Jeremy Hall – Confessions of a serial entrepreneur

One month to gain 10lbs, three months to lose it

It takes three times the time to lose weight as it does to gain it, and add to the time you need enthusiasm and be prepared for hard work. It is the same in business, one bad business decision can burn up three months of cash and profit quite easily.

 As I reflect on where we are so far this year, I am trying to mentally gauge how far into my three year plan I am. “How much true value have we added to the business, will we be on target for selling a company(s) in three years for £1m plus?”

Clearly we are in a much better place than on the 1^st January, our direction is clearer, cash flow and profits has improved, our outlook for Q3 and Q4 positive. The hardest thing I have to deal with is the thought this whole year is about repairing the damage from previous years. By December, I hope to have the beginnings of a “war chest” (a pot of cash in a business) and not fighting the fires that need to be extinguished.

Will I look back on January 1^st 2011 and only see the foundations of a great business? Regardless of where we will be, getting the business in good shape, bringing the cash in and sorting out historic challenges has to be dealt with first.

Leaving it to the last minute

My wife and I were shown around a private school this week. The very presentable well spoken 17 year old who was tasked with this important position – he was for that morning the face of the school, the sales person in effect – educated us to the school’s history and exemplary academic record whilst we viewed the 250 acre site.

We spoke about course work and he noted how he did it straight away as opposed to leaving it. Now when I was a student, everyone left their course work to the last minute.

With this young man’s words ringing in my ears, I reviewed my 100 day plan. I am very happy with where we are, a lot of the tasks have either been started or are completed. Regardless, there are more to do. Like any entrepreneur, I do not like getting into detail and administration. It is time not spend driving the business forward or meeting customers. I do though need to take a day “off” just to focus on these tasks. Once completed, the business will run more smoothly.

Basic sales skills

I still remember today the content of my first ever sales course I went on over 23 years ago. And here I am, standing in front of a few rookies talking about

1. Timescale
2. Decision maker
3. Budget

We have limited time which is a pity. Having basic sales skills is so very beneficial. It is an art you can use in many facets of life, not just in the day job. As and when the time is right, the company will invest in external sales education for the team.

The key starting point is confidence. I need my team to get orders – urgently! It is irrelevant to me if they are for £50 or £5,000. As soon as they get an order they know they can do it, “Mr X. bought of me so you shouldn’t you.” In addition, you can stick a sales person through a month long training course on systems and procedures, but the best way for them to learn is to get an order and run through a real life example.

Prospects galore

I have worked out, we never should have to cold call in our company. My LinkedIn network alone has over 30,000 contacts in a 50 mile radius (these are the contacts of my contacts.) The Who’s Who customer base is many thousands of customers not to mention all the other contacts we have. When you factor in referrals in the future, we have too many companies to target.

We run through all the potential markets for meeting books and company plaques. We have to stop writing them down, the list just keeps growing and growing. Focus is what is needed and a clearly defined plan for our salesperson activity.

Our map of the South of England arrives and we mark a boundary – a one hour’s drive from the offices. The plan is to hand deliver as many samples as we can to coincide with field based sales meetings.

I role out the key performance indicators to the sales team. These targets are mostly based around profit and activity be it we have a number of other targets such as customer retention and new customer acquisition.

We are ready to go and start hunting…

Office bound

Time just disappears when you have a new team, not to mention the equipment you have to acquire and install. We have now documented a list for all new recruits of paperwork that is needed to be completed and tasks necessary to be done. It all takes up valuable time.

Positively, the groundwork done will have a long life span so the next time we recruit it will be easier.

The world is changing

The laptop was finally switched off at 11:45pm tonight. Trying to run internal training unprepared is not a great idea and having new starters where there are loose ends on the paperwork does not fill them members with loads of confidence.

I have managed to tidy up a document entitled “Achieving Sales Success at Who’s Who.” This was a paper I originally wrote in 2002 to train new sales people in questioning techniques in the leasing sector.  It was not only the obvious changes that had to be made to accommodate our team selling a completely different range of products.

It is no longer necessary to carry a map in the car and go to AA Routefinder online. I used to advocate always having a disposable camera in the car in case you were in an accident.  With regards to planning for a meeting, the manual said always try to drive to the client’s offices before a meeting when you are in the area to judge what size company they were. Now the manual reads have a Sat Nav, use Google Earth and Google Streetmaps, and most mobiles have a camera built in.

Earlier in the day, I pulled together all our HR paperwork into one Excel folder. The paperwork was out of date, we have been using different type faces, fonts and located (saved) in different folders on the computer.

We covered off areas like health and safety and first aid. These are all things that just get forgotten in a small company. Apparently, the first aid officer must refresh their skills every two years. We have people using a heat press where they have had no official training and just as importantly, they have not signed to say they have had the training – all a potential liability.

My brother who is a solicitor said to me many years ago, at the start of every year, take a day out to undertake a complete legal audit.

