If you finished work at 6pm today. Sort it the fuck out! If you have any hope of one day earning a decent amount of money doing what you love, working with people you love then trust me when I tell you this… You need to work your tail to the fucking bone to achieve it! I’m not talking about staying until 7pm or doing a few emails at night or talking to a client out of “work hours”. I’m talking about telling your girlfriend she comes second. I’m talking about telling your mates that business comes first. What I’mRead the rest of this story…

It’s a strange little world us chaps at Advantix live in. We turn up at a client’s place, ask them about 50 questions, write down everything they say then vanish off into the night for the best part of 2 months. Suddenly, we resurrect ourselves from the Dungeon of Shoreham (that’s our offices) and rock up to the nerve racking meeting of glory. Did we miss anything? I can’t remember if the invoice request should include VAT or not? Did we put the final change on the logo on all the pages? How does it show up on the iPad?Read the rest of this story…

What do our best customers do: Pay on time Reasonable with deadlines Don’t bitch about things Happy to set up a Direct Debit Don’t make us jump through hoops to win jobs (when we have an existing relationship) Enjoy the process of working with us It’s worth knowing who your best customers are so you can try and find more of them.

Our worst customers have a thing or two in common: Pay late Constantly after a discount Don’t respect our time in terms of meetings and phone calls Present unrealistic deadlines for work Add stuff on at the end of the job Try to mess up procedure by not signing our agreements Don’t pay their monthly fees by Direct Debit when we ask them to It’s far from conclusive but knowing some characteristics of your worst customers lets you know who to look for and avoid.

Last year, we did this for the first time and it was a great move. In late December 2010 I thought about all of the products we were going to be launching, the content we wanted to get out there, the events we wanted to put on and I wrote a list of every email I wanted to send and put them in a list like this: January: 3rd: Happy New Year 12th: Blog post summary email 25th: Free PDF on Business Automation Then, the same thing for February through to December. What I did next is go through andRead the rest of this story…

My favourite TV show when I was a kid, Boy Meets World – the final episode, everything changes, relationships change, jobs change, people change. The dumb older brother Eric says in the final words of the final episode, “It’s not the change that matters, but how you deal with it that counts”. It was beautifully said and the events today made me think about that scene. A lot of lives were changed today. Startups now have a bigger personal allowance (helpful if your at that point), Millionnaires buying houses over £2,000,000 now have to pay a ridiculous 7% Stamp Duty,Read the rest of this story…

How long does it take to stop reading this post, answer the phone, read your email then send a text and get back into the flow of the post again? Apart from the added stress of jumping between so many different tasks, it’s not just the time it takes to do a task. What’s often not considered is the amount of time it takes from being in the flow doing one task, stop doing that, start doing something else, then get in the flow doing the new task. I call this ‘set up time’. The way to avoid this greyRead the rest of this story…

Bookkeeping is one of the easiest things to outsource. If you use an online system like KashFlow then you shouldn’t really need to outsource the invoicing; but sending a virtual assistant (VA) an email saying “Invoice Matt Jones £300 for consultancy, due in 7 days from today” and firing it off is a lot easier than messing about in Microsoft Word making your invoices. Your job as business owner is to set these things up, not necessarily use them day in and day out. What about expenses? Just an idea, but how about keeping all your receipts in a box,Read the rest of this story…

A little story… I was in Tenerife enjoying a nice 4 week break from the day-to-day of business (yet it kept running as if I was there), and the phone rang while at dinner. It was the Police. They told me my apartment had been broken into and looked like the place had been robbed. I couldn’t help but feel relieved that my family hadn’t been butchered or something. I lost two TVs, two games consoles, two of our computers, a server and all my DVDs. While the TV’s and games consoles being stolen were annoying, they were certainly replaceable.Read the rest of this story…

Whenever I offer any business advice in this area, it follows a very simple pattern: Discover all the problems you have (some you’ll know about, some you won’t), propose solutions and then put them into action. The problems are an essential starting point and cannot be ignored. Our first ever Business Automation system came about almost by accident when I went into Sussex Academy of Music who were existing website clients at the time and started having a conversation about their online shop. I can’t really tell you how it happened but we spent the next 24 hours, all 3Read the rest of this story…