Knowing, being and doing

 It’s gratifying to see that one of my articles is included in the Best Posts of 2009 list on the Freelance Advisor website.

 It’s called SWOT Yourself to Success and it’s all about how carrying out a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis on yourself can help you better understand why you do what you do in the way that you do it and how this may affect the opportunities and threats that face you. Perhaps it’s been so popular because it suggests that understanding all of this is less about vague navel-gazing than carrying out a structured review process with the aim of creating some tangible outputs.

 Ultimately how we see the world and react to what we believe is happening around us is very much down to our own individual perceptions, plus our beliefs about who we are and the way things should be done. Good client / customer care depends on understanding their point of view, anticipating their needs, and adapting your behaviour to what they want. The more insight you have into all of this, the more flexible and successful you are likely to be.  

 You can see more at http://www.freelanceadvisor.co.uk/go-freelance-guide/freelance-advisor-best-of-2009/

Management is more than compliance

The power of the brand – who you are – is increasingly important in business today. It’s not enough just to do the work well at the right sort of price; clients are increasingly looking for firms and people with the sort of qualities and values that match their own.

This is particularly true in situations where you are in a competitive situation with other firms, for example in a tendering process. When the essential services you provide are so similar, the decision is being made on a much wider range of factors, including such things as diversity and environmental policies and evidence of wider corporate social responsibility.

I was caused to think of this by the recent news that Stonewall – the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual lobbying group – has just published its Top 100 Employers List highlighting those organisations that have taken strides to create more equal workplaces.

Four large firms are on the list, but these aside, the legal sector as a whole is conspicuously absent. On one level this hardly matters, particularly for small firms. Equality and diversity isn’t about winning prizes. On the other hand it reflects a worrying underlying belief that standing by the letter of the law is important, enacting the spirit of the law is not.

 Whether it’s age, gender, race, disability, sexuality, family friendly working or a whole host of other issues, it’s important to spend management time on ensuring that your firm has the sort of policies and practices that go far deeper than simple compliance. Ultimately that’s what makes an outstanding and impressive workplace.

To do or not to do

One of the biggest issues around effective business development isn’t actually deciding what to do, it’s doing it. In fact, most people will find they have some success by doing just about anything which is different from what they normally do simply because it means they have to adopt a new focus and exhibit different behaviours.

Nevertheless, most people tend to concentrate their efforts (particularly at this time of year) on resolving to do more of some things rather than less of others. In fact this tends to be a self-defeating approach because in practice there are always 101 reasons/excuses why you don’t achieve what you set out to do.  For example, you decide you should keep in more regular contact with your clients. You focus on that, write it down on your “to do” list, and then beat yourself up when you don’t achieve it.  But you don’t achieve it because you haven’t  addressed those things that prevented you from doing so in the first place – such as lack of time,  lack of understanding of the benefits, or even just lack of confidence that they’d appreciate hearing from you.

 So – to make it happen you first need to focus on, say, spending less time on non-essential emails and phone calls which will free up maybe half an hour a day.  You can then spend that time initially focusing on what you want to achieve in measurable outputs, how you’re going to go about it in a way that doesn’t make you uncomfortable, and thereafter, only then, on  actually doing it. 

It’s a far more pragmatic and results-focused approach than the usual “I should…” method and it  actually works. Why not try it?

New Year’s Resolutions

It’s taken me a while to get round to setting up this blog. To be frank, there’s no excuse apart from the fact that it’s a bit of a cobbler’s children situation. Too busy doing the work to work on my own business.

Anyway, I’ve decided to rectify the situation and take some of my own advice; in this case: take stock of where you are before the year end and start putting your New Year’s Resolutions into practice early. That way, you’ve got a far better chance of getting things going and keeping at them than you will if you leave it to that rather artificial period of post-Christmas euphoria.

So – this blog sees me addressing the number one point on my Resolutions list:  review all marketing channels and decide where you need more focus. For me, that means starting – and maintaining – my M3 blog.

Watch this space (or even better download an RSS feed to this blog) …