PetesWeekly

I don’t know about you, but I feel that I must be getting old.  I am still trying to recover from my birthday in February, which turns out to be rather a long way back, but seems like yesterday.

The speed with which this year year hurdled past is matched only by the speed with which the economy worldwide has collapsed.  Except in China, of course.

But as we get closer to Christmas, and hopefully snow, it occurs to me that the single biggest regret I have in life is not that I haven’t yet reached my goal of retiring rich.  Or that I’ve given up on that, and just surviving to retirement age is the new target.

Nope, my biggest regret is that I have spent the past 35 years focused in the wrong direction.  No matter what business books tell you, a client-centric focus is not the right approach for the small business owner.  As one of my clients delicately put it a while back “Don’t ever confuse us clients with your friends.”  Before you get frothy, please bear with me for a moment.

Many of my clients are great friends.  But that’s not the point.  The responsibility, nay the duty, of a small business owner is to be kiddie-centric.  Clients come and go, but your kids are going to be messing up your house for the rest of your life.  (Or messing up your life for the rest of your house, whichever comes first.)

They are a lot more forgiving.  They are unlikely to abandon you when you mess up, or at least for as long as you have money to share.

In my case, until just a few years ago, every waking moment was spent on business.  I rather liked the challenge.  I still do. And frankly, it’s so much easier a challenge than preparing children for life.

But my biggest regret is that I didn’t get to put my kids to sleep every night they would have let me because I was too busy travelling, or too busy coding, or too busy in meetings, or too busy doing a bunch of thngs that seemed more urgent, but were nowhere near as important.  My children assure me that “it’s okay dad”.  But it isn’t really.  Maybe they didn’t miss it.  But I did.

Nowadays, when Mrs Carruthers and I go to any school gatherings with young Ms Carruthers, it is tacitly assumed that Danielle is accompanied by her mother and her grandfather.  When I was about 30 I met a man older than 50 who told me exactly what I’m telling you.  I ignored the best advice I ever got because I was too busy to believe him. In hindsight I think that 30 year old version of me was a prat. (I have no shortage of clients happy to confirm this.)

As I write this I’m listening to some vintage Rolling Stones.  Each song brings back a memory of a person, a relationship.  I have no idea what my bank balance was at the time that I heard each song for the first time.  And I don’t know what business was like.  But the people, them I remember.

So, for this last e-mail of 2011, may I humbly beg you to follow the only real piece of good advice I can give you this year? Take the time to put your kids to sleep over Christmas, and – what the heck – throughout next year.  That investment is safer, more guaranteed, and will generate better returns forever than anything else you could possibly do.

Except, maybe, taking the time to put your partner to bed every now and then as well. That’s also whole heap of fun, it turns out, and you won’t be kicked in the nuts as often.

You don’t actually have to prepare them life. Just loving them is enough preparation – for both parties. And it sure is a lot more fun.

At the risk of cheapening the point, when your family takes strain, when your relationships are in turmoil, you might as well forget about business until you find balance.  Relationships are more important than anything else.

And finally, don’t ever think that your kids are interested in the money. They aren’t. They don’t care, at least while they still want you close by when they sleep. They quite like you, though, so matter how tough things might seem to you, they just want to play. Try it. It’s kinda fun! There will be enough time for clients next year.

God Jul (Merry Christmas) and best wishes for 2012. We’ll talk again in January. Thanks for a fun 2011.

One of the biggest challenges for us micro-business owners (self-employed) is that we tend to work from home. 

On the one hand it is cheap, comfortable, and a cold beer is never too far away. On the other hand we turn into hobbits.

It is easier to explain if I look at it from an expat perspective. Arrive in Britain or Norway, for instance, and you see all these folk dashing about looking busy, effective, and professional. It is, to be honest, a little disheartening, and we are tempted to feel rather inferior.

At least until we get to while away some time working amongst these titans of commerce. And then we find out that it is all smoke and mirrors. They’re as confused as we are, if not more so. (We Saffers tend to be quicker problem solvers because we know that otherwise we won’t be eating tonight. The socialist locals know that no matter how little they do Dave or Jens will bail them out at month end.)

