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Are You Shop Blind?

Are You Shop Blind?

By Phil Latz

When you’ve worked inside your business for years, things become familiar. That can be a problem!

All of us see things differently. You might have heard of the expression, ‘She looks at things through rose coloured glasses.’ At one level that’s saying someone is an optimist, but it also implies they might be in denial of negative things. They unrealistically see things as being better than they actually are.

When it comes to your business, you need to see things through the eyes of a potential customer who is encountering your business for the first time. They will notice things that you overlook.

In this article I’m going to use the example of a ‘bricks and mortar’ retail shop. But the same principals apply to every other business. Your shopfront might be your website, your mobile service van or your front office. Your shop front might be your 25 year old Commander phone system playing the Greensleeves chimes when your customers are on hold.

First Impressions Count

How many customers aren’t even making it through your front door?

Don’t just imagine that you’re a first time customer, physically put yourself in their shoes! Go out of your shop, walk a block down the street then turn around and walk slowly back towards it.

As your shop gets closer, ask yourself these questions. How effective is your signage? Is it appropriate for your location? For example, a shop that most customers drive to needs larger, simpler signage than one where customers arrive on foot.

Is your signage lit at night? Wherever you’re located there are 8,760 hours in the year, but the sun is only up for 4,380 of them. If you don’t have good exterior and signage lighting then you’re hiding yourself for half of the year.

Are your signs faded? Are they current? You might be old enough to remember the huge Ansett Australia airline group that went bankrupt in 2002. It was a good test of retail travel agencies, many of whom had Ansett signage. The sharp ones soon updated their signage, but for years afterwards you could still see ‘Ansett’ posters and signs in some less well run travel agency windows.

As you continue to approach your shop, stop when you’re directly outside. Is the footpath swept and tidy? Or are their weeds in the cracks and stains from last week’s party at the pub next door?

Does your shop need a fresh coat of paint? What about the window displays? The leading department stores and specialist retailers pay professional window dressers to regularly update their displays in sync with new seasons, summer sales and so on.

Even if you can’t afford to do this, you can at least think about how you can make the most of your shop windows to maximise your sales and learn some basic tricks of the trade via Google and YouTube.

Now you’re ready to enter the store. Is the door working well? Hinges oiled, handle clean and fully working? Automatically opening doors are expensive, but ideal, especially for stores that sell larger items.

Consider All Five Senses

You’re now standing just inside the door.

What do you see? 

Are the products brightly lit with focused display lighting that really makes them shine and ‘pop’? Or is there just a row of old fluoro’s in the ceiling, three of which are grey at the ends, two more that are flickering and one that blew months ago without being replaced?

Is there a bold graphic, alluring sign, brightly lit hero product or some other feature that draws the customers’ eyes deeper into the store and entices them to come right in, not just hover at the door?

Can you see dead corners where the latest stock deliveries are piled up in cartons? Not every shop has the luxury of a loading bay or rear entrance, but even if your stock has to come in via the front door in full view of customers, you should get it out of sight and out of their way as soon as possible. 

What do you hear?

Is there appropriate music playing that puts customers into a positive frame of mind? Or is a certain staff member’s favourite death metal band being played way too loud?

Can you hear staff discussing things that should be saved for the staff lunch room, out of earshot of customers?

What can you smell?

You’d be amazed how many shop owners don’t notice that their carpet actually started to get musty two years ago. It’s like the frog in the saucepan with the heat slowly rising.

The first level you should aim for is a clean, fresh smelling shop. More sophisticated retailers actually pay specialist companies who can provide a wide range of scents to make shops more enticing to customers.

Of course, the aroma of your products is a big selling point if you’re a bakery or florist for example, so make the most of it.

What can you touch or taste?

I’m combining the last two of our five senses because when it comes to retail stores, they might well be mutually exclusive. For example, in a bakery it’s a great idea for customers to be able to taste samples, but not such a great idea for them to be able to touch fresh bread that another customer ends up buying.

However if you’re selling hard goods of any description, the opportunity for your customers to touch the product first is a unique advantage you have over your online competitors. 

Your customers want to feel the weight, texture, hardness or whatever other key attribute of each product is important to them. So let them! Obviously there are security considerations, especially if you’re running a jewellery store, but in every retail category there are ways to maintain security whilst still letting your customers immerse themselves in the key attributes of your products.

By now you should have some fresh revelations about how you can improve your store. But if you find it hard to be impartial and objective, you can always get an independent third party to give you a frank assessment. A business coach could help you here!

