Jeremy Hall – Confessions of a serial entrepreneur

750 buddies on LinkedIn

I am getting weekly e-mails via LinkedIn from people who I do not know asking to link in to me. This is not unusual, but the caliber of these people is proving to be interesting. The Indian Chairman of a mining conglomerate employing over 6,000 people and a Member of Parliament to name a few. Be it I will be a famous entrepreneur and business leader and immensely wealthy, it would be a bit of an exaggeration to say I am at that level now. So why are these people asking to link in to me?

I can only assume it is Who’s Who, or that as I am widely connected to numerous successful business leaders, people are finding me via other people they are connected to. I do not know the answer, but one thing is for sure, I intend to find out how my name keeps cropping up.

So, if you need anyone to help out with a bit of political lobbying, give me a call.

The sky is blue

On January 4^th I documented on our white board the profit target for January. In the breakdown there was a line entitled “Blue Sky.” I attached a figure of £5,000 gross profit to this profit centre.

Now a Blue Sky profit centre is one that just does not exist at the start of the month. All I knew is that on January 4^th, from somewhere, somehow, I would find £5,000 of profit. In Entrepreneurs Wasteland I forgot about this profit centre that is there for every one of us. This is the profit centre that month in month out always delivers on time and on budget. And please, let me let you into a little secrete; all you have to do is believe and have faith. “What a load of bollocks” I hear you say, “we all know that there is no Tooth Fairy or Father Christmas, why should we believe in this profit centre that we do not know about, that is not planned but keeps delivering month in month out!”

Well, I might not believe in the Tooth Fairy or Father Christmas, but many years ago I did, and year in year out they did deliver. And this is the same in business with regards to the Blue Sky profit centre, believe in it and it will happen.

This profit centre has been delivering to me for some months now. It might be a fluke sale of 1,000 personalised meeting books, a highly paid consultancy project, or a deal that comes out of thin air, but it does happen. This month, the most amazing thing is a deal came in last week with £5,000 profit. It really did appear from nowhere, through some conversation that took place best part of four or five years ago. Bizarre, but true.

The moral here – give yourself a Blue Sky profit centre target every month, have faith and truly believe it is achievable – then watch the results.

How many days are in a day?

We went out on Friday night with Mr. Squirrel and his wife to see the Jersey Boys. (The London theatre show.) This blog is not here to plug other people or events, but when you are in London next, make sure you get some tickets, it is well worth it.

Now Mr. Squirrel does consultancy work and gets paid £x.00 per day from his clients. The day rate is not cheap and I would imagine he earns a reasonable living from this, all of which he will squirrel away. When you are on a day rate and there is only one of you, your total income is £x.00 multiplied by 20 for any one month. Or is it?

So I ask the question to Mr. Squirrel of how many days can he find in a day? Suffice to say, as a lot of the work is replicated between clients, he does get a few days work out of one day, i.e. charge two or three clients for a day’s work on the same day.

He is definitely the best fed squirrel I know!

Mr. I Do Not Exist

We receive a letter in from Mr. I Do Not Exit with an invoice for £250 made out to our company. He is taking legal action against me for wasting his time and harassment. He completely denies having anything to do with the lease contract he has. If I stop writing to him and turning up at his house unannounced, then he will let me off the £250. “Have we got it wrong I ask myself?”Has someone else committed a fraud, paid the lease and used his name?” If I do have it wrong, it will be very embarrassing!

We check the original lease agreement, the authorized signature is exactly the same as his signature on the letter sent to us and received today. It is no fraud, he has our kit and he knows it. The stupid arse has now completely pissed me off, but I raise a smile. He must be a complete lunatic. We made a call to the original supplier of the equipment to check further to make sure we have not made a mistake, and guess what, we haven’t. I write back to him, a tough letter confirming we will be taking legal action and I enclose another invoice. He has made a number of points on the letter. Advice from a solicitor some time ago was simple, do not bother answering any of his questions. Some advice from me, if you want to piss someone off, write to their home address so the letter arrives on a Saturday morning! We will be sending this lunatic a weekly invoice every Friday, first class of course.

For all my avid readers, this is fun. You have to have a little bit of this in the mix when you are running your own business. I could have easily dropped this and said do not waste the time, but no, the business world can be a serious place so when you do get the opportunity to have some fun, do so!

Birthday greetings

I truly believe that calling/e-mailing and wishing someone you know in business a “Happy Birthday” is a great idea. So today, when I wake up, my first thoughts are not what presents I have today, but who will contact me!

I look at my e-mails first thing, Tony Woodward, a Dad from school sends me an e-mail. “Where did you get my birth date from I enquire?” “Plaxo” comes the reply. I get two other e-mails, one from “A suit that does not fit dot com” and another one from Virgin Atlantic.

I look at these two e-mails, what a great way to advertise your business. It is just so simple, why does everyone not do it?