I found all of this out when my wife kicked me out of the house a few months ago. I cannot repeat her exact words because they were loud and in Norwegian which I still struggle with. But her intent became clearer when I came out of the bathroom one morning to find my office neatly outside on the porch.

A few days later I moved into a small glass-walled office down the cliff at the local boat harbour. I have one of 9 offices surrounding a central area with a Nespresso machine. (Guess what clinched the deal.) 

I feel like a voyeur because I can watch all of the activity around me. Norwegians at the office, I must gently say, are a lot less impressive than them cross country skiers using the freeway to practice when the snow has not yet arrived. (We expect it today. This is not because today is special, it is just that we always expect it today, no matter what the date is. Norwegians love snow.)

Now, about that activity. Well, there isn’t much. Norwegians, like Brits and my fellow countrymen, glare at their screens, pick their noses, scratch their ears, vanish for long lunches, and leave early on Fridays. In between they look glum because no sales are coming in, and when a real live prospect approaches, well, they mess it up just like the rest of us. 

So, a hint if ever you find yourself in a new place. (That could be a new country, or in SA, a new province – which is just like a new country.) Go find an office to work out of for a few months. get to see how impressive the locals really are at close quarters.

And then start working from home before the snow arrives, even if that means losing the wife. Even she cannot be colder than the local weather between November and April.

Seth Godin wrote this week about how new technology affects our businesses. He suggests that instead of asking ourselves how we can adapt this new way of doing things to our own efforts, we rather ask “how will this technology undermine our efforts”. Undermine, in this context, is in the sense of a sinkhole appearing in the middle of the M1.

It struck a chord. A while ago I wrote about webinars hurting conference venues. Owners of venues and event organisers assured me that I was wrong. Yet, over the past five years, I have done more than 1000 hours of profitable live online training, but less than 50 hours of live seminars. It turns out that lot of other trainers are going down this path. And the more people who attend online, the more who start to use it for themselves.

I have a South African friend who trains techies. He used to fly around the world doing his training in situ. (Highly techie field.) After joining one of our webinars, he began to ask how many of his clients would prefer the online process, rather than paying for him to be there. That was 18 months ago. Last month he invoiced more than R1,000,000, training people around the world through webinars, without leaving home. (That means that none of that money was paid to venues, hotels, car hire companies, airlines, or printers – all of whom normally take a large chunk of that income.)

I contrast his results with the response I get each time I talk to a teacher about webinars. “Yes, but, what about the personal relationship.” And in that single statement they discard the future of teaching.

Frankly, I think that relationship means a lot more to the teacher than it does to the person sitting behind the desk. Who can recall an hour of Latin with Wesley Francis without a shudder? Classrooms are great for people who need to be forced to learn. But for those folk who have their own drive, they are hell.

Each of us who is inside an industry looks at it from inside our own box. Webinars won’t work for a group of four-year-old kids. But, they are an godsend for people under time pressure, or for deep training of smaller groups, or for impromptu groups. (Venues and impromptu are mutually exclusive concepts.) And these are the folk who make up a lot of the seminar market.

Let’s forget training for a moment. Let’s look at Google Translate. I use it because I am grappling with Norwegian. As do most of the others in my class. (Polish, Russian, Polish, French, Filipino, Polish, Iraqi, Thai, and Polish.). Google Translate does a fine job of quickly turning Norsk into English, or Russian or Polish. It is a fine tool.

When I am lost, which is very often, I type in the entire text of the letter that’s arrived with a large official stamp, or the website I am looking at, or the newspaper I am reading. Google Translate gives me fine rendition in English. Not perfect, but close enough.

When I speak to a Norwegian about the subject (and more recently a German Ph.D.) she bursts out laughing about how bad Google Translate is. And then she regales me with a tale about how some or other local idiom gets translated literally rather than rendering its true meaning.. (“He laughed his lungs out” being the German example, which means “he stubbed his toe”, I think)

In getting lost in that one tiny error, she discards a tool that the rest of us idiots use daily. And the world has no shortage of us idiots creatively playing with our tools as we dream of world conquest.