Whatever you do, don’t rely on what your visiting sales representatives tell you. They just want to butter you up to buy more of their products over their competitors’ so they’re not about to share any hard truths with you!

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Build Your Business Upon Good Foundations

Build Your Business Upon Good Foundations

by Phil Latz

Building a strong, long lasting business has many parallels with building a house.

If the foundations are not strong, then no amount of shiny paint or fancy lighting is going to make that house a good long term investment.

So how do you build good foundations? In this article we’ll look at six key attributes.

What if you’re not starting a new business, but already have a business that is showing some cracks? Don’t worry! There’s good news for you at the end of this article.

1. You Need Adequate Resources

In the case of the foundations for 99% of Australian houses, that means concrete. If concrete costs, say $300 dollars per cubic metre and you need 10 cubic metres to pour your foundations, then you’re going to need $3,000 to pay for your concrete.

This is one area where you just can’t take shortcuts and say, ‘I can only afford half the concrete so I’ll make the foundations smaller.’ The same applies with any business. There are many ways you can save money, but every business will have certain foundational costs that you need to be able to pay for before you start. These might include government licence fees, franchise fees or a wide range of other costs.

Insufficient capital is one of the main reasons that many small businesses fail. You need to carefully work out in advance how much capital you’ll need and how you’re going to source that money, always adding a contingency margin for unforeseen additional costs.

2. You Need a Team of Experts

Have you ever tried concreting? I’ve done enough concreting jobs to know that from now on I should leave it to the experts! If you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s quite easy to make a huge mess when pouring concrete foundations. And if you don’t fix mistakes quickly before the concrete sets, you’ve got a serious problem that will be expensive to remedy.

Even if you’re starting business as a ‘one person show’ with no employees, you need a team of experts right from the start. The exact make up of your team will vary slightly depending upon the nature of your business. But there’s a good chance your team will include an accountant, lawyer, insurance broker and finance broker. Think of your key suppliers as part of your team. They want you to succeed and will almost certainly have good advice to offer if you ask them.

3. You Need Good Plans

Builders don’t just arrive on site with their tools one morning and say, ‘Right, where shall we put this house and what size shall we make it?’

A lot of time and expense has been incurred before the builder starts work. Everything from soil samples to see what type and depth of foundations are needed to a site survey to consider the best orientation of the building. Will it catch the sea breezes? Will it make the most of the available views? Will overshadowing of neighbours be an issue preventing Council approval of your house? The full list is long.

It’s no different in business. What is your target market? Who are the existing players in that market? What will be your unique selling proposition (USP)? In other words, your point of difference that is going to cause a customer to choose you over your competitors. What will be your cost per product? What sale price will the market support? What margin does this leave you? Once again, the full list is much longer than this.

It’s far cheaper to alter walls, add rooms, deepen foundations and make other alterations while your house is still a plan on a piece of paper or computer screen. Likewise it’s cheaper to plan your business in advance rather than use the, ‘Let’s just try it and see!’ approach, where too many mistakes could leave you bankrupt.

4. You Need Reinforcement

Concrete is strong in compression. Steel is strong in tension. They’re as different as chalk and cheese. But combine the two and you have reinforced concrete, something greater than the sum of the parts, that has literally revolutionised the shape of modern buildings and cities.

Likewise in business, you need people that you listen to who have a different perspective to you. That might be because they have different personalities and outlooks on life. It also might simply be a case of someone looking at your problems with a fresh set of eyes.

When you’re buried within the daily detail of your business for 40, 60, 80 hours per week, you can lose perspective. This is where a coach or business mentor can help. Other key people who can provide this vital different perspective might be your wife / husband / life partner or business partner.

As well as providing different ideas, these people are vital in giving you support and encouragement. It can be very lonely owning and running a business. Even if you’re surrounded by staff, as the owner, you face responsibilities that are often hard to share. Having discreet family, friends or professional advisors gives you a shoulder to lean on.

5. You Need Independent Expert Advice

Before the first concrete truck arrives on site to pour the foundations, a civil engineer who is independent from the builder and developer, must come on site and inspect the preparations. They look at all of the formwork that will define the boundaries of the foundations. They check that the steel reinforcing bars and mesh have been correctly specified, placed and tied.

For a standard house foundations engineer might only be on site for a single hour or less. But their expertise can determine the lifetime success or failure of those foundations. They have to come at the right time. Once the concrete has been poured, most of the critical details that determine a sound foundation will be hidden forever. It will be too late for their advice then.

