Learn from your success

I have listened or read a few articles (a few thousand of them.  Just remember that I never, never, never, ever exaggerate!) concerning the value of learning through your failures.  Some even advocate to fail early and fail often so that you can learn and eventually be successful.  Not me.  I don’t plan to fail.  In fact, I have never planned to fail.  I only ever plan to succeed.  This does not mean I haven’t failed.  I have and have done so in some very large ways.  But normally, I have mitigated well before such a failure is catastrophic.  And yes, I do learn from them.  Even before becoming a businessperson (oh so pc), it was one of my employers who set me up in management and perhaps in my future by teaching me exactly what not to do!  Was that learning by failing, well, yes in a way, the failures of others.  But that doesn’t mean for every observed failure, you can’t make it work.  A little more careful planning might just make your venture a success.

No, planning to fail is not an option.  The best thing any businessperson can do is to learn from success.  Perhaps from the success of others.  But that will only get you so far, as me too products or services can only take you so far.  To be the leader, to be the innovator and to have others copy you is a real sign of success and as they continue to follow instead of innovate, you will remain on the front foot.  And to learn by your own success and then repeating that success is the real secret.  Doing over and over again those things that make you money, make you happy, give you balance will make you even more successful.

So when you next ask me ‘How are you doing?’ and you know I am going to say “Fantastic!”, after which I will most likely say something like, “Same, same.” it is because I believe in the science of repeating your successes and learning from them.

Lest we forget

My father, John Gerald Mason served in WWII as a private in the army in two campaigns in New Guinea.  During his tour, he contracted malaria.  Upon his discharge in 1949, he was given the wonderful diagnosis of having just 6 months or so to live.  And so he refrained from seeking that what most returned servicemen do upon their return.  A wife, a family, a home.  However, some 10 years later, he met and fell in love with my mum and the rest, they say, is history.  He did succumb to that nasty malaria in 19 August 1971 (thankfully, some 22 years later than his original 6 month prognosis) from pneumonia which is quite often the case when battling the fever of an attack.  This left my mum a war widow by definition for which I am very happy to report, is, to this day, very well looked after by the various government departments of veteran affairs and repatriation.  As was my schooling, development and well being.  This was capped off by the wonderful people from Legacy who provided me with opportunities of fellowship, sponsored billets and a guiding hand when needed, right down to a simple dinner and the bus fare to return home from any city club activities on a Friday night.

The men and women who serve have done so and do so without question, without judgment and with so much lost opportunity that we must never forget them.  Nor should we forget their loved ones left behind.  Love you dad.  Love you mum.

Certification and service. An oxymoron?

Perhaps.   A certification service provider is really only as good as your primary contact.  And if you happen to be a small / medium business, you may not even register (no pun intended) on the certification provider’s radar.  There are many fundamental reasons why you get varying degrees of service and attention from the certification fraternity.  Here are a few.

If you wish to have the biggest market recognition from your certification trade mark, then realise, they also attract the ‘big end of town’ as their client base.  What this means is that 80% of their revenues come from 20% of their clientele. And if you just happen to be in the bottom half of the client pool, then you aren’t even afforded a primary contact.  You must deal with the operations department for things such as auditor availability, audit dates, reschedules, etc. Got a problem with a certificate?  Different department.  Got a problem with an invoice?  Different department.  And so on.  And remember, the largest provider is also one of the very few that has employee auditors which comes with its own pros and cons (and another post).  However, these guys do have resources and do have people in just about every location in Australia.  I just wish they would stop charging travel within metropolitan areas.  It looks so petty on an invoice.

Most other providers have a client manager mentality and that means your auditor is your primary contact.  This stream lines your communication and allows you to form a relationship with that person meaning you don’t have to induct that person into your workplace or quality system every time they show up.  It means they can truly add value once they learn the culture of the organisation.  However, not all providers allow these ‘client managers’ to actually book audits, which means you still have to go through some sort of back office bottleneck to get a date set up or changed.  Some don’t allow these people to quote on additional sites or additional risk systems.

Just keep in mind, there are certification providers who do all this from your primary contact and ensures you get the best level of care and service you deserve.  And if you are not, you get to resolve with them first to ensure the best outcome.  If not, it is just a phone call or email away to request a replacement auditor (or provider) and let the journey begin again.

Don’t give it away

This is true for both service and product based businesses.  So here are a few points about this.

A sample is not a giveaway.  In fact, the free sample or intro offer is a very astute mechanism for getting customers.  Just make sure you budget / plan this into your cost of sales and hence it has value and is smart business.

