The Gilman Company Blog

Stephen King, Sending Email and Heavenly Bliss

Stephen King has written that he believes Hell is repetition. Any guy that has the wherewithal and talent to sell a bazillion books has to be onto something, right?  What does that have to do with your business and sending email, you ask? It has to do with you becoming more productive, efficient and avoiding repetition Hell.

Repetition Hell
You type out several virtually identical emails a day or every week that are virtually identical in content. Essentially, you're responding in the same way to inquiries or you're reaching out with the same type of message/information.

Purgatory (You're Almost There)
Who doesn't deplore needless typing. It's a waste of your time, your life and your abilities to be exceptionally efficient and productive. So, you type a message template once, copy and paste when necessary and throw in an occasional and personalized nice-ity. Better than repetition Hell, but aren't you really wanting Heavenly Bliss?

Heavenly Bliss
Create a unique page on your website with an easy alias URL related to the type of information you're getting out. Now, your three or four paragraphs turns into a line or two of personalized greatness and a short and easy URL.

Get a Gilman consultation.

Grocery Store Membership Cards

Dear Chain Grocery Store CMOs,

Yes, membership cards seemed like a good idea at the time. But let's face it. There is no value in grocery store membership card programs for customers and your not realizing the type of value that seemed to exist from a conceptual perspective. Here are a few reasons why you should drop your membership card program first and take credit as the industry leader who did so:

1. Obviously, all of the retail chain grocery store competitors in your category have the same program.

2. A lot of the data you collect is bogus.

3. The rewards you offer aren't compelling and unique enough to retain a customer that you wouldn't retain without a card program.

4. Now you have a duty to inform people when they may have purchased bad food. "Dear Valued Customer, we sold you some bad food."

5. Your card program is a hassle for potential new customers.

6. You give so-called preferred treatment to some customers and the others are chopped liver.

7. Wal-Mart has been expanding grocery sales since "Go" and they don't have a card. Although customers will still come in for your extensive mustard selection...unless it's cheaper at a card-less discount grocer.

8. You can reduce your marketing budget by eliminating membership cards and have something new to talk about or pass the savings along to customers.

9. Unless you're a discount chain, the real value in your local stores is location, personal service and selection, not membership. Spend more money marketing that stuff.

10. Relating to the people who come into your stores as "customers" is more important to them than relating to them as "members."

Get a Gilman consultation.

What is a Decision?

When the phone rings in your sales call center, do you make a decision to answer it? The correct answer, usually, is "no." The answer is "no" because some things in business that have to be addressed can and should only be addressed in only one way...if you want to maximize your chances of success in business.

When a basketball player turns over a play and he's running toward the goal without a single defensive player from the other team in site, does he make a decision to do a layup or try for a three pointer? No. There are some things in basketball that can and should be addressed in only one way...if you want to maximize your chances of success in basketball.

Generally, there is only one set of circumstances where a decision to pick up the phone in a your sales call center is made. Generally, there is also only one set of circumstances where a basketball player running toward the goal unchallenged will make a decision between a layup and a slam dunk. In both cases, the individual who turns this one way only situation into a decision making opportunity doesn't know what to do.

These "one way only" cases that are converted into a decision making opportunity happen a lot with technology based projects, sometimes because of a communication gap or deficiency between the people who know what to do and the people who don't. Sometimes it happens because an ego takes precedent over maximizing the chances of success. The same problem arises in marketing, logistics, accounting, PR, etc., etc.

Bonus Tip: Figure out who it is that know and who doesn't know.

Get a Gilman consultation.

Profits Up, Sales Down

A Forbes.com article yesterday noted that Toys 'R' Us 4th quarter profits rose by 11%. Pretty good performance on the profit side.

On the other hand, sales at the retail toy giant declined 6.3% from $5.83 billion. In light of the economic crunch, a decline in sales makes sense. But, how do you get an increase in profits in light of declining sales? With corporate and payroll expenses declining by $73,000,000 at the toy retail giant, it's not too hard to understand.

Clearly, Toys 'R' Us has undergone some operations streamlining over the past few years and has done a pretty good job of managing its e-commerce segment in light of the fact that it also has about 1,500 brick and mortar retail stores to funnel products through. When you cut $73M in costs and and operations still result in a solid profit, you've done a pretty good job managing operations.

Get a Gilman consultation.

Aligning Costs with Revenues

Now that you've had a few months to settle in to 2009 and we're all brushing the dust from the onset of the economic downturn, you probably have a good idea of where your cash flow is at and what you can probably expect throughout the remainder of 2009.

