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 3 of us making notes and thinking of ways to improve their business. I had no idea that this would become our first ever business automation system. When we eventually took a break, we had over 30 pages of notes. This served as the foundation for the system we would eventually build and work on for over 3 years.

This is one of the most important exercises you can do and I recommend you do this every 6 months or so. All we’re going to do is just start identifying problems within your business – thats it. Not necessarily to the extent of what we did with Sussex Academy of Music but if that’s what it takes – do it!

There aren’t any limits or guidelines so anything like ‘low sales’ to ‘Amy doesn’t file the invoices properly’ is the kind of thing we’re looking for. What’s important is that you think about all areas of your business and write down the problems for each. Some areas to think about:

• Time Management
• Order processing
• Customer service
• Storing information
• File management
• Finance
• Reminders about important tasks
• Delegation
• Communication
• Work / Life Balance

These are by no means conclusive, just a few ideas to get you started. I recommend just writing as many problems as you can think of that you’re currently facing in your business day-to-day. A problem doesn’t need to be a catastrophic disaster, but anything that you’d consider to be less than ideal.

Once you’ve done that, you can start to fix those issues by putting systems in place to help you fix them.

Go for it… If you want help dissecting the outcome, get in touch by ringing on 0800 644 0028 or emailing me on ads@advantixgroup.com and I’ll do my best to offer some solutions.

I never want to wish anyone out of business but I’m glad that Kodak are out of business. It comes down to the fact that recessions are a good thing.

• Interest rates are lower
• Talented people are looking to work for you
• Someone’s loss is your gain
• People are looking to save money more (HINT: Be in the save money market and you’ll do fine)

If you are one of these people who run around blaming the recession for your own shortcomings, then have a real think. If you were once successful and your not now, maybe that’s because you’ve refused to change.

Kodak declared bankruptcy today. Which is 3 out of 3. I correctly predicted Woolworths, Borders and Kodak before the end of 2011. I was off by 19 days. HMV are closing up shops, and will be gone in 6 months to a year unless they can switch up their business model and figure something out fast.

While it’s bad for the many thousands, often tens of thousands that these companies employ, it’s great news that these businesses are gone. They deserve to go. They’re clogging up the minds of the consumers when a smaller, more agile, more prepared to adapt company can swoop in and have their moment in the limelight.

I’m not ripping on any company individually and don’t get me wrong, it sucks to be made redundant, especially when you feel it’s your only option. I’m excited about the new generation of businesses who can have their moments.

The moral of this post is simple – Don’t rest. You can’t take your success today for granted. You need to keep investing, keep inventing, keep trying to be the absolute best. When you do that, you’ll be fine. Kodak waited too long and gave up, then tapped out to bankruptcy.

Don’t tap out!

We have several systems and apps, which are awesome on their own but when tied together could be 50x more powerful. We aim to spend a lot of time making our existing systems amazing

2.  Better Marketing

Simply put, we haven’t needed to actually do any marketing this year. We’re always busy, and our events have always sold out. Expect more promotion of SignBase and AddBook and videos to explain how they will work in your business.

3. Events

Our event series, Automate My Business is going to become our main source of generating leads and business. We’re going to be spending a lot of money on this event and refining it to make it more powerful and the “go to” event if you want to automate parts of your business.

4. I’m Writing A Book

I have so much content and ideas flying around my head on how to automate bits of your business but it’s hard to cram this into an event. It’s not going to be an ebook, it’ll be a real book, with real pages and it’ll be selling on Amazon and you’ll even be able to get it on your Kindle, iPhone, iPad and various other devices.

5. Growth

It’s rather quickly come to our attention that there literally isn’t anyone else that does what we do, which is go into businesses, and build systems to automate massive parts of their businesses. I’m learning what it’s like to be a market leader so look for us to step up into that roll.

6. Support Section

We’ve been slowly putting together a line of communication which will allow you to get any bugs with the websites and software we provide fixed at probably twice the speed and get feature requests quoted for and into production at a rate much quicker than right now. The main problem is these bug fixes and features come to either myself or Sabrina via phone, email, text or in person. That’s 8 ways and I’ll be the first to admit, sometimes we forget to quote for things or pass things to development. This will solve that problem.

I love the secrecy surrounding Apple products so I was a bit hesitant to write this but hopefully it gives you some idea as to what we’re working towards over the next year.

Make sure you’re on our email list to get notified. www.advantixgroup.com/start to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Thanks

Adam

I set out this year to launch both SignBase and AddBook, and win 2 more BusinessBrain customers. By the end of the year, I’d done all those things and more. We’ve shifted the businesses entirely to almost completely eradicate web design and stick to doing what we do best – Save people time.

