Alan Jackson of The Better Business Bureau Ltd.

Every day, scores of decisions are being made across your business. Many will affect your short-term effectiveness and long-term profitability. Yet organisations can be frighteningly inefficient at managing the information necessary to support their business processes.

I don’t have to tell you the costs of paper-based business processes. Manual information handling and management can cost “a bomb”. A typical worker loses the equivalent of several weeks a year searching for misplaced information at work. Documents are often lost for good.

Having the right information to hand when it’s needed improves productivity and the quality of all those decisions. So efficient management of this information is essential to the success of your business.

Content – a Growing Challenge

Typically, 80+ percent of an organisation’s a total information resource is vested in documents containing various forms of text, graphics and images. This “content”, as it’s called, unlike information in traditional databases, has little or no inherent structure. In the “information age” the availability and necessity for content is growing at an increasing rate. Yet many organisations undervalue, and most continue to neglect this important resource.  

Content is often spread across an organization in various departmental “silos”, making much of it inaccessible to the people who need it. Electronic documents, such as specifications, operating procedures, contractual agreements and regulations, that represent the lifeblood of the company are frequently poured into the ubiquitous and, usually, disastrously chaotic and under-managed facility, the “shared drive”. If you have any poignant “shared drive” horror stories you can share, please add them to the comments, below…

You need to gain control over your unstructured content to improve the effectiveness and turn it into a corporate asset. Properly managed information can add significantly to enterprise competitiveness and improve profitability. Workers who can search, retrieve, share and review information in context will reduce exception handling, failure demand and manual processing, bringing costs down and improving service.

Content Agility to Streamline Decision Making

Content agility is about using content to increase the overall responsiveness and productivity of your operations. It’s about being able to respond quickly and effectively to the business and transaction events that set important processes in motion. It’s about having the information on hand to support decision-making in business processes.

The strategies that allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information resides, is known by the generic term Enterprise Content Management (ECM). ECM methods and tools provide the ability to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes.

Consider the advantages to a customer service department when internal documents, scanned images of external documents and workflow functionality are brought together to allow agents to access any information needed to resolve a customer enquiry. Likewise, an accounting department could access supplier invoices, purchase orders from an imaging system, and contracts and regulations as part of an approval workflow. Web content management further enables presentation via a Web browser, allowing an organization to conduct business and commerce over the Internet. So a courier company could provide instant customer access to inventories, shipping and receiving documents, and waybills.

Reaping the Benefits of Effective Content Management

You need the right information to make informed decisions – maybe scores of times a day. Effective content management ensures that the right information is available when it’s needed most. These capabilities can deliver a significant return on investment along with a wide range of business benefits, such as:

• Making the most of the information and knowledge contained in your content,
• Reducing costs by saving the hundreds of man-hours every year that can be spent accessing, handling and manipulating all forms of content,
• Being able to react immediately to customer demands and other business events,
• Ensuring information security, accuracy and integrity,
• Improving regulatory compliance and, consequently, reducing and better managing risk,
• Processing work substantially faster,
• Extending the reach of information to wherever and whenever it is needed,
• Levering existing investments by sharing content between otherwise disconnected processes.  

Effective content management will reduce operating costs and deliver a significant reduction in fixed costs … so adding a significant amount of incremental profit to your bottom line. Having all the information needed to make the right decision quickly and efficiently satisfies clients, partners, suppliers, and shareholders alike.

The Way Forward

In a nutshell, if information is critical to your business functions and processes, your content resources must be easily accessible, completely secure and properly managed. There are a variety of proprietary ECM packages available on the market that can help. But before rushing to automate, which can prove to be a costly mistake (see: http://wp.me/pJElS-1C ), the proper disciplines coupled with properly managed shared drives are a good and relatively inexpensive place to start – as I’ll explain in a future article.

About

Alan Jackson is a business development coach operating in the UK Midlands region (www.bureau4betterbusiness.co.uk). Follow me on Twitter or email me at alan.jackson@bureau4betterbusiness.co.uk. Feel free to leave comments or subscribe for more small business productivity insights.

Costly I.T. Investment will only lock-in inefficiency if the underlying operational processes are not sound.
Redesigning these processes instead can deliver remarkable and lasting service improvements and bring
about a valuable change in thinking and organisational culture.

The Illusion of IT as a Panacea for Improving Service Performance

I.T. is often seen as the panacea to service improvement in back-office administrative systems and service industries. Whether it’s a CRM system, a scheduling database, or a performance management tool, there is a naïve view that if we make an investment in I.T. our problems will be solved and performance will improve.

But this belief is mistaken if there are systemic problems with the design of the operational system and management of the work. All your ills may not be solved by I.T. unless the underlying policies and resulting operational processes are sound.

