: TIME MANAGEMENT TIP: |
Signs up for a year’s access to the Opportunity Matrix online tool and get the full twelve month’s access for just £47 – that’s less than half the normal price! All I ask in return is that you write me a great testimonial of how Opportunity Matrix has propelled you forward in your career, your business or your life.
And while stocks last I’ll throw in a FREE book – not one of those 15-page e-books (you get one of those too), a quality 300+ page hardcover copy of the Institute of Directors accredited “The Growing Business Handbook”, worth £25. So you can read my chapter on the importance of focussing on the right opportunities for you, as well as more than 60 other chapters on all the things a growing business will want to know. And I won’t charge you postage either, not even a pound for charity, I can’t be fairer than that, can I? So to get your copy, just go to the website and sign up – and remember, you get a whole year for the price of just 6 months, that’s a full 12 months for just £47. |
| FOCUS: Focussed or Stubborn? When is it time to give up? A great friend of mine, the incorrigible, incomparable marketing guru Fraser Hay, once gave me a great acronym to describe focus: Follow One Course Until Successful. As I’ve gone about the place, speaking on the topic of making the most of your best opportunities – by focussing only on the best ones – many people have challenged me about that. They believe that sticking to one course is stubborn and dangerous, and that one needs to be flexible on order to achieve success these days. In many ways they’re right; sticking stubbornly to something that isn’t working would seem to be a pretty good way to achieve failure, on the face of it. Imagine a golfer who consistently slices the ball into the rough just carrying on hacking away in the same old way. Many do, of course – and they don’t get to challenge Tiger Woods for his crown. I think it was Einstein who said that the definition of insanity is to keep on doing the same thing, and expect a different result. On the other hand, how often do we hear of people who have given up just too soon – just before they hit their “acre of diamonds”? And how many tales are there of people who have gone through rejection after rejection, only to find massive success at the umpteenth attempt. Remember the Decca A&R man who told the Beatles that nobody wanted another “beat combo”? Or Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen, who had their book of stories rejected by over 100 publishers – before they found one who would publish “Chicken Soup for the Soul”, which went on to become the biggest-selling series of personal development books in history. So what’s the difference between insane stubbornness and inspired focus and determination? Successful entrepreneurs I’ve spoken to have generally agreed – it comes down to belief, backed up with solid market research and a deep understanding of what customers are actually looking for. To carry on doing the same old thing that’s not worked, in the blind hope that somehow it’ll all come right in the end – that’s insanity. To stick doggedly and courageously to a vision that’s backed up with a solid business logic, and try every possible way to get it recognised by potential customers - that’s inspiration! ENTREPRENEURS: What does it mean to be self-employed? When I first came out of corporate, it meant no longer having a boss, being able to spend my working days doing what I wanted to do, not what some nominally senior executive thought I should. It meant being able to pursue the opportunities that I thought were worthwhile, not having to toe the company line and let seemingly lucrative things pass me, and the company, by. And it meant doing only the work I love, and ignoring the bits I found boring or distasteful. That worked, to an extent – I’m happier now than I ever was in my last corporate job, and I’m making a decent living. Recently I’ve been looking at what my clients and network colleagues do, those who have what I would call a “real business”. By that I mean one with premises, staff and overheads, who have more to be concerned about than how much they can draw from their companies for themselves. Like me, they enjoy the challenge of pushing the technical or intellectual boundaries of their specialism. And like me, they enjoy that fact that there’s no-one to tell them what they must do when – well, apart from clients that is, and the best ones have their clients well-trained. Where they differ from me is that they also get great satisfaction from the business itself of running a business. They love the fact that they provide people with jobs – while they really (I mean really) don’t want a job themselves (most have become unemployable), they take pride in providing employment for those who do want one. They love creating a structure that allows them to service their customers better, to give them better value than they could on their own. And most of all, they love not *having* to do the work themselves. As I said before, they still love doing the work – when it suits them to do it. In my experience, most of them get rather tetchy when the business is faced with workloads and timescales that mean they have to actually roll their sleeves up and do some particular bit of work they didn’t chose to do. It means that they aren’t in control, they haven’t been able to source other skilled labour to do the work while they take a profit. A business owner isn’t trapped in their business - they could (if they chose to) walk away and have the day-to-day business carry on perfectly well without them. That’s the difference, from what I see, between the self-employed expert (even a very wealthy one, who’s in massive demand and can therefore charge enormous day rates) and the successful business owner – they own the business, and while they may chose to work in it from time to time, they don’t work FOR it. KEY ACCOUNT MGMT: How much account management resource should we allocate to each of our Key Accounts? The obvious answer would be to divide our total turnover by the turnover of each account, and then allocate x number of account manager hours according to the proportion of turnover. So an account contributing 50% of the sales (dangerous position to be in, but that will be the subject of another blog) will get half the available KAM hours. There’s a problem with this approach. Actually, a number of problems. First is that below a certain point, it just isn’t possible to do effective Key Account Management; and the converse of that is a law of diminishing returns, whereby the additional hours given to an account may not generate a commensurate improvement in sales. Second is that not all