The Gilman Company Blog

Looking for Dumb People?

Is there money to made by marketing services to people who don't know any better? Certainly!

There are countless examples of services that no one needs, but that customers line up to pay for. In fact, many of these services make realizing the desired outcome more difficult (not to mention more expensive). So, how do you sell something that no one needs or necessarily wants? Focus on a false sense of fear and offer to "handle everything."

The anecdote: A notice from Company X, which I have never heard of, explaining my obligation to update a legitimate administrative legal matter. Clearly, my time had come. I paraphrase: "So many horrible things can happen to you if you don't address this matter. Luckily, we can handle everything for you. Just pay X to us and we'll take care of it."

There's nothing exciting, inspiring or genuinely likable about a business model that relies on ignorance.

Google Adopts "Innovation Reviews"

Flipping through the print edition of the Wall Street Journal, it's interesting to see that Google is reorganizing its effort to leverage the ideas its employees come up with. The fact that Google encourages its staff to take one work day a week to work on projects that are not related to their jobs has led to some interesting innovations. But how do you harness the value of those ideas? After all, Twitter was developed by former Google employees. If your Google, you harness those ideas by managing your innovation resources. Here, the company has drawn more dotted lines to senior management and executives and a process is developed that lets innovation easily trickle up for review by executives.

This process certainly puts more responsibility on senior management and executives, but when your competitors are biting at your heels and you've invested a lot on employing the best of the best, you want to make sure that very little or none of the innovation you're paying for slips away. This issue of managing innovation, also marks a unique problem for rapidly growing companies and intellectual property.

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Quality vs. Quantity: Customer Service Call Centers

Logging calls might be a good measurement of how efficient your call center is, but are you really throwing money at your call center to support efficiency or is it to enhance the goodwill your company has with customers by providing great customer service?

Where does the value from your customer service investment go and where do you want it to go? Is picking up the phone enough? With your customer service investment, are you trying to address a quantity issue or a quality issue?

How well your customer service staff resolve a complaints is hard to measure empirically with call logs. One way to take a stab at this is by collecting data (electronically) on each call. For smaller organizations, a simple list of check boxes, perhaps in a spreadsheet, that will only take a few brief moments to complete will provide some added insight.

Also, training call center staff on how to effectively relate to customer service issues, especially the difficult ones, could make their jobs easier and less stressful. This will also enhance your return on customer service spending.

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Employee Fraud On the Rise: Billing, Expense Fraud, Skimming...

Yes, risk management gets tougher during an economic downturn. Enter employee fraud, such as billing fraud, expense fraud, skimming, check tampering, etc.  It's fairly obvious why this happens as personal economic pressures mount. Lifestyle and spending changes are difficult to adjust to, a two income family may be looking at only one income and after several years of good times, safeguards to prevent employee fraud may be relaxed.

It's not heard of for companies to close their doors, not knowing that a primary cause of their demise was employee fraud.

However it goes down, some type of audit of your operations procedures that may face the highest risk of employee fraud can be audited. Even a tactful communication to employees that the company cares about and is concerned about employee fraud could be valuable. Whether it's an internal task force, your finance auditor or an outside consultant, taking a close look at where employee fraud may occur and advice on how how to avoid it and what to do about it if found, could be a life saver.

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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.

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Collaborative Decisions

Making a collaborative decision is a great way to empower others and to leverage the diversity of your team or group. It's also a good way to solidify your group and give everyone in the group an interest in the success of a project. Further, it's a great way to encourage group members to think objectively about the success of the group.

This is not the same as asking others what they think. This is bringing a group together and clearly saying, "We need to decide."

Why a collaborative decision? Other than the team building benefits, this decision is one that will affect various areas of your business enterprise and leveraging the diversity of those areas to inform the decision making process could be invaluable.

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The Best Candidates for Creative Jobs are Night Owls

If creativity is an important part of the position you're trying to fill at your company (writers, graphic designers, programmers), you just might want to ask whether that candidate is a night owl.

Generally, scientists agree that night owls are more creative than so called "morning people" who usually hit the sack early. According to Wired Magazine, in a creativity tests, early birds struggle. It's not clear why night owls tend to be more creative, but it seems like there should be a connection with living outside of the norm that says you're awake when the sun is shining and asleep when it's not.

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Giving Face Time: The Art of the Walk By

Every day is a mixer. Beyond chance meetings in the elevator, take the initiative and the opportunity to give a little face time to colleagues or associates within your organization that may be out of your typical circle of operations.

While you're at it, try straying from the platitudes of dead end niceties (i.e. How are you? - Good. - Yourself. - I'm doing well, thank you.). Ask a benign but detailed question about specific things that this colleague does. "How is the ____ project going?" Test your abilities to keep it light and don't get lured into a detailed and long conversation. It's not a "water cooler" chat and it's not merely a polite acknowledgment.

Yes, it's easy to get shored up in small group. Up your "walk by" face time giving and you'll learn more about your organization, who you're working with, what the possibilities are and build relationships that you can leverage in the future.

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The Bad News: No Raise. The Good News: You're Not Fired.

With many options on the table to reduce costs and keep operations lean during the economic downturn, putting your next scheduled round of raises off should come before a round of layoffs. Here, consider an announcement to your employees that your company has been affected by the economic downturn and that layoffs are a last resort. In an effort to minimize the possibility of such a drastic step, along with other measures, doing away with raises is a reasonable step. This doesn't mean, however, that the review process should be left behind. Keep the same review calendar and combine reviews when your regular raise regimen is in place again.

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Counteroffers: When the Cart Goes Before the Horse

Sometimes, the counter offer comes before the offer. How so? Depending on the nature of the deal you're working on, set the tone of the negotiations, such that all offers are played loose. Contemplate a negotiations that could include many rounds of counteroffers. Assure your contact that the most important thing is doing business together and that their interests are important to you, because they are. Understand that if they don't win, you don't win, because it's true. In a sense, the numbers are a formality, the important thing is that you will move forward together together based on obvious mutual value and you will share that value in one way or another.

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