Jeremy Hall – Confessions of a serial entrepreneur

Prepare for the year ahead

As my wife and kids head off for a show, I spend the day sorting out and reviewing my personal and business paperwork. I am not just talking here off going through a few draws and emptying the in tray. This is a fully loaded yearly service. Every file is reviewed and old paperwork no longer needed is burnt. I reorganize the filing system to ensure that documents are easier to retrieve and replace old A4 lever arch files with new ones. My office looks tidy, it feels tidy and most of all, I feel in control and prepared for the year ahead.

The Running Man

I have not been out for a run this month, and to make matters worse, most of November. The results are clear and obvious. My body is returning to its natural weight, my diet has been infiltrated with too much chocolate and other junk food and I am feeling sluggish.

To be fair, I am probably no different to the rest of the UK population, many of which are waiting to the 1^st January before they address the issue. For me, this issue will be addressed today. 2011 will be a great year for me, and one thing is for sure, I need to be fit and healthy to ensure I get the best out of it. You do not need to be a fitness fanatic to be a wealthy and successful business person, but a base level of a healthy lifestyle and self control will help.

Who’s Who in Leasing

This biographical reference book was published by us in 2008. It did not sell well. We can all dissect the reasons why. Ultimately, the individuals who feature in the book and the leasing sector in general does not see the value of a publication that lists all the main players.

 For me, it just shows how short sighted so many people are in this business sector. They show little enthusiasm for knowing the competition, arrogantly dismissing other companies. That is why very few people in leasing make any serious money. They have not seen the potential of acquisitions or trading thoughts and ideas with competitors.

Top quotes…

We hear them, we read them, I just wish I jotted them all down. They are all there in the public domain in thousands of books and I would imagine there are numerous famous quotes books at Amazon. For me, reading a great quote will always be in context of a story or business biography.

Quotes I use and refer back to on a regular basis:

“When you’re going through hell, keep going”. Winston Churchill

 “You come into the world with nothing, so if you leave with an overdraft you have made a profit.” Unknown

New Year’s resolutiuons

I would like to see the research on how many people have New Years resolutions and how many of this group keeps them. My gut feel is that most adults will chat about the subject but very few will actually keep to their resolution(s) past 31^st January. I did hear once that research on gym memberships discovered that most people who signed up to a gym in the New Year, on average only lasted to the 16^th January.

Half the problem is that resolutions are not quantifiable, for example, play more tennis, take more pictures, drink more water, get fit. (All past resolutions from the Hall household.)

I do not bother with New Years resolutions any more. I cannot think of one year where I got to the 31^st December and could actually remember what they were let alone did I keep to them. I do write a list of things to achieve in the following year though. Unfortunately, here again my track record is poor of doing what I set out to do.

Today, I am taking some time out to put together a 2011 “mind map.” This document will spread across sheets of A4 paper stuck together. It covers everything from when to buy a new car to work we need to do to the house, other personal objectives and also things I would like to do in business. I will highlight some real tangible goals, but for the most, the document is a list things I would like to do. For example, even though our house was completely renovated in 2004, we still have a big list of things to do such as repainting or buying curtains for a bedroom. There is no expectation to achieve all the tasks on this list as cost and time makes it prohibitive. I do want to use the mind map as a blue print for the bigger picture of planning the future.

This is the first time that I am to put together a mind map that encompasses both personal and business tasks/plans/objectives. The results should be interesting.

Cappuccino survives the recession

I had an idea this Christmas was to be expensive after spending £56.50 on wrapping paper and £66.00 on a Christmas tree. My Mother-In-Law confirmed my suspicions when she announced the turkey set her back a further £70.00.

 It’s funny how I think about this cost, but it business you can waste many thousands very easily just on a few wrong decisions. All it takes is to employ a non performing employee for one month too long on £30,000 per year, and that expense would pay for your Christmas trees and wrapping paper for the rest of your life. This is why I find it so interesting to meet tight people in business. They do not spend the £2.50 on a cappuccino, when in the overall scheme of life, it is an irrelevance.  May be they are trying to send a message out that if they are tight with the little expenditure, they will be frugal with the big costs as well. For what it is worth, I don’t think so. Being tight (if you have the money in the first place) is a state of mind.

Successful entrepreneurs are on the whole not tight with their money. They will spend cash as they believe in their own ability to make cash. They know that a proportion of the money they spend will be wasted, but in the overall scheme of business, it is immaterial.

That said, I intend to be more careful with the cash next year, but the focus will be on the bigger expenditure and not to cut out the odd cappuccino now and then.

