So here’s a good one. I emailed my local (large) newspaper yesterday, The Seattle Times, and asked when the paper was supposed to be delivered to my home in the morning. They gave me the times for weekday and weekend. I then emailed back and asked that my paper arrive by those times. They responded “We will notify your carrier”.

Two issues in one. First, Customer Service. Shouldn’t they have said “We will ensure that your paper arrives on time”? The principle here is that customer service should take the problem from the customer and resolve it – not bounce it to some other part of the organization as if they were somehow different. In the eyes of the customer they are all the same.

Second, we have the issue of Product Delivery. What other large organizations rely on independent contractors to leave their product on your driveway (or in the bushes, out in the rain, etc.), hopefully in time to be of use?

Is this a useful business model for the 21st century?

Jim

Silent Majority” is a term we have been hearing for a long time. It identifies a sometimes large group of citizens who do not involve themselves in politics until some major issue comes to the fore. Does this group exist? I think so. Why are they silent? Easy. They are too busy raising families, working hard to make ends meet and to execute their life plans, to become involved in public issues. Or so they think.

If one does not plan to have a career in politics or public service, it is all too easy to fail to put anything about politics into your life plan. This is a mistake. What goes on in the world of politics affects all of us. As someone said, elections have consequences. But sometime, when people rise up, become vocal, and express their concern about what is happening in the country, those in the political world are surprised. They shouldn’t be.

So take a look at your life plan, and see what it contains regarding politics. Don’t have a life plan? Make one. My book will help, if you want help. But do it. Avoid being an eternal member of the silent majority by putting into your life plan the need to understand and respond to things political.

Jim

Any organization that serves others must provide what is commonly called Customer Service. That is, when a customer has an issue, they need some one to call who will get the issue resolved. Here are some thoughts on providing excellent Customer Service:

1. Don’t give the customer any reason to call. That is, anticipate and fix problems before the customer ever sees their effects. We used to hold top level weekly meetings where we reviewed all unsolved customer service problems. More often than not these were new issues, often easily solved, but things the customer service people had not been trained to address.
2. Get rid of those extensive call director menus, and allow your customer to talk to a real person, quickly. I know this is a cost issue. My solution? Allow the customer to self select into a longer automated queue if they are comfortable doing so.
3. Have your Customer Service people take charge of the customer’s problem, lift it off of the customer’s shoulders, give your people a procedure for dealing with these things, and compensate them for doing so. Get back to the customer when a solution is provided.
4. Training, training, training. How can you expect your customer service people to know the answers to all the problems that might come up if you do not gather information company wide, craft solutions, and inform your people about them?
5. Compensation. Craft a structure to pay good employees for good work, as an incentive compensation plan laid over base wage.

Remember, you will not receive a call from your customer when he switches to your competitor.

Health Care Reform

It is interesting how the process of making public policy highlights so many of the business adages in my book Fortune & Freedom: The Entrepreneur’s guide to Success. Previously I wrote about the need to define the problem before you attempt to solve it, and noted that little of this had been done in the national debate on health care. Someone must have read my blog, because starting shortly thereafter all I have been hearing about is the goals of health care reform. Unfortunately, there has been little discussion about specifics that would address those goals.

So let me give you an illustration of a business fallacy titled “Oh no, you did exactly what I told you to do!” See the picture in my book of the man with anguish on his face? He has just seen the result of his hasty solution to a problem he has not taken the time to define and analyze. Will this be all of us after the Health Care Reform initiatives become law? Or, to say it another way, let’s go back to the issue raised above, define the problems we are working to solve (there are plenty of them), and discuss and agree on solutions to those problems.

It seems to me that most people agree on the need and the goals of health care reform. The problems lie in laying out solutions to specific health care problems, and discussing and agreeing on these solutions. Pretty much all the discussion I have heard to date is vilifying the other guy for not agreeing with you. You certainly could not stay in business if you ran your company that way.

In my book “Fortune & Freedom” The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Success”, I note in Part IV that identifying the problem before solving it is priority number one. I quote my middle school math teacher who said: “If I had ten minutes to solve a problem, I would spend eight minutes reading it.” So what is the problem we intend to solve with the proposed new Health Care Legislation? Is it covering people who do not have Health Care Insurance? Covering people who do not want health insurance? Or is it cost?