I start my day with a blood test to check my cholesterol level and Gamma GT reading. “Name please”, “Jeremy Hall” I say. Date of birth, “27^th January 1965” I reply. She sticks the needle in my arm and sucks out the blood before she connects that it is my birthday today.

Later in the afternoon I speak to our IT company to get an update of where we are with our new admin system and most importantly, the section that deals with birthdays. Next Monday it should be working!

How much are your curtains worth?

I have just moved my home insurance provider from Chubb to Home and Legacy, a saving of £1,000 per year. In doing this, they have to send an agent out to view the property and review our contents, a great idea as if there is ever a claim, an independent person can validate what we have said is the same as what he has seen.

We had this chat about what is the value of our possessions. Our agent explained that most families do not know exactly what they assets they have. He gave an interesting analogy. Play the game where you put ten items on a tray, look at them for a minute then take the tray away. See how many you can remember. We need to write a comprehensive list of all our items, what they are worth, where and when we bought them from. We need to track serial numbers and take a picture, then copy this document and ensure it is held in a couple of places. All in all, at least a day’s job.

It is the same in business, I would imagine that most companies have an adequate insurance policy but I know nearly all companies do not have an adequate record of all their assets. I know this as we looked at writing a fixed asset software package a number of years ago. It seemed so simple. You spend a few thousand pounds on writing the software and you sell this software solution to numerous companies. However, the demand was close on nonexistent. It is just deemed to be unimportant.

For me, I will take that day out to picture everything from a curtain to a saucepan. At least. I know when this job is done, I will never have the use for it.

Is it time to advertise this blog?

This is my blog, I write it to keep me focused on the big picture, the goal I have. It forces me every day to take a few minutes out and think about what I am doing and are we on track. An interesting by product is that I will be able to look back at this one day and actually remember what I was doing. Spending over 20 years in business, I have forgotten so many amazing things that I have witnessed and erased from my memory all those negative events, all because I did not keep a diary. You never know, it might even find its way into an international best seller!

Meeting with Mr. Young today,(he is 61 buts looks 31) he informs me he reads this blog and enjoys it. I feel quite proud, it is only recently that I have learnt to spell, let alone write a blog on a daily basis. I know the grammar is poor, there are many mistakes, but that is because this is from the heart. I do not sit around for an hour everyday thinking about what to write. Speed is the key, it is a case of “bish, bash, bosh.”

Now talking of bash, I receive a call from Singapore (a couple of days later – I am late with this week’s diary entries) My buddy has just left his office and is taking his life in his hands traversing his way through the Singapore traffic. “ I really enjoy reading your blog he says”

Wow, two people in one week making reference to this famous piece of work.

So my question to myself – you out there in cyberland – is it time to advertise this blog, or is it our little secret?

Hitting Mr. I do not Exit hard

Not to be confused with the client of Mr. Obnoxious, Mr. I do not Exit is the person who wrote back to us saying he did not live at his home address. (See January 4^th) Our new brief has been instructed to not mess around with the standard nice “letter one” from a debt collector, but move straight into the “go for the jugular” letter. This will be fun, he hasn’t a leg to stand on. Why does he not just call us up and deal with it?

Not having done this for some time, I am interested to see the exact process you go through when you deal with debt collectors.

My new “brief” – “slang for a solicitor”

I have been highly recommended a debt collection company. We need a company that can bang out letters to companies that do not pay us, where the process is simple and the costs reasonable.

I have an initial chat and all sounds great. They drop me an e-mail with the things they need to set up an account for money laundering and “know your customer” regulations. So here I am ready to start dealing with a new brief and they need war and peace on me and my company to prove who we are. It all seems just too much effort.

Mr. Obnoxious

My brother is a solicitor, my sister-in-law a barrister, two of my three next door neighbors are solicitors, I know many solicitors and I have spend a lot of money with them in my time. All the solicitors I know in a personal capacity are very pleasant, intelligent and interesting to be with. So then, why is it that so many solicitors specialise in being obnoxious in the work place?

Now Mr. Obnoxious represents a person I am taking legal action against for nonpayment of a bill. As my solicitor has hit me with a £750 bill for his work to date on this subject (two letters and a few calls etc) I decided to call the solicitor of the person I am taking the action against directly, to see if we could have a sensible chat and come to an arrangement.

He wants me to prove we have legal title in the equipment first. I explained that we did have it and I could get the Bank of Scotland to provide further evidence, even though they have already confirmed this to him. I said “Let’s just assume I have full legal title, can we have a chat about how we can deal with this.” Suffice to say he did everything he can to be as difficult and obnoxious as possible and put the phone down on me. “This conversation is ended” he said.

He has done his client no favours, we will hit him hard now, not just for the bill of £4,500 but the replacement cost of the equipment at £20,000. This will be going all the way, he has picked a fight with the wrong person.