In reality, applying I.T. to a system that is already inefficient simply makes it even more difficult to remove the waste at a later date. I was once asked to analyse the requirements for an enhancement to a complex logistics system to reduce complaints about delivery defects. The brief was not to improve the “on time in full” metric but to provide visibility of delivery defects (“overs” and “shorts”) so they could be managed better.

Apart from the proposed I.T. solution turning out to be unrealistically expensive, a root-cause analysis of the defects revealed that implementation of a number of simple countermeasures, many virtually cost-free, would all but eradicate the problems they sought to monitor! The countermeasures included simple mistake-proofing, improving working practices and incentivizing the right behaviours.

Had the I.T. solution been within budget, the inefficiencies and wastes may have been forever “locked-in” – the reason to address them having been conveniently “brushed under the carpet” – out of sight, out of mind. Customers are not impressed that you know how many times they have complained in the past. If you want to impress them, you need to stop the complaints coming in.

A rethink of your operations may be a lot more productive than tinkering with a broken system that may be beyond redemption. Adding I.T. “bells and whistles” may only give the illusion that things are running smoother.

Rethinking Your System

If you design your system from “first principles” to do what matters most to customers, no more and no less, you will inevitably improve service and reduce costs. You will be amazed at the potential for improvement revealed by identifying all the hidden, wasteful practices. And better still, everything you need to foster change and improvement already exists within your business.

You need to take a fresh look at your organisation and services as an integrated system, from the customer’s perspective. With this understanding you can harness the latent talent of both your managers and workforce to redesign your business blueprint. This means revisiting your business’ policies, the operating model – processes and procedures – the organisational structure and performance measures. You are then in a position to optimise your system by systematically eradicating inefficient practices to deliver in the most efficient way possible.

Below are the typical benefits we might expect for a call-out repair service.

• Reduction in end to end time (from the first call to completion of the repair) by up to 80%, or even more
• Up to a doubling of the first time fix rate
• Virtual eradication of failure demand (mainly progress chasing)
• 10 % reduction in time spent on repairs by tradesmen
• 10% of a tradesman’s day freed up by removing paperwork
• Virtual eradication of jobs rejected at post-inspection 

Your 6-Step Service Improvement Plan

I can offer a flavour of what you should do to change from a traditional mindset to thinking about your organisation as a system. Remember that the people who work in your processes and with your customers every day are the best people to help you design things from the customer’s perspective. They are the experts, and often unsung heroes within your organisation, so use them!

1. Establish how things are working today by identifying all the customer touch-points – where service value is delivered. Then spend some time in situ, not in some theoretical study at “arms length”, to understand the work and what the customer really values.
2. Look at the value stream and support processes, from start to finish; examine, for example, the last 100 repairs completed, 10 houses let or designs approved. Define “output measures” – i.e. measures of what matters to customers – and use these to quantify your baseline performance.

   Note: Be sure to avoid “activity measures”, these are the type the unenlightened use for top-down command and control of a workforce. For example, number of calls handled per hour says nothing about whether and how well the customer’s demand was met.

3. At each touch point, categorise customer demand into “Value Demand” (i.e. demand you are in business to deal with, like “I need a repair”, “I want to order a widget”, etc.) and “Failure Demand” – demand caused by a failure to do something or to do something right (“what’s happening with…”, “I don’t know how to…”)
4. Start with a common, problematical or costly failure demand and establish the root causes. If the impediments are related to the design of the current system, you put them in place (deliberately or inadvertently), so you can remove them!
5. Map the flow of each value demand. At each step look for inefficiencies – interruptions in the flow, wasteful practices (activities that add no value) and things that go wrong. Design process countermeasures for each source of inefficiency.
6. Document each improvement in your business blueprint and repeat continuously.

Reap the Rewards of Changed Perspectives

With the wrong perspective on the system, your policies will be wrong. You will then deploy the wrong processes, and use the wrong measures to monitor performance. When you can’t achieve your targets you will look for ways to ‘massage’ the data to hide them or make them more palatable.

Changing your perspective makes sense – if you find hidden waste and remove it, you will speed up the flow of work. Cash flow will be improved. Your customers will be happier. You will get less failure demand. You will free up capacity. Your staff will be more productive and staff turnover will be reduced, further reducing overheads.

If you completely rethink the way you design and manage the work, not only will you make remarkable and lasting service improvements, the process inevitably brings about a valuable change in thinking and organisational culture, which improves workforce morale. So think before you spend a fortune on an I.T. solution, which could be counterproductive in any case.

Alan Jackson is a business development coach operating in the UK Midlands region (www.bureau4betterbusiness.co.uk). Follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/B4BBler).