My advice, which I shall be following tomorrow, is to take a day out every year (or two) to run through every aspect of HR, training, employee reviews etc. Time and effort well spent.

Recruitment

Many a year has gone past when I have recruited on mass and ran a structured training program.  For a business owner, this is always a difficult time.

There is all the HR work for the new candidates;

1. Offer letter
2. Contract of employment
3. Employee handbook
4. Trust and confidence agreement
5. Job description
6. Key performance indicators, targets

Then you have to think about the business;

1. Our company manual is out of date
2. We have to find work for them to do in the first few days when they are getting up to speed
3. We are missing order forms, terms and conditions, stock reports etc
4. We have to set up computers with log on codes and e-mail
5. We need to set up log on codes for the variety of computer databases we run

Lastly, there is the training schedule, the document that has all aspects of the job and company where training needs to take place.

With no HR or training Manager, and a day job to do, I am doing the best I can. The hardest thing will be keeping to the training schedule over the coming months. I am only too conscious that I have offered training in the past to employees and never delivered. Like most other business owners, the day to day running of the business takes over.

It has to be done well. The quicker and more thoroughly we have a trained, motivated team, the quicker we will get results. I want – need – our team to hit the ground running, I am looking for results fast.

Tellytubby to Terminator

With the daily diet of exercise, I am slowly being morphed from a Tellytubby into a Terminator. Well Terminator is a big exaggeration, but I am starting to be the results.

Every month thousands of pages of magazine articles and books are published on diet and exercise and everyone seems to have their own ideas of what to do. I always enjoy reading the conflicting advice.  One fitness guru will advocate drinking cold water before going to bed whilst another will say don’t.  A well known rugby coach explains that exercise before breakfast and last thing at night is best as you are burning fat calories. Another article will read never exercise before bedtime.

Leaving this conflicting advice to one side, I ask myself a simple question. “What are the effects of exercise on business?”

I feel physically and mentally stronger. I am more alert; I seem to speak slower and more clearly in a confident voice.  When I get in the car first thing, my thoughts are more positive, I can take on the challenges that will be faced in the day.

I have read numerous business books in the past. Many of them will have a chapter on lifestyle that will touch upon exercise, diet and religion. I do not know what research has been undertaken on how fitness and diet impact business success, but if there was any, I would like to read the results. For me,  I believe there is a direct correlation between lifestyle and success.

Wasting money in business

One of the reasons why my investment went sour in a company called In The Bag was because of wasting money. They were notching up a monthly bill of £3,500 for stationery alone, a near impossibility as they only had circa 15 staff. I collected all the half used bottles of Tipex together with the pens, paper and ink cartridges into one place; we had enough stock to start a small stationery shop. If that wasn’t bad enough, the next months bill came in at over £1,500.

The waste was embarrassing. A complete lack of control and simply not enough thought to where the company money was being spent. The writing was on the wall, if the directors cannot manage something as simple as a stationery cupboard, they certainly could not manage a business.

We try to run a tight ship and not waste money. I – not my colleagues – still end up placing orders for a variety of things that fall into the genre of a complete waste of money.  Paying for a script to be written for a DVD that does not go ahead, buying data for a book we will not produce, asking my colleague to buy the wrong size envelopes, changes to the website, buying stock for a project that does not work, letterheads that we do not use, the list can go on.

A business has to have some waste, it has got to make poor decisions to test the boundaries and try out new ideas. We bought letterheads because we intended to do a mail shot, we paid for a script because we to were to produce a DVD. It’s just painful when the time comes around to write the cheques out, like this week

When 10 x 10 does not equal 100

After leaving Sheffield Polytechnic (now I am proud to say Sheffield Hallum University), I had a job selling laser printers for a very brief three month period.

I was one of ten new recruits brought in by the MD who had this naive belief that as one individual actually did £10k gross profit in a month, ten of us would do £100k. Simple mathematics and a very profitable model – in theory.

 Ram us in a room with the yellow pages and a telephone and after a few weeks training the cash would come rolling in. How wrong he was.

Now we tried this at Wyse Leasing. Eight new telesales recruits in a “pod” with a Sales Manager and a big target to hit. They were a bit like the rear gunners on a Lancaster bomber in World War Two where life expectancy was two weeks. We did not get it right first time, but second time around we did achieve success.

I have been thinking how we can build a UK sales team without the major investment in salaries. Franchising is a logical solution or commission only sales people. To make our new Who’s Who divisions work, we need to focus on customer acquisition. The business model is based on high customer retention and repeat orders. If we invest in customer acquisition now, we will reap the benefits for years to come.

It must be a dilemma facing Sales Directors all over the UK who want to grow their business. On paper it makes sense to recruit a team of ten knowing that some will fail. However, the reason why not many companies do this is because of the fact that it does not always work, other than if you are a big company with a lot of time and money to invest in training and personal development.

Just because we have a business that is scalable, it does not mean it is always easy or sensible to scale up. Regardless, I am plotting a plan.