It’s no different in your business. The best time for you to have an expert come in is before you commit – before you start pouring concrete. This is different to the ongoing support and reinforcement that I was talking about in the previous point. This is key expert advice on critical questions or decisions that might only have to be made once at the start of a venture or at certain cross road points. Sure, their hourly rate might seem high, but the right expert advice at the right time could save you a fortune, and possibly make you one.

6. What if You’ve Made a Mistake?

What if your business is already up and running? It might have been going along for years. Perhaps things looked strong in the early years, but now it’s cracking up due to poor foundations.

Don’t worry! In building they call it underpinning. When foundations of an existing building, even an old one, are cracking up or where never adequate in the first place, they can be dug out and replaced with new ones.

Underpinning can be expensive because it needs to be progressively done in small stages whilst each section of the building above is propped up.

Once again, this is where a business coach can help. You can’t tackle all of your foundational cracks at once. But they can help you decide which are the key sections that you need to reinforce first. 

The most important thing to remember is that your cracked foundations are not going to magically fix themselves. It might require some painful digging and you might feel a little precarious during the transition, but the only way to put your business on firm foundations is to take action!

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Personal Growth | Urgency vs Importance

What is the difference between urgent and important?

Business Coaching Video: Urgency vs Importance

Do you find yourself wanting to do more things than you have time to do? Do your days seem to race by with half the things on your ‘to do’ list still not done by the end of the day? If your answer is Yes, then welcome to the club!

Just about anyone with any level of ambition will tell you that they don’t have enough time to do all the things they’d like to do. That’s not because they’re lazy. But because our time is finite.

You need to start by understanding just how precious time is. Time is more valuable than money. If I give you a thousand dollars, I can go out and earn some more money to replace it. But if I give you an hour of my time, it has gone forever.

No amount of money can buy you more time.

In this video, you’ll learn how Bill Gates, the world’s biggest philanthropist, manages his time. You’ll also discover the difference between urgency and importance and where you should be spending most of your time.

From watching this video you’ll gain new insights into managing your precious time.

Watch Video Six: Urgency vs Importance

Watch another video

Book an Obligation Free Consultation

If you are struggling with the topic in this video, or want to improve this area of your business with new strategies and a proven formula for success, then complete the form here now, to book an obligation free consultation with Phil Latz.

Phil will meet with you for one hour, free-of-charge, to listen to your current situation. He will help you to hone in upon the key issues and strategies that will make the most impact, no strings attached.

It will only take you 30 seconds to activate change! You have everything to gain and nothing to lose! 

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Urgency vs Importance

by Phil Latz

Hi, welcome to the sixth blog in my personal growth series that I hope will help you become more successful in your business.

As a business owner myself for many years, I understand the challenges that you face. 

Today I’ll be sharing with you about how to make the most of your time.

Do you find yourself wanting to do more things than you have time to do? 

Do your days seem to race by with half the things on your ‘to do’ list still not done by the end of the day?

If your answer is Yes, then welcome to the club! Just about anyone with any level of ambition will tell you that they don’t have enough time to do all the things they’d like to do.

That’s not because they’re lazy. But because our time is finite.

You need to start by understanding just how precious time is. Time is more valuable than money.

If I give you a thousand dollars, I can go out and earn some more money to replace it.

But if I give you an hour of my time, it has gone forever. No amount of money can buy you more time.

I recently watched an excellent Netflix documentary series entitled ‘Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates’. It’s a behind the scenes look at the life of the richest man on the planet. Bill Gates is worth something like $100 billion US dollars, but he is unable to buy a single extra minute in his day. He has to live with the same 24 hours that everyone else gets.

So what does Bill Gates do about it? He makes the most of every moment. 

He employs personal assistants to carefully manage his meetings. He prioritises. Interestingly, he studies voraciously, constantly reading and learning.

These days, Bill no longer works at all at Microsoft, the company he founded that continues to drive his wealth. His focus is upon eliminating diseases and advancing other humanitarian causes through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. If anything, Bill Gates who was born on 28th October 1955, is more driven than ever.

I’ve read a lot about time management over the years, but one methodology that I first read about back in the early 1990’s has always resonated with me. So much so, that whenever I hired a new team member into our company, I would sit down with them and share this idea.

You can read about it in this book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey. In an age when business books can be out of date in a year or two, this book, which was written back in 1989, remains a best seller.

I’d recommend that you read or listen to this book. Remember, the more you learn you earn.

There are many wise teachings in this book of which the Four Quadrants, that I’m going to share with you now, is just one.