In my last blog (Business Blueprinting – The Key to Achieving World-Class Performance) I discussed how to banish disorganisation and improve efficiency by systematizing – establishing an operational blueprint that focuses on processes and managing them effectively. A blueprint captures tacit knowledge (what people know how to do but can’t explain), turning it into systems and explicit knowledge that others can use. You get big benefits by systematizing and you carry big risks that key knowledge will be lost, if you don’t.

But most small business owners have more than enough excuses for putting up with the disorganization, lost paperwork, missed deadlines, missing information, errors, wastage and long completion times – and with the consequential under performance and poor profitability.

If you keep doing all the technical work yourself, working in the business, then you’ll be forever be trapped doing it and never free up the time to work on your business. So with all the pressures of running your business, just how do you go about systematizing it?

Well, having decided that you’re going to start doing the strategic work necessary to develop your business blueprint, you need to make time, and this can be difficult at first. Don’t be put off by the size of the task. Remember how you eat an elephant – a bite at a time! So let’s consider how strategic work can be done incrementally, to get powerful results.

1. First take a good a look at all the tasks on your to-do list (if you don’t keep a to-do list, start one now!). Identify all the technical tasks and ask yourself, “Does this really need to be done?” and then, “If it has to be done, can it be done by somebody else?”

2. Pick a discrete, achievable task, preferably one that’s fundamental to the business

3. Document the correct way to perform the task, step by step, specifying what, why, when, who, where and how – use annotated diagrams and illustrations, even video, if they can add value or save on the narrative.

4. Note down the quality control standards for each step and for the expected end result – these describe how you know something’s been done properly

5. If it’s appropriate, create a check list – a useful aide memoire to ensure nothing is missed

6. Have someone follow through the steps with you – then revise the document, until you and your tester are comfortable with your newly documented system.

7. File a copy in your company’s Operations Manual.

8. Repeat these steps on the next task.

When the new system document is ready, not before, you are in a position to delegate, or even outsource, that task. Delegation without providing an established procedure is abrogating responsibility, which will just sew seeds of discontent among your workforce.

Don’t neglect the training that will be needed to successfully introduce and run this “system”. Learn how best to monitor the delegated procedure – that’s your new job! Don’t micro-manage, but make sure that you are kept in the loop on progress and performance.

Delegating is a big first step toward freeing your time so that you can focus on what’s really important. If you’ve always worked in your business, doing things your way, letting go of these tasks may be daunting. So you’ll need to persevere and take things a step at a time.

Your collection of system documents (your business blueprint) will soon start to grow into a living Operations Manual. This describes “how we do it here”, proven ways of getting consistent results that everyone follows. Note that it must be a living document, subject to continuous improvement, which means your change process is key to sustaining your new-found success.

Systematization and delegation are critical components in the development of a business that is balanced and inclusive. It will help you discover the natural place for yourself, your managers and your staff.

Alan Jackson is a business development coach operating in the UK Midlands region (www.bureau4betterbusiness.co.uk). Follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/B4BBLer)

All the routine, day-to-day operations of your business are quite simply the outcome of a process. These include manufacturing, ordering, payment, invoicing, timesheets, new account setup, status reports, in fact everything that makes the business tick. The processes that touch your customers directly, often called “value streams”, are supported by internal processes.

Inefficient processes mean your business is under-performing. This leads to higher costs and poor customer service, which dents your “bottom line”.

As companies grow they tend to end up with a mish-mash of paper forms, email templates, desktop spreadsheets and databases, shared document directories, and rely on ad hoc knowledge to handle day-to-day business. Disorganization results in problems such as lost paperwork, missed deadlines, missing information, errors, wastage and long completion times. Does this sound familiar?

Deming, an eminent quality guru, showed that over 90% of performance problems can be attributed to how an organization is designed and managed – its business system. Organizations without values, a strategy and well-documented processes typically suffer from employee problems, quality issues, customer dissatisfaction issues, and an inability to unlock their real profit potential.

Ironically, by the time most managers realize they need to get better organized, they are so over-worked and overwhelmed with “fire-fighting” that they do not have the time to work on their business. They are too busy working in it, as Michael Gerber recognised in his book “The E-Myth”.

World-class companies banish disorganisation by focusing on processes and managing them effectively – by systematizing. This is about taking tacit knowledge (what people know how to do but can’t explain) and turning it into systems and explicit knowledge that others can use. You get big benefits by systematizing and you carry big risks that key knowledge will be lost, if you don’t.

When a company operates according to a properly documented business system:

• Everything is very organized so it operates like a finely tuned machine,
• Employees have a positive attitude,
• Customers are happy,
• Innovation and creativity abound,
• It is a “gold mine”.

