In business: If you talk the talk, you better walk the walk, too!

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Many years ago, I worked in a school in Taipei. It was very much a wonderful learning experience because I saw all the mistakes that our school’s owners made over the years. I still remember most of my students fondly, and just occasionally I will run into one or two of them on the street. But one of the biggest mistakes we made, and it was years later that I realized it as such, was our motto. We enjoyed our work, we liked the students, and we thought we were good, so we stupidly created the motto: “The best of the best”.

Best of the Worst: Best of the Words

Unfortunately, the motto was quite hollow. It was supposed to invigorate us and inspire our students, but it didn’t ring true in our hearts. Our flyers were printed on green A4 paper, and distributed community wide.What they really shouted was how pathetic we were. And our school was. Small classrooms, poor resources, lack of leadership, … to name but a few. When I realized the enormity of our mistake, I was determined not to repeat it. Why?

What was wrong?

If you really are the best, everyone knows it. There’s no need to tell it. It’s in plain sight. And if you’re not the best, it’s a lie. And again, everyone and their dog can see it. It’s that simple. It was the case with us. We were obviously not in the first category at all. So clients were left to draw only the latter conclusion. We really set ourselves up to fail by creating such high expectations. How could we really succeed?

Choose something tangible

We have been building our marketing campaign for our own business for some three years. But one of the decisions I made at the outset was to avoid making unverifiable claims. Instead, we would tell people exactly what we did, and leave it up to them to decide if we were good or not. Now our motto is exactly what we do: “Teach our students to use English and make it a part of their lives.”- It reads better in Chinese!

And that’s exactly what we do: students are greeted in English, classroom activities take place in English, even break-time activities require some English. We do use Chinese at times to make students feel comfortable in stressful situations, but for the most part, we encourage students to use English as much as they can.

Say it loud, say it clear!

It doesn’t have to be a complex message, it doesn’t have to use superlatives. But any motto or slogan you choose for your products should at least encapsulate the benefits of your product in ways that are tangible and identifiable. Make sure your performance matches your claims and be prepared to verify the claims. Parents hear our students using English when they arrive or leave, they call up and use English, too, when they have problems with homework. Classroom work is verified with all skills quizzes. And yet, sometimes we still fail to get our message across!

It ain’t lip-service

Many companies promise great service, but when you call up to find out about the ‘great’ service, you find out the truth. I recently was asked to telephone a local hospital in Taiwan that claimed it had an English answering service. Although it was just a survey, I was horrified to find out that if I had been depending on this service as a tourist, I might have ended up dead! I called the hospital’s ‘English’ hot line, was transferred in a bilingual telephone message to a center that picked up the phone for an answering machine! An English hotline had a Chinese answering machine! Wow!

Manage Expectations: Be realistic!

By managing expectations, the hospital could have avoided the complications, negative reports, and immense loss of face this caused some official when it went in the report that the hospital failed the assessment. By simply saying the line was only staffed from 10-4pm each day, the hospital would have got a lot of kudos for providing a needed service.

Unfortunately, the mistake this hospital made is one that many international companies make, too.

When you’re a service oriented company, it’s vital that service is as good as you can make it. In other words, you have to walk the walk if you talk the talk.

What’s your experience marketing your business or selling products or even dealing with ‘big’ companies and their promises? How does it fit in with what I’m saying here?

100 subscribers: We did it, well sort of

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It seems InvestorBlogger finally regained its 100 subscribers from a year ago. Unfortunately, it was unclear who the 100th subscriber was, whether from email or just the regular feed.

So, I’m afraid I can’t give away the extra EC for two reasons: I can’t access the original forums where I made the original offer. There’s been quite a fuss about that change, on the boards. I’ve already said my piece.

But perhaps my bigger mistake was not releasing how difficult it would be to tell who the 100th subscriber would be.

investorblogger 100

The total in Feedburner is an aggregate of Feed readers, Email Subscribers and so on. This is not broken down into chronological order, so it is nigh impossible to tell who the 100th subscriber via email is, as the number of feed readers changes daily. Mmm. This is not what I had hoped. So I may have to rethink that competition! Any suggestions?