Every single task that you do in your working life can be divided into four quadrants.

The vertical axis denotes importance. The bottom is unimportant, the top is the most important tasks.

On the horizontal axis denotes urgency. The left side is most urgent, the right side is not urgent.

So the quadrants can be described like this:

Quadrant 1 tasks are both urgent and important

Quadrant 2 tasks are not urgent, but important

Quadrant 3 tasks are urgent, but not important

Quadrant 4 tasks are not urgent and not important

How can you discern if a job is urgent or important? Urgent jobs are right in front of us, the phone ringing the person asking for an answer. If you don’t respond to them quickly, there will be an immediate consequence.

Important jobs are more closely linked your mission, your values, your high priority goals. You could say that they’re the bigger picture jobs. They won’t shout at you like the urgent jobs, but if you neglect them, you’ll wake up one day years later and wonder how you could have worked so hard, for so long to achieve so little.

The key question to ask yourself is, ‘In which quadrant should you be spending most of your work time?’

Think about it and speak out your answer now.

I’ve asked this question many times over the years to my new staff members and other people I’ve trained.

Chances are that you gave exactly the same answer that almost all of these people gave me, ‘Quadrant 1 of course because it’s both urgent and important!’

Please don’t take offence, but you’re wrong. Your key to long term success is to spend as much of your time in Quadrant 2, not urgent, but important.

Note that I added the words ‘long term’ before ‘success’. Right now, you might well have a pile of Quadrant 1 tasks that are demanding your attention. But if you shift your thinking, you’ll gradually be able to make more time for Quadrant 2.

Spend your time in Quadrant 2 and your benefits will include vision, perspective, balance, discipline, control and fewer crises.

On the other hand, if you stay in Quadrant 1 your business life will be accompanied by stress, burnout, crisis management and constantly putting out fires.

So exactly how can you make this change?

Initially, the low hanging fruit will be Quadrant 4. You should try to eliminate these tasks entirely. Quadrant 3 tasks should be batched up and done as quickly as possible, or better still, delegated if you have anyone helping you.

Allocate all the time you’ve saved into Quadrant 2 tasks. These include things like working on your business, not in your business, budgeting, planning, learning, making important decisions. 

If you procrastinate on Quadrant 2 tasks, they migrate across to the left, to Quadrant 1.

Meanwhile, there’s no avoiding the fact that you have to deal with the pre-existing Quadrant 1 tasks that are upon you right now.

It might take months or even years to restructure your life and your mindset to eliminate Quadrant 1. You might never fully achieve this, but even if you can increase your Quadrant 2 time from say 5% to 20%, that would still be a fourfold increase that would reap huge benefits for you.

To summarise, remember that your time is the most precious asset. Think carefully about how you are spending it and prioritise the important over the urgent.

I hope that this blog has given you a helpful plan for how to allocate your work time.

In the next blog in this series, I’m going look at another aspect of how to make the most effective use of your time.

I believe that with passion, consistent effort and wise advice you can succeed in your business.

I wish you all the best and I’ll see you next time.

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Work Life Balance

by Phil Latz

Hi, welcome to the fifth blog in my personal growth series that I hope will help you become more successful in your business.

As a business owner myself for many years, I understand the challenges that you face. 

Today I’ll be sharing with you about work/life balance. 

I’m going to challenge some ideas you may have relating to this topic.

Government surveys show that self-employed business owners on average work longer hours than typical wage earners.

You don’t have to scratch too far beneath the surface with many business people before you’ll hear a comment like, ‘I know I should be spending more time with my family’ or ‘I wish I could spend more time with my family.’

Sometimes that’s followed by a justification such as, ‘Still, I’m doing all this for them.’

If you’ve got kids, especially younger kids, they really don’t care how much money you make in your business. The thing they most want from you is your time and attention. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that any sort of toy, or electronic device, no matter how expensive or fancy, is an equal substitute.

On the other hand, you don’t need to feel guilty about enjoying your work. After all, isn’t that one of the reasons we started our own business? Some of us feel like we’re hard-wired for business. We’re driven. If you’re like that, then taking a year off to look after your kids full time will be a year of frustration.

Clearly, every individual and family needs to find the balance that’s right for them. That’s why it’s called a work/life balance. 

Swing the scales too far in one direction and you might be spending lots of quality time with your family until the day the bank repossesses your house because you haven’t been making any money to pay the mortgage.