To improve things you first have to understand your organization as a system. Then you need to create an operational blueprint, the company owner’s manual. This lays down “how we do it here”. How we do what? How we do everything, from answering the telephone to hiring and firing.

In addition to company values, objectives and strategy, a business blueprint contains, for each business function/department identified in the organisational structure, every policy, procedure, form, document, training video, and other resource needed to run the business.

The blueprint should be so complete that day-to-day operations no longer depend on any particular employee. All ongoing operations and activities run according well-documented, efficient processes that are managed by well-trained, easily promoted and interchangeable employees. All processes are aligned to the strategic objectives and operate according to defined company values.

A well-prepared blueprint is essential for efficient and effective operation of your business, especially in today’s business environment. It:

• enables productivity improvement and growth without sacrificing product or service quality,
• makes the business process-centric rather than people-dependent,
• helps transition a business from a start-up to a going-concern,
• helps to create a positive team-culture based upon best-practices,
• promotes cross-training and multi-skilling,
• frees your best employees for promotion,
• increases the company’s intrinsic value and saleability,
• frees your time to build your business and to enjoy life.

Preparation of a business blueprint involves your entire team in capturing the know-how related to the roles they perform, systematically. Your employees should be eager to help once they realize they cannot advance in your organization if their roles are too dependent on them. Like you, if they want to maximize their opportunity they will want to free themselves from their “job traps” so they can assume new responsibilities and grow with your organization as it grows.

Ultimately the objective is to document your organization’s roles and processes so thoroughly that your employees can easily learn new jobs and advance with your organization when opportunities arise.

Alan Jackson is a business development coach operating in the UK Midlands region (www.bureau4betterbusiness.co.uk). Follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/B4BBler).

A true story illustrating how the lack of a documented, systematized process led to disorganisation on an epic scale – and it’s all avoidable with the right kind of thinking.

I’ve just started a new project in the Banking Operations unit of a major bank. The following vignette describes what happened over the first few days. It illustrates the problems and inefficiencies that inevitably arise when a company lacks systemization, in this case for handling a new starter.

To set the scene for the first day, I bowled up on Monday morning to the allotted location, one of several in the town. After a three-hour drive I was half an hour later than the contingency time I’d allowed because of that perennial problem, traffic. Multiple circuits round the car park and waiting for a space to be vacated didn’t help my sagging equilibrium.

First the gatehouse had no record of my arrival and the blank expressions were repeated at Reception. After some checking by the receptionist (punctuated by incoming telephone calls), I was told that my contact, the Project Manager (PM), had moved to a location across town some weeks previously – the contract agency had not been informed!

Ok, no problem, with a post code my satnav would take me there. But the next problem was no-one on reception knew the post code and the directions offered gave me little confidence that I’d be able to find it. After the receptionist failed to find the post code in various documents and after three telephone calls, I had to call the PM, apologetically.

I did get to the right place eventually, but it had taken nearly an hour and involved a number of people in completely unnecessary and valueless work.

A couple of hours later I was returning to where I’d started to pick up my allocated laptop and to be issued with an access card and photoID! But no-one had said that photos are taken only within a small time window, which I had missed, needless to say. The next opportunity was Thursday. In the meantime, I needed a chaperon to get into the office and the canteen.

Then began the saga of the IT account. The log-on details that came with the laptop didn’t work so the PM had to print out several documents to enable me to start some useful work. After a couple of quite lengthy calls to the help desk, which involved the PM, it was eventually determined that they needed to run a job to set up the account. It would take a day and they would call when it completed.

But no call came. So yet another call to the call centre revealed that they had tried to clone the wrong type of account. Recovering from this might take up to 5 days (this affected 5 other starters)!

By now I was exchanging SMS status reports with the PM who was busy off site. Looking for help from staff in the office proved fruitless. The PM contacted the manager who had issued the laptop. He, in turn, enlisted the help of one of his staff who obtained a new password for me – but, again, it didn’t work. In yet a further call from IT Support, we established an account on a desktop, but the laptop refused to play, until late the next day.

What do we learn from all this?

I did not find a single person during the saga who was following a prescribed, documented procedure, despite the likelihood that the bank takes on scores of contractors like me. Resources were not in place; everyone was trying hard and working to the best of motives but “ad lib-ing”. The whole system appeared to be working against everyone’s best interests.

The inevitable outcome was a plethora of inefficiency, wasted time and frustration that affected a large number of people, most with far better things to do. The cumulative cost to the bank of all this valueless activity must run into thousands of pounds a year. And the really sad thing is that, in my experience of joining nearly 40 on-site projects over the years, this saga is very typical. Very few companies get this process right!