accounts contribute just turnover – some have strategic value that over-rides simple sales. An example I use a lot is an innovative supplier and an early adopter customer – they need people to take their innovations or they’ll never get going. Or the well-known “marquee” accounts that will mean other customers take the offer more seriously; Microsoft made very little money out of putting Excel into 3M, but it was the account that gave the market confidence to switch from Lotus-123. The final reason why the simple divide-and-allocate approach fails is that Key Accounts have different needs, depending on the nature of our relationship with them. To understand that better, we need to look at the Key Account Selection Matrix, developed by the Key Accounts Best Practice Group at Cranfield Business School under Professor Malcolm McDonald in the 1990s. I use an adapted version of the matrix (I call it the Account Category Evaluator, or ACE, see downloads section at the bottom), but at this level the original will serve our purposes. The matrix uses a number of criteria to assess each account on two dimensions: how attractive is the account to us, and how strong are we in the account, relative to their ideal supplier. This creates that friend of all consultants, the 2×2 grid. Strategic Partnership accounts are those with high attractiveness and high strength – it’s worth our while putting in the resource to work in partnership with them, and it’s worth their while to develop the relationship with an important supplier. High on attractiveness but low on strength are the Development accounts – we need to do some serious work – often internal changes – before they’ll commit resource to partnering with us. High on strength and low on attractiveness gives is the Maintenance accounts – we don’t want to put too much resource into them, and we don’t really need to as the customers need us to a large extent. And low attractiveness and low strength gives us the Opportunistic accounts – it’s not really worth a major investment of resource for us, and we are somewhat vulnerable, so best to get what we can out of them while we can. McDonald, in his latest edition of Key Account Management, written with the current Prof of Key Account Management at Cranfield, Diana Woodburn, suggests the following ratios of KAM resource. For each Strategic Partner account, allocate one unit of account management. Each KAM unit can handle two Development accounts, three Maintenance accounts or four Opportunistic accounts. Of course that doesn’t take account of the differentr skills needed for each type of account – you’ll find some discussions on that in my Key Account Management for Profit Club. So you can see, from a KAM perspective, some clients really are more equal than others. TIME MANAGEMENT TIP: How much of your working day do you spend on activities that are truly productive? Recently, I’ve been recording how much time I spend on each of my clients and businesses. I started off by creating a spreadsheet tool that allows me to record what I’m doing – I click a button when I start something, and again when I stop it, or I click a different button when I start something different – it’s been quite an eye-opener. The first thing I’ve realised is that some of my activities don’t generate anything like enough profit for the time I spend on them. This is really taking the analysis I did with Time Allocator™ (see the downloads section at the bottom) to the next level, and it’s revealed just how much time some of my stuff is taking up – much more than I thought. It’s also revealed that some things that are really important to me (like Opportunity Matrix™) are getting squeezed out by the tasks (and clients) that scream loudest. That’s prompted a thorough review of what I do – and what I won’t do. The other thing that tracking my time has revealed is how much time is spent on stuff that isn’t truly productive. I’m talking about time spent on clearing out spam e-mails or chatting on Skype (two horrendous time-wasters), and on things like “marketing” on Facebook, LinkedIn & Ecademy. And I’m also talking about those phone calls that have no real purpose, those trips to get a “quick” cup of tea. At first I thought my tool wasn’t working right – I was diligently clicking whenever I started & stopped any productive task, and at the end of a 9 or 10-hour working day, the time recorded by the tool only added up to 6 or 7 hours. So I checked the log records, and thought I found the problem – there were gaps all over the place, 10 minutes here, half an hour there. Except those gaps were real – I really wasn’t doing anything productive in them. Necessary, yes (especially if you consider bathroom breaks!), but not productive. So now I’m tracking my time, I’m conscious of how long each of those “little” breaks can get, and I’m keeping them shorter. And my productive time has gone up by as much as an hour a day. You probably don’t need to be quite as analytical as me about it, writing a spreadsheet and everything (hmmm … productive or not?), but if you take the time to record your activities, I’m sure you’ll also find a lot of unnecessarily unproductive time spread all across your day. What could you do with an extra hour today? … |
And finally …
I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of The Busy Fool newsletter, and also found some of the tips useful. As not all readers will have seen all the various free items – you each came here from a number of different places – below are links from which you can download any of them. Each will ask you for your details – don’t worry, I won’t send you duplicate e-mails, I just need to know which items people find most useful (so any feedback would be great, too). I hope you find them useful.
In the meantime, any comments or suggestions about the newsletter you have will be most welcome.
Free resources:
Time Allocator™ is a free tool from the providers of OPPORTUNITY MATRIX™
Most of us are faced each day with decisions about what to spend our time on – there just aren’t enough days in the month to do everything we want to do. But how do we decide how much time to dedicate to each thing we could do?
Just by entering a few details, Time Allocator™ can show you how many days each activity should get. Click on the image above to get your own copy.
IDEA ASSESSOR: to assess which of your ideas is best for you using our unique Idea Assessor™, click on the image above. A few simple entries will give you your answer.
VALUES ELICITATION: click on the image to get an mp3 version of the Values exercise described above.
ACCOUNT CATEGORY EVALUATION (ACE): click on the image to get trial version of the ACE spreadsheet mentionned in the Key Accounts article above.