Which gets me to thinking. Maybe we shouldn’t be looking at what our competitors are doing. They aren’t doing anything that we are not, other than maybe doing it better.

Maybe we should be looking at what complete strangers are doing because they are not locked in by our history. They are taking a complete new look at what we do, and seeing it for what it is: Quaint in an olde worlde way, and ripe for change.

“My fondest hope is for world peace.” This is what all beauty queens say. Including Sandra Bullock. And “my people are my biggest asset” is what all businesses are fond of saying, often just before firing 15 percent of said biggest asset.

But any person running a small business needs to work from another rule book. Our role ensures that we will only ever hire staff who don’t fit well, and then look after them in a way that ensures that we will get the worst from them that they can offer.

I might be generalising, but after working with more than 30,000 SMMEs over the past 20 years, I can count on the fingers of my left foot the number of ventures with great staff, doing great work, and having real fun.

I was thinking about this after reading Mike Schüssler’s economic report about the sad lot of entrepreneurs in South Africa. Who would have thought that you and I, on average, earn less than the 22-year-old sweeping the floors of a govt toilet block. And that’s not allowing time off to toyi-toyi about greedy rich capitalists like you and me.

As I see it, the reason we battle with staff issues is simple. A big company knows the risk when it employs a new person. So it does it with extreme care. It defines the role, detailing the exact skills needed. It then takes as much time as is needed to find the right person, with an expert team to meet each hopeful new staff member. This means that they cull from the list the axe murderers, light-fingered accounting staff, and those people whose Ph.D. is not really from Oxford in the UK, but rather from the Oxford Online University in Ulan Bator.

Before the new staff member joins, he/she then signs an employment contract that gives the company all legal rights possible, and the staff member none. (This is the reward for being a “our biggest asset” staff member.)

One must contrast this with Mike Microbusiness. He knows that he needs help only when he starts working 25/8 instead his usual 24/7. He doesn’t employ a person with some expert skills that he doesn’t have, a person who can add more value than Mike is paying. He employs a person to share the pain. Instead of focusing on the right things to do, he adds an overhead to try and finish all the things he should not be doing.

It’s simple to qualify for employment at Mike’s. You need to be breathing, with at least one leg. The leg, of course, is optional as long as you can start next week.

Mike doesn’t have the knowledge, reserves, or cash to do any real evaluation, and often employs the first person to arrive that doesn’t look like his grandmother.

Then Mike throws as much of his load at her as he can. This is, I’m afraid to say, not a well thought out process. The employment contract, if it exists at all, is verbal. (“Gosh darn, I know I should have got that signed when she joined,” is one of the refrains I see on business Forums everyday.)

According to Mike Schussler, most Mikes earn less than most of their employees, for taking all of the risk. And when things go wrong – and 96 percent of the time they go wrong in the first 10 years – Mike’s staff will still hate him for letting them down.

I am a little embarrassed to say that that is why I now live the life that I do. When my business closed, I lost everything. My staff each had to find new work, and hated me for that. I had to find R2million to cover the debts incurred in not firing them much, much sooner.

Now, I don’t employ staff. I didn’t used to have an office, but my children drove me to drink too early in the day, so I now rent office space month by month. No surety. I have a partner, but he lives two countries away, which is far enough away for both of us to be happy. I automate as much as I can. And each thing that I can’t automate I humanate. (This is handing the work to online freelancers in India or some other warm place where people don’t earn a lot of money.)

I don’t drive a smart car because I don’t have to impress clients. I don’t wear a suit because I don’t even have to see clients.

All of which means I don’t need nearly as much money to survive as I used to. And I don’t run nearly as many risks as I used to. And maybe, just maybe, I will finally get to retire in the next five years, which has been my dream for the past 30 years, a little like a carrot in front of this donkey.