The President at various times says it is both, and that the present high cost of health care is caused by the profits of the for-profit insurance companies (not all providers are for-profit organizations). Some politicians such as Robert Reich assert that government competition to private providers will bring down the cost. (If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you – but back to the subject at hand). So what is the problem we are trying to solve?

And, of course, the above is only talking about the evidence of the problem, not its causes. So once we decide whether we are solving the problem of cost or coverage, we then need to identify the drivers, the problems that cause high cost or spotty coverage. Only after these drivers are defined and agreed to can we start to craft a solution.

Have you heard the phrase “A solution in search of a problem”? We need to be careful what we wish for. Our wish might be granted.

Jim

OUT OF WORK?

That question is being asked more often in recent months. If your answer is “yes”, then in addition to seeking your next job opportunity, you might consider working on future opportunities in general.

In “Fortune & Freedom” I talk about the need to accumulate “necessary skills”, whether you intend to become an entrepreneur or simply to improve your future job performance. Those skills include selling, learning how our political system works at the grass roots level, and others. (Take a look at the Table of Contents on the www.furtuneandfreedom.biz web site for the list of the five key skills I think are important).

So between job interviews volunteer in a political campaign (yes, they are going on even now), get a job selling on commission, or take a course in accounting. My book has a lot more detail on what I recommend. So go for it!

Jim

Discovering True Fortune & Freedom
A Book Review by Terry Schmidt
http://www.managementpro.com

Let me make a couple of points. First, a credit crunch arises in an economy when a meaningful number of people come to believe that they might not get their money back from their bank, stock investment, etc. Given this, repeatedly telling people that they are likely to lose their investments and then jobs if they do not support a candidate or vote for bailout legislation, is the height of lunacy. No wonder we are seized by this credit crunch.

Second, people pay $3 million for a 30 second super bowl ad because by and large advertising on television works. Wouldn’t you thus think that several years of media bombardment telling us how poor the economy is might have a similar effect? We used to call it Bush bashing, then election politics, and now bailout, but it is all media advertising, and the message has been the same.

Who is surprised by where we have come to?

Jim

Fortune and Freedom

Hi, I’m Steve O’Keefe, and I’m helping The Old Guy with his online marketing. I promised Jim Hirshfield I would add a post here once a week to talk about how we are approaching online marketing for his new book, Fortune & Freedom.

Jim hired me to do a Blog Outreach Campaign. During the campaign, my team will reach out to three blogs each day and ask them to tell their readers about this book. We did a few things in advance to increase the chances of success.

First, I read the book. You would be surprised how many publicists and marketers never read the books they are promoting. Even editors and publishers often don’t read the books they are publishing. In some cases, the authors have not read their own books! This happens with ghost-written books. Several times I have found authors completely unaware of what is in their own books!

The best ideas for marketing come from a deep understanding of the product and a deep understanding of the target audience. When you do your research on both sides of that equation, you can “find the lightning” that links your product and the target audience. For Jim’s book, time is the lightning.

“Time is the one nonreplaceable asset,” says Jim Hirshfield. If you’re not convinced of that already, his book will do the job. In marketing the book, we are focusing on saving journalists and bloggers time. We wrote a really short news release and a really short pitch, hoping journalists would reward us for our brevity by asking to see the book.

So far, so good. About a dozen journalists have asked to see the book already. Here’s what one top business publication said about our pitch: “The reason we said yes instead of no (like we have to every similar request we’ve ever had in the past) is because you kept it short. We like to support this sort of behavior.”

Besides a short pitch, we also save time for journalists and bloggers by providing a well-chosen excerpt in multiple formats: text, Word, PDF, and HTML. The excerpt, along with high-res and low-res artwork, is readily available through the Media Room on Jim’s web site or by request.

You can’t tell by this post, but we’ve learned the hard way that we get better results when we say less. Think of ways you can reduce your pitches, news releases, and business plans to the bare minimum. You’ll find people appreciate it and reward you with their full attention.

STEVE O’KEEFE
Executive Director, Patron Saint Productions, Inc.
Author, “Complete Guide to Internet Publicity” (WILEY)

A Writer’s Budget Take a look at the attached Word file link. It contains a budget worksheet for a self-published book. This information was no where to be found when I embarked on my writing project. Perhaps you will find it helpful.