I’ve decided that our marketing mix is going to consist of 3 things:

1. Word of mouth, and a structured referral programme where people get paid healthy fees
2. Social Media
3. Live Events

Last year we put on an event around the idea of Email Marketing. Due to varying levels of computer users in the room at the same time, it was rather tricky, but lessons learned. We’ll do it out of nicely printed up workbooks next time to keep everyone at the same pace.

From a personal standpoint, I’ve finally realised that Advantix can really be a million pound business. It’s a great feeling to know that you’re doing incredible work, it’s being really well received and you have money coming in to make it all better.

“We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make movies” – Walt Disney

I’ve realised where our weaknesses are – we’re not as quick as we’d like to be with feature requests and bug fixes. We’re far from slow, and no-one’s complained but it could be better. It’s the one weak link in the chain. We’re turning it into a positive and building feature request forms and bug fix forms right into the BusinessBrain customer’s software.

It’s not that hard to take negative things about your business, or weaknesses and with just a little bit of TLC you can turn them into massive selling points. It does take a champion to admit fault with their business. It’s something it’s taken me a long time to do but I see real merit in doing it now.

You should look for weaknesses then throw some love at it and make it a benefit of doing business with you.

So, having accomplished more this year than I can really even remember when it feels like only yesterday I was shooting the promotional videos for our July event shouting fuck 17 times at the camera because I kept forgetting my lines. We’ve accomplished a lot and I know our clients have too. That’s a nice feeling.
It’s not all been swirly whirly ice cream time. We’ve had to let a few customers go. Some big, some small but I think it’s those hard choices that average people wouldn’t make. They’d settle. It’s a bold move stopping working with a customer that sent you over 50% of your previous year’s revenue. Was it the right decision – who knows but when kicking the idea about I asked myself the same question I asked when deciding whether to start Advantix:

“If I get rid of them, what am I going to be doing 6 months from now?” The answer, was the same as before… “Sitting here asking myself the same question”.

Make bold decisions. They’re bold because other people don’t make them. Other people don’t have big successful businesses and ideal lifestyles. You do.

Lastly, it’s been an amazing joy to work with people so passionate about their business and their craft. I look forward more than anything to reaching more people, building the business to support it and doing more great work.

Keep doing awesome work and the results, what ever it is for you will no doubt follow.

Well done!

I’m about to change how Advantix promotes itself. I’ve just done the numbers. Do you know many new customers came by advertising. Zero. Do you know how much business we’ve brought in as a percentage of our turnover from word of mouth. 100%.

The numbers don’t lie. This is happening whether we like it or not. How can so many businesses ignore word of mouth in the various forms it exists when it’s so fucking powerful. Shocking. Don’t get it but I’m going to try and make you get it. This is what I’m going to be doing going into 2012 to meet more businesses.

• Seek out groups of people on Facebook that want to learn more about business automation
• Find people that are asking questions about business automation on Twitter, respond and create relationships
• Make more videos that are quickly shot vids, then pump them out. Get this down to 15 minutes.
• Create a rule list of times I should update Twitter and Facebook – it’s easy to forget
• Find every one of my customers on Twitter and Facebook
• Send an email to all our customers telling them I want to follow them on Facebook and Twitter. They don’t have to follow us but we want to learn more about them.
• Ditch all other attempts at marketing. We’re a small business, focus on word of mouth, events and social media. That is it!

Ladies and Gentleman, if you don’t have a social media strategy going into 2012. Just ring me. My personal mobile is 07793 823301. I don’t care, I’ll talk to you at 3am and I’ll do it for free. I just can’t possibly bear to see the businesses that have supported my business over the last 5 or 6 years crumble and fail because they don’t “get” social.

I’ll tell you this. Help is here. I might not be an expert but I can spend an hour with you on the phone and tell you what I’ve learned. Don’t fuck up your business because you can’t be assed to learn a new platform.

Look, when you were 8 you couldn’t drive a car. You can now right? You can learn things, just don’t screw up all your hard work because your scared. You want someone to hold your hand. I’ll do it. My name is Adam Hempenstall and I will help you because I give a shit.

Thank you for reading this – I love you all.

If anything’s in the wrong place or un-natural – BYE BYE.

If something doesn’t work first time – BYE BYE

It has to be spot on. It’s the one part of your process you can’t have wrong. The bit where you are saying “hi” to people. This is what the page looked like when I’d finished:

First Attempt

To me, it looked cooler having the next button on the right, nicely lining up with the help column, and in line with the ‘Skip’ button. Looked neat.

It sucked!