Happy Christmas

Happy Christmas!

Have a great time today, I will!

Big Man

Every year on the 23^rd December, my Brother-In-Law and Father-In-Law and I play golf and retire to The Ship in Marlow for a few drinks. This yearly ritual has been going on some time now.  Standing in the bar discussing how well we would have played if there was no snow the phone rang. It was the Big Man in leasing – an extremely well liked and respected individual.

Big Man gave up drinking alcohol for a year and raised quite a bit of money in the process. As the money he raised during the year went up, so his weight went down, by an amazing five stone in the full 365 days. Since that date, his weight has returned to its natural level plus a bit more, so Big Man now stands in at an alarming 20 stone plus.

He was returning my call from a few weeks ago when I asked him to join me for the first 100 days of no drinking starting 1^st January. He is up for the ride and be it has requested a start date of 6^th January. The bet it on, £10 for every day he does not drink. However, to get the £1,000 which I will donate to Barnardo’s, he has to do the full 100 days, if he does not complete the task, he will have to put his hand in his wallet.

For me, not drinking for the first 100 days on 2011 is about fitness and keeping a clean mind. It is a great way of showing discipline. For Big Man, I think it is more a necessity. He has a big heart, but if he is honest, not big enough to take his weight.

It is all in the presentation

I was sitting in the car this morning, engine running with the three kids in the back, waiting for my wife so we could make our inaugural visit to Westfield shopping centre in London. My mobile rang, it was Mr. Manning, a person who I had lunch with recently. He thanked me for setting up a trial account with WestWon.biz, our company credit information website and reliably informed me that he has not undertaken a company credit check in ten years. I responded in my half hearted way of still keeping the sales process alive by saying the site was originally set up for Sales Directors to provide invaluable information on prospect customers. The sale was lost, he has mentally branded these credit reports a product to be used by Financial Controllers and Credit Controllers and hence can see no value.

Walking through the vast expanse of Westfield shopping centre, I noticed a person sitting down with an unopened iPad box. This product was so well presented, even before it was opened, you just knew that the product was to be brilliant. We all know Apple have some of the best product designers in the world and that is one of the key reasons they have $37bn in cash at the moment!

Our first stop was Jo Malone, a store that sells cosmetics. Standing in the long queue, I witnessed four people wrapping their products and one person at the till. It was a work of art, the packaging and product presentation was amazing. My thoughts were that it did not matter if the actual item you were buying was rubbish, these products were bought mostly as gifts and the sale was all in the presentation.

Now this brings me back to the conversation with Mr. Manning.  I feel the reason why I have never made a success of our company credit information business is because I have never presented it correctly. I never wanted to compete with companies selling credit information to Financial Directors, I wanted to sell this to Sales Directors as a tool to help sell leasing (ultimately we dealt with the sales teams as opposed to the finance teams.) Our website, brochure and product has always been aimed at financial people.

I have for some time been giving some thought to a way of presenting credit data to sales leaders. (Note to the team at CoCredo, the idea has come from you originally, not me.) If we could totally repackage this product and redesign the look and feel and specifically aim it at sales leaders, we could be looking at a niche product in an untapped market.

I know that I need to be totally focused next year and to be fair this product idea is outside of my personal business plan. The challenge I have as an entrepreneur is that I just cannot put the idea down and say no, it is like a drug addiction, I have to at least give it a go.

As we all wind down for Christmas, take a look at how successful products and companies for that matter are presented. Of two companies with a similar product, the successful one will have the better packaging.

Writing the spec for a new website

A New Year, a fresh start and time for a new website at WestWon. So many companies like ours, spend the time and money on a website and then leave it alone without further investment.

With our http://www.westwon.co.ukwebsite, we have not made any changes since it was created. To make matters worse, we have not even added items to the “News” section. The site is out of date and it does not get many hits because we have not invested in search engine optimization.

I started to document my thoughts in a website brief. The key difference with the new site is that I want it to be dynamic. I wish that we can make all the changes internally without going to our web designer. So for example, with the bad weather there was limited office cover for a day. I needed to quickly put a note up on the site saying this. I also want to be able to manually put in all the phrases we need to ensure we feature highly with the likes of Google. So for example, we finance microscopes. On the site, we need to mix

The product – microscopes

Location – list of towns

Keyword – finance or leasing

Hence, someone may search on “microscope leasing in Chesham” or “finance for scientific in Amersham,” we will be found. As and when we finance other types of assets, I would like to quickly add these without going to the effort and cost of using web designers.

 With the brief just about finished, I send off an e-mail to our IT company to see what is involved.