It really does not need to be like this. With a bit of Systems Thinking (analysing the customer’s touch-points with the process), the main process (contractor induction) and all its sub-processes (such as IT account set-up) would have been adequately scripted, or systematized (detailing “how we do it here”).

The PM could have simply initiated an optimised (Lean) process during the previous week, following each step and checking off progress completion. Variability of outcome would be radically reduced, as would costs; failure demand (work resulting from a failed process) would be almost eliminated. The end customer (me!) would be impressed with the efficiency and all the participants happy with (another) job well done.

Your business processes are too important to leave to chance. Banish disorganisation by focussing on processes and managing them effectively – by systematizing - taking tacit knowledge (what people know how to do but can’t explain) and turning it into systems and explicit knowledge that others can use. You get big benefits by systemizing and you carry big risks that key knowledge will be lost, if you don’t. Fail to systemize and you become trapped in your business which will continue to underperform.

I’d really like to hear situations in which you’ve been on the receiving end of poorly systematized processes!

Alan Jackson is a business development coach operating in the UK Midlands region (www.bureau4betterbusiness.co.uk). Follow me on Twitter (http://twitter.com/B4BBler).

Sadly, some companies may simply not survive if this is their only strategy. The skeleton crew left may not have the capacity to deal with revenue growth in a rebounding market. The lost skills may be difficult to replace.

Economist John Maynard Keynes long ago called the unfortunate response of senior managers to cut jobs and costs across-the-board as the “paradox of thrift”.

This short-termism is undoubtedly fuelling the recession and driving to its current depths.

But an economic downturn can actually be the best time to rethink your business strategy and leapfrog your competitors! It seems counter-intuitive, but recessions offer invaluable chances to grow your business, solidify relationships with suppliers and customers, strengthen the talent pool in your organization, and gain lasting market share.

As Warren Buffett once said, “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.”

Rather than hacking away at costs indiscriminately, your objective should be to aim for increased efficiency. Trimming costs intelligently will release funds that you can use better elsewhere. Click here to see how a modest 5% across-the-board productivity improvement can double your profits.

To transform the performance of your business you need to start thinking differently about how your business runs – its processes.

Everything your business does, its routine day-to-day operations, is quite simply the result of a following a process, whether it be manufacturing, ordering, payment, invoicing, time sheets, new account set-up, status reports, and everything else that makes the business tick. Some processes, often called “value streams”, touch your customers directly; many support these core processes internally. If your processes are poor, your business will be under-performing. With lower efficiency leading to higher costs and poor customer service, your “bottom line” will be under pressure.

Every company’s processes are unique. As companies grow they tend to end up with a mish-mash of paper forms, email templates, desktop spreadsheets and databases, shared document directories, and ad hoc knowledge necessary to handle day-to-day business. Disorganization results in problems such as lost paperwork, missed deadlines, missing or incorrect information, and long completion times. This is what is often called “red tape”. In the end, red tape hurts the customer, and then your bottom line suffers.

Adopting ways of thinking from approaches such as Total Quality Management (TQM), Lean, “Just in Time” (JIT), Six Sigma, Theory of Constraints (TOC) and Systems Thinking will enable you to reduce lead time, inventory and wastage, improve quality and increase capacity and workplace morale. By applying these methods you will start to develop a truly remarkable business, with truly remarkable profits.

Although the roots of techniques such as Lean and Six Sigma come from manufacturing, as far back as Henry Ford, don’t dismiss them if you are a service provider. It doesn’t matter if you are in the business of cake-manufacturing or retail logistics – the concepts apply pretty much equally to all types of business. So, don’t be a hostage to fortune, take decisive action and check them out now!

Alan Jackson of The Better Business Bureau Ltd. is a small business productivity coach operating in the UK midlands region. Follow me on Twitter.

In part 1 I introduced you to a set of tools that will help you to build up Twitter followers in the locality that matters to you. These are the people whose word-of-mouth will make you and your business become better known and trusted.

You need to be well known and well regarded because when someone comes to making a buying decision, they are much more likely to choose a business they know. The relationship you’ve establish with them means they don’t have to take “pot luck” with someone they don’t know.

So if you’ve started to build your followers you now need to know what to Tweet about to keep your followers interested and engaged. You also need to be aware of what kind of Tweets to avoid.

You must Tweet about topics that are sufficiently interesting and informative to be Retweeted (forwarded) by your followers. If your material is good enough, your followers will spread the word to their followers…

Spread the Word with Effective, Compelling Tweets

As is the case with pretty much everything on the Internet, content is king on Twitter. You need to use content to position yourself as a subject matter expert in two or three important areas related to your business.

Make sure the topics you choose directly relate to the community you’re trying to build, although not every tweet has to be about you and your business.

