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Reflections on the Summit, and a great video

By on October 30, 2008 in Events

It’s a week since were up on Mount Dandenong and I’ve had some time to reflect and gauge the feedback from those who came up there with us.

Overwhelmingly the feedback was positive which has encouraged us to do an event next year. Many people commented that it was different to what they’d thought.

One close colleague who knows me as a finance person thought that his eyes would glaze over in the first hour and it would be boring for him. Twice he has come back and said it was nothing like he thought it would be and of course much much better. Already he has invited a few colleagues to next year’s Summit before we’ve even set the date!

We are in the process of getting all the footage and material ready to post to the internet so that people can get an appreciation of what the day was all about and also give those of you who came the chance to reminisce a little. We were hoping to do that within a week of the Summit but our filming people have been caught up in another conference and there will be a slight delay. Please bear with us…

As promised at the Summit, here is the video of Paddy Hirsch, the Senior Editor of Marketplace explaining the financial crisis and how it occurred. This is a great explanation of a very difficult subject:

The reason I’m showing you this video is twofold:

  1. To help all of you understand the financial meltdown a little better; and
  2. To get you thinking about the use of simple yet powerful videos like this one for promoting your business online.

On that second point… all of us need to market our business in new and different ways. If I had a dollar for every time I’d seen a manager write on the whiteboard to explain a concept to people then I’d have lots of dollars in my kitty. I encourage you to watch the video twice:

  1. On the first time, listen to Paddy and get an appreciation of the financial crisis.
  2. On the second time think about how you might be able to create and publish videos like this for your business. Ask yourself questions like:
    • What concepts would you like your clients or customers to know about your products or services?
    • How would you go about recording yourself drawing that on the whiteboard, then uploading that video to YouTube so you and other people can refer to it at any time?

Remember Alister’s first rule in the new world:

  1. Start by giving me something for free.
    (If I like it, I won’t mind paying for the “meat”.)

There are a number of interesting articles which I’ve been reading around the Summit and just after it. These will be the next few posts as a service to bring you up to speed on the new economic conditions which are unfolding.

By the way, Lindsay and I are so committed to these innovative forms of online marketing that we’ve both signed up for Alister’s Internet Marketing Mastermind‘s course. The best-priced memberships are selling quickly, so I encourage you to act quickly if you’re interested in this exciting course.

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Do you really know where your profits are coming from?

By on October 1, 2008 in Management

On Friday, I introduced you to the second of three keys for ensuring you succeed in these changing economic times, and that was, “Make sure you are empowering those people who are really running the business.”

Today I want to talk about the third key, but before I do let me take a few sentences to reflect on the gale blowing through the financial markets.

A dip? A pothole? A sinkhole?

It seems that we’re in for more than a small dip on the economic horizon. We’re in for completely different economic times!

This morning I was with a client who has been around for a while and was recalling the economic hard times right back to the 60’s. He did comment that we’ve been on an economic run now for the last 18 years. He remarked — and I agree wholeheartedly with him — that for many managers this will be a completely new experience.

Think about it for a minute.

What were you doing 18 years ago? For most of you, it would be something quite different. Your position and scale of responsibility will have been very different from today. That’s why we’ve started blogging in the way we have been. I foresaw current events back in March and the “proverbial is only now hitting the fan.” It means we at One Sherpa weren’t having a lend of you when we outlined the need to acquire new skills for managing in the new environment.

Somehow we got the title for the Summit right on the mark, which is ‘Critical skills to rise above uncertain times.’

Anyway, back to my third key…

“Make sure that you know where and how your profit is being made.”

As I was saying above, we have been on an amazing boom time for the last eighteen years and as a result many of the management practices that were necessary in hard times have become completely irrelevant and lost from the skills repertoire of managers.

In the good time it was simply a matter of increasing your sales as fast as you could, and the profits would generally follow along, even if the cash flow was tight. It was not necessary to know where you made your profit because it all just seemed to work itself out.

In the economic times ahead it will be more important to know exactly where you make your profit. There will be far less room for error and non-profitable products and services will need to be eliminated from your business to first survive and then to continue making satisfactory profits.

At One Sherpa, we determine a company’s performance by looking at the movements in their profit, broken down into three separate elements:

  • Price/Cost Inflation,
  • Cost Productivity, and
  • Volume/Mix Change.

Business owners have not been concerned about this type of breakdown (recently) because inflation has been low, volume has been high and businesses have generally run along OK.

Think about the level of cost increase running in your business… Has it increased? What about the effects of the petrol price increases? How have increased interest rates affected the households of your employees? What about the massive increase in the cost of food?

We used to be able to manage with only one major factor – volume increases — because the other factors were not significant enough to make a material difference. Not any more! In the new environment we will need to look at all three factors and understand why and how they’re affecting our day-to-day business.

I would like to ask you to consider adding your thoughts and relections in the comments area below. One of the reasons for blogging is to increase the interaction and cross-fertilisation of ideas. I really appreciate your thoughts and comments and if you are able to share them in the comments section of the blog it would increase the value of the articles and give others the benefit of any thoughts and feedback you might have.

I look forward to seeing you at the Summit on October 17th. Come ready for a day to remember and some take-away value that will assist you chart your way up your own particular mountain.

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