If you're not already, this would be an excellent time to take a magnifying glass to your costs and revenues. Your cash flow could be one of the most critical elements of your ability to get to the other side of this downturn. Cash flow is about surviving. Profit and loss reports are about how well you happen to be doing. Look at all of you data in each of these areas closely.

Get a Gilman consultation.

Seth Chavez

Delegate What You Hate

Your not good at it anyway and that's probably why you hate it. You'll save money, get it done right and save a few gray hairs on your head. Doing things that you don't like to do or that your not good at will affect your productivity and efficiency. A great leader will recognize who does what best and delegate accordingly.

A few things that people hate to do that they should delegate:

Write/edit

Calculate

Speak

Navigate

Sell

Deal with technology

Hire/direct people

Administrate

...

Get a Gilman consultation.

Who Needs to Know: The Status Meeting

From time to time, calling a status or information sharing meeting can be productive and valuable. However, this is also a great way to waste the human resources that you pay so dearly for. To run a productive status meeting minimizing HR waste, don't invite anyone who isn't directly related to the subject that will be reported on.

As an exercise, think about the last meeting you called and calculate, based on how much each staff person who attended the meeting makes every hour (including yourself) and what your HR cost was to have that meeting. Here, think about the value you have as a result of the meeting, then subtract the value that you would have had if all of those staff hadn't attended the meeting, but were working otherwise.

Get a Gilman consultation.

How Much Does it Cost You To Make a Decision?

The longer it takes you to make a decision and the more resources that go into attempting to make the best decision, the more that decision is going to cost.

Whether it's deciding which new fleet vehicle to purchase or where to have lunch, think about the costs of how you make that decision in comparison to the risk in not making the right decision after all. Having four executives, all making a six figured salary, in a three hour meeting deciding if a it's worth the additional $2,000.00 to get copy machine "A" instead of "B" just doesn't make sense.

Get a Gilman consultation.

Don't Ditch that Fax Machine...Yet

Why do business still have fax machines? Turns out, the PDF hasn't quite put the last nail in the coffin of fax machines. Similarly, fax machines never put the last nail in the coffin of the United States Postal Service (AKA the post office) either.

At their peak in the 80's, the fax machine was revolutionary. Fax users could take a piece of paper and make it magically appear somewhere else in a matter of seconds. Wow! But, faxing can be sloppy and it's not as reliable as the PDF.

If you haven't already, make the PDF your preferred document tool, because it's more efficient, more cost-effective is ideal for efforts to go as paperless as possible and it's more reliable. But, don't put your last fax machine out on the curb just yet. It could be a lifesaver in an emergency situation and you could be dealing with organizations or individuals who aren't on the right side of the technology curve just yet.

Bonus tip: centralize your fax machine. One fax machine, in many cases, can serve more than one department and many employees.

Cheepskate Tip of the Week: Online Price Comparison for Office Supplies

This isn't about larger business equipment acquisitions, like new furniture for an entire department, new servers or a company wide upgrade of mobile phones or wireless devices. You may want to go with vendors that you can trust, talk to and meet in those cases. This is about those quick trips to the closest brick and mortar to buy something that would make your life easier and more productive or to stock up on the things you go through regularly. This is also about ordering from the same catalog every time, because that vendor knows what to do, how to bill you and your generally pleased with filfilment.

You will pay a premium for the convenience of driving to the local retail spot to purchase supplies like this, including your time or your staff's time out of the office and the travel expense. Or, you're placing orders through that fat catlog Without even knowing how much anything costs. You're number cruncher processes the invoice without a second look and there's no cost savings oversight. That doesn't make sense. Ask your accountant to track these expenses and see how you did last year. Then imagine that you can have anywhere between 5-25% of that money back in your pocket.

NOW...
After you've looked at your spending, just for fun, go to an online price comparison site, like www.pricecomparison.com, Google has one too, and see how much you can save on your next supply order. Is saving $50 on that desk printer worth filling out a quick form? Of course the terms are important; look closely at those and try to get an idea of the type of customer service you can expect from this online vendor. Call the cusomter service number to say hi and see what happens.

Bonus tip: if you haven't centralized this process, that would be a good way to track your cost-savings progress. Choose someone with good clerical skills in your office and have all of your office supply purchases go through that channel. Have that person produce monthly or quarterly expense reports. The oversight? A supervisor's signature and approval on each supply order.

Get a Gilman consultation.