Update: Well, we blew through the original target. We’re now approaching 120 subscribers! Wow! That was a surprise.

Borrow more, spend more, inflate away the debt: Darling’s prescription for success in 2009 and beyond

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The politicians are at it again, in the UK. Raising taxes to pay for their own past mistakes. Unlike the US democrats, the British government can’t blame the other party at all for what’s happened, since they’ve been in power since 1997. I’m no economist by training, and I’m not living in the UK at the moment, so perhaps I’m ill-informed. Perhaps.

Today, Alistair Darling has proved to be nobody’s darling: He hiked the top rates of tax for those earning over £100,000 which according to one story combined with other plans of his are estimated to bring in an extra £6bn by 2012 rising to £17bn by 2014. He’s also trimmed benefits, taken away tax breaks, and much more…

Given that his assumptions are optimistic, to say the least, raising taxes on any segment of the population at this time is likely to vary from mildly regressive on most people to seriously foolish. I tend to the latter end of the spectrum. Why? Because those who are the entrepreneurs in the UK are the ones most likely to provide work for those who earn much less, and they need the capital to provide investment capital for future businesses.

Startups Need Capital

Startup capital comes from someone’s pocket, after all. If tax rates rise, entrepreneurs will conclude that the tax burden places an increased need for higher returns. This means that they will either find markets with better returns than ours, move their domicile off-shore, or simply exit the British markets. Or they will charge more for their products and services. Is it any wonder that British consumers typically pay over the odds for products and services? Hint: it could be linked to the amount of taxes they are paying, directly (VAT, etc.) and indirectly (corporate taxes).

budget 09Back to you and me

In the end, the only people who suffer are the ones who purchase the services and products, ie. you and me. Why? Because we’re the least informed on how to create tax efficient vehicles, how to get tax credits for investments, how to offset tax increases, and where to shelter money from grasping governments.

It’s all in the numbers

“His calculations, however, depend upon a forecast growth rate of 1.25% next year, rising to a figure of 3.5% in 2011.” (source) Does anybody seriously believe we’ll have growth in 2011 of 3.5%? Really, are you kidding? Mortgages are underwater, unemployment is jumping, people still can’t get credit, and others have their credit lines closed by banks too nervous to hold their customers hands any more. With customers needing more cash, where is all this consumer spending going to come from?

But what surprises me?

The tax rates are going to penalize those people whose talents are needed in investing, finance, law, politics, business, government, science, social services, health care, and so on, the ones we need to build, sustain and nurture our country. Doesn’t anyone remember the last grandiose experiment in raising taxes in the 1970’s when top tax rates virtually killed British industry, stifled entrepreneurs, and led (indirectly) to thousands of layoffs in all industries? Oh, well.

It’s in the figures

But I took a look at the graphs, and I don’t get it. It tells me that the government has borrowed £175bn, yet it makes no account of where this borrowing went, how it was divided up, or why it accounts for fully 26% of government incomes. Of course, it beggars belief that borrowed money could possibly count as ‘income’ in the first place. But worse, the interest on that money now eats up £28bn of expenditure. This makes it the seventh largest expenditure in the budget. And I would guess this amount will continue to grow even more. ( A crude calculation shows that this is at an APR of 16% … wow! Perhaps the government should find more economical ways to borrow money!) I do know that if I ran my business with interest amounts so large, and rates like these, I’d be moving as fast as possible to cut my debts, not borrow more.

Whither inflation?

Unfortunately, I’m not convinced: I think this set of figures bodes badly for inflation. The government will be tempted to inflate its way out of such large debts by allowing inflation to be higher when recovery comes. And it’s likely to include a period where we revisit oil prices in the $80’s and $90’s as soon as recovery begins. Inflation is around the corner, and gold prices are a hint of what is to come. But then again, I’m not an economist.

So buy your salt now if you believe prices are going to rise, or buy it later when it’s cheaper. Either way, these days you’re going to need a lot of it when you read the governments’ assessments of what is going on, and what is going to happen.