Listed below are some of the topics you should start Tweeting about to build up a relationship with your local followers. This will build a strong foundation for your “Twitter brand” and give other Tweeters a reason to follow you.

• The two most important types of Tweet for engaging your followers alert them to:
  • useful articles and newsworthy items you find on the Web (not those from your local competitors!)
  • interesting and authoritative e-zine and blog articles, special reports and even e-books you write yourself (an authoring guide would fill an e-book in its own right!). Your own content should always encourage readers to visit your Web site.
• Retweet information from the people you are following that your followers will find interesting and informative
• “Divulge“ insider information related to your sphere of influence
• Participate in conversations when you can
• Share original thoughts and ideas
• Run customer surveys and polls
• Notify your followers of:
  • special events, workshops or demonstrations you are running
  • Special offers and discounts, especially limited time ones
  • money-off coupon promotions – ask your followers to Retweet (forward) coupons to other users to get a “finders” discount.
  • new product introductions

You can keep tabs on how well your word is spreading from your Twitter home page by clicking on “Retweets” and then “Your Tweets, retweeted”.

How many Tweets should you send? Aim for one to five Tweets every working day. Too few and hardly anyone will see them, too many and your followers may get bored or even irritated with them (nobody likes people who monopolize!). Don’t be afraid of posting a reference to your own content multiple times. Only a few of your followers are likely to see any one Tweet and you can always change the wording. Sending a Tweet referencing the same content every week for a while is acceptable. You can shedule Tweets using an application such as Hootsuite. 

How long will it take to build up your followers? Don’t be tempted to go wild, following people indiscriminately. Pick people you follow carefully, based on their profile. Aim to add, and follow back, about 15 to 20 each day until your followers are generating the number of leads your business needs to prosper. This won’t happen overnight; it may take several months and require you to write many unique articles to keep interest going.

If you don’t have anything interesting to say, say nothing at all. Don’t Tweet for the sake of Tweeting.

As a business trying to establish your “Twitter brand”, be sure not to Tweet about the banal, such as discussing what you had for breakfast or the state of the traffic.

You must use direct, explicit promotion (e.g. of special offers) VERY sparingly.

Do not ignore questions or comments by other Tweeters.

If you are consistent, genuine and provide quality, your word will spread and you and your business will become known. You are not advertising, so don’t sound like an ad and don’t try to sell yourself or your business. Attract people to you and continue to connect with them by what you provide.

Have fun, and happy networking!

 Alan Jackson is a business development coach operating in the UK Midlands region (www.bureau4betterbusiness.co.uk). Follow me on Twitter!

If you’re a small business dependent on local trade you’ll know the importance of word-of-mouth to attract new customers. But what you might not know is that the Social Media Website Twitter can do the same in cyberspace – and more efficiently!

Twitter is a free social networking, service that enables its users to send and receive “micro-blogs”, short messages (up to 140 characters) known as Tweets, often referring to another information resource, such as a Web site or e-zine article.

Even though the Internet is a global medium, there are ways you can use Twitter to “spread the word” within your local area. Essentially you do this by building up a group of “followers” from your catchment area who choose to read your Tweets. Your followers will pass on anything you Tweet about that’s valuable or of real interest by Tweeting to their followers.

So to use Twitter for actively promoting your business you need to know how to gathering Twitter followers in your local area, and then know what to Tweet! Here are some tips to get you started – more to follow in my next blog!

Building Up Local Followers

There are a number of free tools and directories that you can use. Try them all out and stick with the ones you find most useful:

• Twitter has a search function to find Twitterers within your catchment area who are talking (“Tweeting”) about subjects relating to your business. First go to http://search.twitter.com/ then enter your search terms followed by an area in this format:

“search term” near:”town”,uk or                       
“search term” near:”town”,uk within:20mi
For example, you could search for “botox near:Preston,UK” and find Twitterers talking about botox in and around Preston. Then follow those users. The general etiquette is that someone you follow will follow you back. 

• Do a search on Google or other search engines to find a similar business to yours with a Twitter presence (which will be indicated on their Web site); follow it. Look at their Twitter followers and choose some of them to follow. Your choice should be based on whether your customers are end consumers, B2C, or other businesses, B2B), how active they are and their location. Anyone interested enough in your competition to follow them are neatly identified as potential leads. They are likely to continue to follow you if you provide them with informative content on a regular basis (that’s probably why they are following your competition).They will most likely follow you back.
• TweepSearch (http://www.tweepsearch.com) searches Twitter bio and location information, optionally limiting the search within a selected user’s followers. Enter your search in the format: “search term” location:”location”
  For example, “small business” location:”London, UK” 
• To use TwellowHood’s directory (http://www.twellow.com/twellowhood/) just click on the UK on the map then select the nearest city/town. You can see how many Twitter users are in your chosen area and they are listed according to the number of their followers. Proceed as with the Google search above.
   