But you don’t want to swing too far towards the other extreme. What’s the point of working long hours, building a huge business and making millions if one day you come home to a large, but empty house? I’ve always considered one of my best business achievements has been to maintain a good relationship with our family throughout these decades, not to mention staying married for 35 years and counting.

How can you ensure that the same is true for you?

I’m going to look at two aspects, work time and then family time, before bringing the two together.

My first tip is that regardless of what you’re doing, live fully in the moment. When you’re at work, try to fully focus upon that and try to limit distractions from your personal life.

Likewise, try not to take your work home. Especially late at night. That’s a recipe for poor sleep and ongoing stress-related problems.

When you’re at work, make the most of every moment. In the next two videos, I’ll be sharing proven techniques for effectively allocating your work time, but for now, I’ll just talk about one. It’s something used by ActionCOACH called the Fun/Skill matrix.

Imagine a chart with the origin point representing tasks that are low fun and require a low skill. Fun increases along the vertical axis and skill along the horizontal axis.

What tasks should you be spending the most time on? The ones in the far top right corner. They’re the tasks that you both enjoy most, because we invariably become good at what we enjoy, and that bring the greatest value to your business. These will be higher level, higher skill tasks.

Meanwhile, look at those tasks closest to the bottom left corner of your matrix. You don’t enjoy them and they’re lower skilled tasks. Hire new staff or delegate to existing team members to do these tasks.

You don’t have to wait until you can afford to employ permanent staff to start doing this. Think laterally. There are plenty of offshore virtual assistants, contractors and automated systems and other effective ways to stop low level, unenjoyable tasks clogging up your day.

Remember, you can always make more money but you can’t make more time. No matter how wealthy you are, you’ve still only got the same 24 hours in every day. Successful business people are never afraid to spend money to save them time, of course always in a calculated, rather than reckless manner.

Now let’s talk about family time.

Here’s one of the best decisions that my wife and I made, a few years after starting our second business. 

I had been working long hours for about three years bootstrapping our media business from scratch, with only about a week off for holidays each of the first two summers.

We decided that we’d restructure our publication schedule so that we could take a full month-long block off work every summer.

I still worked hard for the other 11 months of the year. In fact, having such a refreshing break let me work harder and not burn out. Meanwhile, our family enjoyed great holidays. We always went away for most, if not all of this time every year. When our youngest daughter finished high school and turned 18 we booked what we thought would be our final family holiday, a big five week tour of Europe.

But by then our family holiday is so much part of our DNA that we just kept on having them. The only differences are that our family is bigger now, with sons in law and grandchildren so we take shorter holidays and don’t travel too far because that best suits our family’s current situation.

Another key to keeping your closest personal relationships strong is a concept that author Stephen Covey calls your emotional bank account.

You have an emotional bank account with each relationship in your life. On any day you’re making deposits or withdrawals from this account, usually small ones. 

Sometimes you can’t avoid a withdrawal. ‘My plane home has been delayed. Sorry, but I’m going to miss Mary’s birthday party.’

As long as you’ve been making regular deposits, there won’t be any long term harm done by this sudden withdrawal.

How do you make deposits? By understanding the other person in each relationship, keeping commitments, clarifying expectations, attending to the little things, showing personal integrity and apologising when you do have to make a withdrawal.

Life doesn’t always have to be clearly divided into work time and family time. Sometimes you can create a third way where you can genuinely combine family and business time in a mutually beneficial way.

Many years ago, a good business acquaintance of mine who we’ll call Fred did just that.

Fred enjoyed sailing on the weekends, whenever his busy work schedule allowed. One day he suddenly suffered a serious injury that required him to be put into traction. There he was, one day flat out working, the next day flat on his back, immobilised in hospital for something like six weeks straight.

Fortunately, he fully recovered. Soon after Fred left his company, sold his house in the big city, moved his family thousands of kilometres to start a new life running a yacht chartering business in a tropical paradise.

‘You get a lot of time to think about what you really want to do when you’re just lying there in hospital,’ he said.

Not everyone can follow Fred’s path, or would even want to. But the key is to not think that you’re obliged to work in a job or business that you don’t really enjoy and that you’ll only be able to really do what you want when some magical ‘retirement’ date finally arrives.

As one wise person once said, ‘You’re already retired if you’re doing what you want to do.’ 

I hope that this blog has given you some useful ideas about how to successfully navigate the work/life balance challenge.

In the next two blogs in this series, I’m going dig deeper into how to make the most effective use of your time.

I believe that with passion, consistent effort and wise advice you can succeed in your business.

I wish you all the best and I’ll see you next time.

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