Don’t discount.  One more time.  Don’t discount.  It only devalues you, the product, the service.  It requires an exponential amount of sales to recoup the loss of margin.  However, if you offloading capacity, obsolete stock, etc, let the customer know this is what is happening.  Let them know this is an extraordinary circumstance.  And if you need to do it again, you need to review your stock holdings, your margins, prices and perhaps even your ‘grade’ of product / service.

Give them the correct amount.  Yes, the correct amount.  Not more, not less, the agreed amount.  This is pretty easy with product but so much harder for you service type people.  I know we are supposed to go the hard yards, under promise, over deliver.  But if you set this expectation, then your clients will not know when to stop.  They will ring you at night.  They will expect weekends.  They will want you to come in between planned visits because of their current crisis.  Deliver the agreed outputs and should they want more, charge them, rearrange them, decrease the service offering but make sure they know that they are getting what was agreed to, including the bill for the extra hours.  And if they are not in your standard terms for deviations, better get them.

Document control – the risk

How you manage your documents should be structured around the risk to the company.  In a law firm, structuring a legal response around an incorrect precedent is high risk, using the wrong annual leave form is not (unless of course you can’t go on holidays then the risk lies with the employee!).  Having a document control system that can manage both scenarios is desirable but not a necessity.  There are some things that are just so mission critical, just so commercially sensitive that they deserve the ‘extra hard yard’ of control to ensure things go right.  And so putting them on ‘google docs’ might not be the best solution, but in so many ways , it might.  It really is a mine field of exposure, mitigation and downright dumb luck.  And these are just the documents that you have complete control of.  Then there is the wonderful world of external documents.  Those things that you need to use, adhere to but you don’t publish or control.  Forget just having a clever repository for them, you will need a process of review, issue and recall to ensure things go right, especially in the field.  A great example of this would be drawings or specifications used at a construction site.
So I suspect you are now expecting a solution to all this.  Sorry to disappoint, but there is no definitive solutions to these complex needs.  Some are better than others.  Some are just wrong.  So here is a very simple list to review when considering your document management; MS SharePoint, Google Docs, DocuShare, Base camp, just to name a select few.  There are so many available via the cloud and some more worthy than others for review.  The main selection criteria you should consider are, single source of data, check in / out capability, version control, distribution control, data backup / recovery and others.  Good luck.

Old Blogger Link - http://www.johnmasonstuff.blogspot.com

http://www.johnmasonstuff.blogspot.com

Blogger Mysteries

Oh the joy of placing your life in the hands of the big brother.  Blogger is a platform from google.  In an attempt to get my 'brand' consistent, I started a new gmail account so that there was a professional consistency to the brand.  No longer will my handle be big bad surfer dude at gmail.com (fictitious, but just a silly) to johnjamesmason at gmail.com.  But in doing so, I had to export / import the blog I have been keeping for the last 18 months.  All seemed good, all seemed well.  There is only one small problem, no one can see the previous 255 posts.  Oh well.  Here is a link to my history; http://www.johnmasonstuff.blogspot.com.  Re-enjoy if you dare.

JASANZ, FTEs and other mysteries

All certification bodies are governed (within Australia) by JASANZ (Joint Accreditation System Australia New Zealand, I know you all wanted to know that!).  These guys issue certification bodies with an accreditation to supply certification services.  Because of this, each certification body is stringently audited by JASANZ in about the same manner that CBs audit you and me.   When they conduct these audits, they audit against the JASANZ requirements and the requirements of the CB’s own management system requirements.  One of the most stringently audited aspect of the CBs is audit duration.  And this is quite easy.  There is a published schedule of audit days compared with employees and management system.  There are very few interpretations allowed of this schedule and so if it says an audit will ‘last’ 6 auditor days, the records must demonstrate 6 auditor days.  Whether you do it by 6 auditors on one day or 3 auditors  over two days, etc.  They must match.  However the one big interpretation is the number of full time equivalent employees and the number of people conducting the same activity.  It is through these interpretations that can cause the differences in quotations you will receive from a CB.  We make sure you get the best integration of this which will ensure you get the price.  Here is just definition of getting the best result.  Define who is full time, who is part time, who is casual.  You can find this information from your employment contracts.  Just keep a summary.  For the part timers and casuals, simply convert / gather the time in hours, divide the number a full time is expected to work and get your FTE.  So when you asked, just produce the spreadsheet and there is no argument.  Hint; just make sure there is some correlation with your organisation chart.  The next biggest definition is how many people are doing the same job.  But that is just a bit of IP that I will keep to myself until you engage our services.  Just remember, make you best estimate as to how many are doing what and record it.  Then discuss this data with your CB.  You will be rewarded.