• With the WeFollow directory (www.wefollow.com) you can search for Twitterers in towns in your local area (consider signing-up, it’s free). Simply enter the name of the town or the county in the search box where it says “Enter a tag…” and select one of the name variants offerered.  Hits are displayed ordered by “most influential” or “most followers”.
• Loaded Web (http://www.loadedweb.com/) is another directory service that offers not only a geo-centric directory of Twitterers that you can select by county and town, it also covers local blogs and businesses that have signed up. 
• Sign-up for Twitter alerts by email at http://tweetbeep.com/ to keep track of conversations that mention you, your products or your company. You can even keep track of who’s Tweeting your Website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like bit.ly or tinyurl.com).
   
• Sign-up to Mr Tweet (http://mrtweet.net), which can identify people who are followed by your friends and people from your own followers list who you might want to follow back. Stats are provided to help you decide (their number of followers, chances of your receiving reply, update frequency). 

Good luck! In my next blog I’ll show you the sort of things you should be Tweeting about, and what you must avoid if you are to keep your followers interested and, of course, receptive to your subtle marketing.

 Alan Jackson is a business coach operating in the UK Midlands region (www.bureau4betterbusiness.co.uk). Follow me on Twitter!

Companies usually face unremitting pressure to increase overhead resources to meet objectives such as better customer service and product quality. Overheads can account for 35-40% of manufacturing costs, and can be double that in the service sector. Few companies would question the principle that overhead costs should be kept as low as possible, but not so low that profitability is put at risk.

In this article I will briefly examine various ways of unlocking the value of the overhead by improving its ability to contribute to key business and customer needs, while reducing its costs significantly.

Turning the Spotlight on Overhead Activities
Processes, and the activities of which they comprise, determine business performance and are the key drivers of cost. A critical review of overhead process activities ought to identify cost savings in the region of 5-10%, possibly as much as 25%. In some areas, costs can be heavily cut, although other areas may even need extra resources to meet business imperatives more effectively.

Key opportunities may lie in restructuring the organisation, introducing new systems or even in changing customer service levels. In manufacturing and distribution, improving product availability, cutting stock levels or reducing lead times may offer the greatest potential. The challenge is to identify the big opportunities that will deliver significant results, blending them with quick wins to generate enthusiasm and momentum.

We need to understand all the activities that take place within the business and assess whether they align with management’s critical success factors, which must relate to customer value.

Overhead activity falls into one of three categories, core, support or diversionary.

Core activities add value to the business directly. They are the activities on which the organisation needs its staff to spend most of their time: purchasing, designing, selling, distributing and invoicing.

Support activities do not add direct value, but enable core activities to take place. For example maintaining records or travelling to meet prospects, customers or suppliers. The value of these activities should always be questioned – “is it necessary to travel or could the same be achieved via a conference call?”

Diversionary activities add no value to the business, but arise from a failure somewhere in the organization, such as delivery of the wrong goods because a small mistake was made in taking the customer’s order; manufacturing variances resulting from a hurried product design; checking and correcting work received from another department.

Some 20% of total overhead activity may be diversionary activities caused by failure demand, which represent pure waste. That’s where the major cost reduction opportunities lie. Management doesn’t budget for diversionary activities. But as they generally involve dealing with fixing ‘urgent’ problems, this time has to be found from somewhere.

Inevitably, it comes from cutting corners on the core and support activities. This degrades the quality of outputs, which, in turn, causes diversionary activities elsewhere. Ultimately the customer suffers, either at the point of delivery (a service agent is not carrying the replacement part) or delivery lead time is extended. Diversionary activities are particularly pernicious as the people responsible are far enough removed that they may be oblivious to the pain their failures cause.

Activity analysis can demonstrate the impact of failure demand on other departments and expose the false economy of saving resources in one department, at the expense of critically important activity in another. Activity analysis provides managers with metrics they need to argue the case for rebalancing of resources, up-skilling or recruitment.

A review of overheads to minimize costs while delivering the required service levels needs to include:

• The Voice of the Customer
Services provided by the overhead must be what external or internal customers, require, no more and no less. Question the reliability of assumptions about customer service level requirements and how well those requirements are met compared to the competition?

• Resource usage
Resources must be balanced to support those areas of the business that are critical to its success at the expense of those areas that are less critical.

• Organisational structures
To improve effectiveness, structures must be flatter, with the minimum of management tiers to shorten lines of communication and devolve responsibility to the workforce.

