The End Of A Good Idea
 
Have you ever seen a PC? Of course you have, you couldn't have found this otherwise. Good aren't they? They'll never replace people though will they?
 
You'll never be able to set up a sales area on a PC which will enable people 10,000 miles away to buy from you without any human involvement.
 
Well except for this web-site of course.
 
"Well that's ok for you, we couldn't get rid of people, we need to administer what we do."
 
"Who told you that"
 
"Jim"
 
"What does he do?"
 
"He's our administrator"
 
I know it might be a bit idealistic, but unless an employee is generating leads, fulfilling those leads or providing customer satisfaction – why are they there?
 
"Well we need administrators, we need HR people, we need managers, without them we'd collapse."
 
"How much you make last year"
 
"We turned over just under £30M"
 
"How much you make"
 
"Well it was a bad year, we incurred a lot of one-off administrative costs, we won't have them this year"
 
"Why, are you going under?" – little consultancy joke there.
 
• Queries take as much time up as any other area within most businesses, and the hard facts are that nearly all queries are ‘human errors': What is astounding is how many queries drift on seemingly with a life of their own. Policy and Systems. If you have a policy and if you have a system queries die early, if you don't they are like Fame – they want to live forever.
• Think about paperwork as you would think about anything else in your business. Whether you are a one-man business or a multi-national, what paper-work (and I include computerised forms, spread-sheets etc) should exist? The main reason paper-work exists is because it is ignored; great empires can be built in administration with paper-work. How can a competitor beat you on price every time and make bigger profits than you? Maybe they do not allow more than one empire on their premises.
• Raise and date invoices from the earliest reasonable point, and that point is at point-of-sale. What the hell is batching, are we still in the sixties? Sell something and invoice it – why wait?
• Look at "fixed costs" Unless a cost is used to generate more business or satisfy your customers in some way – get rid of it
• Only ask to see invoices which exceed budgeted cost. Agree a budget for telephone, electricity, heating etc, and every time it is exceeded get it explained. You'll be amazed at how much you will save. Do not query everything within budget; set the budget and hammer them when they get it wrong. Unless you do not believe in human error.
• Overtime, additional bonuses, needless training, anything that cannot immediately affect increasing leads, improving your sales or satisfying your customers, have a long think. Do not allow overtime and excessive bonuses become the norm, systemise, you will be amazed how easy it will be to let that key worker go.
 
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