• Systems
All management systems (“how we do business here”) must be clear and focussed on the areas delivering maximum benefit to the business; information systems must provide adequate and appropriate support.

By thinking about activities in different ways it makes it far easier to make changes across an organisation in a structured manner, looking at the relative merits of making reductions in some areas and increases in others.

Please feel free to add your comments below. Please visit my Web site at www.bureau4betterbusiness.co.uk.

Ok, so times are hard, especially for small businesses. The UK recession is the longest in living memory. Sadly, many small businesses have been caught “like rabbits in the headlights”. It’s easy to panic as leads dry up, clients shut their wallets, revenues decline, and balance sheets go into the red. What has worked in the past is no longer working. So there they stand, transfixed, waiting for the impact. When it comes, as it most surely will, there are a number of excuses they will inevitably have used along the way to justify their lack of positive action to arrest the decline.
Excuse Number 1: There is no point. We are all doomed!

So many have “bought into” the recession that they run the risk of simply making failure a self-fulfilling prophesy by becoming resigned to what seems like an inevitable fate. It doesn’t have to be like this. There is no inevitability for those prepared and equipped to change.

Excuse Number 2: I am waiting for the economy to recover, then everything will be ok

This is the “leap of faith” excuse. Reacting to the recession by “battening down the hatches” and waiting for the market to turn round and get back to “normal” are dangerous strategies that many businesses will simply not survive. Markets seldom come out of recession looking the same as they were before. The skeleton crew you have left may not have the capacity to deal with revenue growth in a rebounding market.

Excuse Number 3: I don’t have the time

This is the classic excuse from managers who are just about hanging on. They are so focussed on “fighting fires” they fail to address what’s really important – preventing fires from starting in the first place. So they doom themselves to dealing only with the urgent, until they are overwhelmed – “fiddling while Rome burns”, as the saying goes.

Excuse Number 4: I am doing everything possible

What this excuse really means is that they are doing all the same old things that always worked in the past…but not any longer. The new economic reality is that the thinking behind the actions that affect performance and productivity has to change.

Excuse Number 5: I know my business so I know it’s operating to capacity

This is the classic excuse of the artisan. In the good times, when people have money to burn, inefficiencies don’t matter so they get locked into a business then simply become the norm. It takes a new perspective to stand back, identify and then eliminate inefficient practices to unlock “hidden” capacity.

Excuse Number 6: I don’t have any money to make any changes

Looking at investment before looking at removing inefficiencies from current operations is a big mistake. It’s tempting to see such things as new plant, extra space or another shift as the saviour but it’s a diversion from continuous, incremental improvement, which comes with a much smaller price tag or for free!

Excuse Number 7: I’ve spent all my spare money on advertising and I’m not getting the leads

Many small businesses rely far too much on classic advertising. It’s relatively expensive and the return on investment is often poor. There are many more cost-effective  marketing channels that are often overlooked; some of these alternatives are free, and they can generate many more leads. What is needed in this situation is a marketing blueprint, with systematic, tested campaigns and plans rather than just random stabs at lead generation.

Excuse Number 8: I can’t work any harder than I am already

Improving productivity means doing more, with less exertion and less resources, in less time. It’s not about being either aggressive or defensive, it’s about structuring things, organising things and doing things more intelligently. As the saying goes, “work smarter, not harder”.

Excuse Number 9: My business is unique so nobody can help me

All businesses operate to a business model that can be boiled down to an organisational structure and processes, some delivering value to a customer and others supporting these “value streams”. As the saying goes, “There’s nothing new under the sun”. Just applying the disciplines to document a business’s blueprint, it’s “book of knowledge”, can deliver huge efficiency savings.

Excuse Number 10: I don’t know where to turn

The technician who works almost exclusively in the business rather than on it may know little about how to make the business work when the going gets tough. You need a critical review how your business is performing to develop an action plan that focuses on simple and easily implemented, low-cost activities that will give immediate results. These can make the decisive productivity improvements that increase profitability and the value of your business. If you can’t do this yourself, get help! Get a business coach who can provide insights and approaches that will be self-financing.

Of course, I know you won’t ever find yourself using these excuses. You know that even during a downturn, there are still plenty of ways for smart managers to improve the competitiveness of their businesses. Recessions are an excellent time to refocus on what your company does best, attract new customers, and build for the future.

But if you do, by any chance, recognise any of these excuses – start to worry, or better still, take steps to do something about it, NOW! And top of your list should be looking for ways to improve the performance of your business by increasing its productivity. With a change in mindset, not only will you be able to ride out the downturn, you will be able to position your business to take on those customers relinquished by your competitors who are going down the pan.

I work regularly with small and medium business to implement profit improvement plans – check out my Web site at www.bureau4betterbusiness.co.uk.