The reason it sucked is because this happened: I asked the first 5 people I came into contact with on Facebook. Luisa, Sabrina, Dani, Rob and Sam. All 5 of which said to put the next button at the bottom.

It’s an open and shut case right. Move the button down.

In this case – yes. I can tell you now, if Steve Jobs had done that, we would never have had the iPhone and personal computing wouldn’t be the same today. There’s a famous Henry Ford quote that goes something like… “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”. So the question is, when do you invent something new, and when do you stick with what people know?

It’s a tough call. I moved the button though

After Feedback

Just because you just spent £1000 on getting your terms and conditions professionally drawn up, doesn’t mean you should shout from the rooftops about it.

Just because you are a Limited company doesn’t mean you should shout from the rooftops about it.

Here’s what you should shout from the rooftops about:

• Another customer is happy because of your awesome service
• You launched another product
• A customer of yours succeeded because of your help
• You got investment (and what it means for your customers)
• Your doing something free for your customers

Yes your terms and conditions are important, so is being the correct legal business type, but your customers truly and honestly do not care unless it’s going to allow them to do the following:

• Save time
• Save money
• Feel better about themselves
• Look better to their friends, family and customers.

That is all.

I don’t think I’ve had a meeting with a prospect or a client where I haven ‘t at some point told them to get testimonials off their customers. It seems that people are embarassed or for some reason don’t want to ask. I’m not sure if it’s through fear of coming across rude, or compliment fishing but I have some advice.

F**K THAT!

You do good work, scrap that – you do GREAT work. It’s your job to educate your customers on why you need testimonials. I don’t have any trouble getting them off my customers because I bang on about it so much!

Text written testimonials suck!

…Unless they are in context. If you have a random “Advantix are so awesome I love them” written on your website (which we do, and yes I’m a hypocrite sometimes), people just aren’t going to believe they are real. If you make sure it’s in context, it’s a million times better. That is why video testimonials are so awesome because the context is already built in. They’ve taken the time out of their day to record you a frickin’ video! They MUST be impressed!

Get Video Testimonials!

In an ideal world, we’d meet all our customers and when the job is done, we’d shoot a quick video on our iPhones and that would be amazing. If you did 5 jobs a month, you’d very quickly have a very full YouTube account and Facebook page full of delighted customers.

I do not want anyone thinking it’s not professional to shoot video on an iPhone. It’s got better video capability than half of the £2000 video cameras out there and it’s perfectly acceptable.

While I’m sure you agree with what I’m saying, I’m prepared to bet my left lung (you can live with only one right?) that you won’t do it. You have got to break this pattern. I’m going to start naming and shaming people now, because it’s that damn important.

Fabulous Floors:

They do some of the best work I’ve ever seen in terms of flooring. When I sat with them a few months ago to plan some of this stuff out, their fitters were there contributing which was awesome but they were all so passionate about how their only goal is to give the customer that wow factor. I told them when they meet the customer and it’s all finished, shove the fucking camera in their face and capture the emotion! They all agreed wholeheartedly, yet I can’t see one video on their site. A shame.

Here’s the thing

How are your prospects supposed to know how good you are. It’s no good you telling them – of course you are going to say you do great work. If whenever you have an objection during a sale you send your customers to a page that is chock full of letters, emails, videos, text messages, all sorts saying how amazing you are. Can you imagine anyone saying no to you? How could they with 200 different positive comments on a webpage?!

Collect All Evidence

People give you testimonials all the time, you don’t really need to ask. Just open your eyes and look. Go through your texts, inbox, paperwork, facebook account and screenshot absolutely every positive word someone says about you and save it in a folder. Then phone me and I’ll make you a single page for your website which has all these testimonials on them.

This is what it looks like:

http://www.advantixgroup.com/commentboard

I’m going to do it and I’ll send an email to our list when it’s done to show you.

Here are the problems I’ve solved for you today:

1. You don’t need to ask people for testimonials (ALTHOUGH YOU SHOULD)
2. You don’t need to worry yourself with not doing it
3. You can collect up all the little testimonials you’ve got already and make an awesome page full of them to use as evidence of your greatness.

Hope that helps.

Ads

I’m just about to vanish off the face of the planet for 2 weeks, ignore all calls and emails and wind up my entire customer base. Or am I?

Over the last 3 years I’ve spent 4 and a half months abroad (18 weeks) and taken a 4 week break around September/October time and I’ve only ever had one issue…

I was in Tenerife and got a call from the police that my flat got broken into and all my stuff stolen. I called my brother and instructed him to go over and secure the door (not that there was anything left) and not to worry about it. I then put the phone down because my desert had come. That is the sum-total of spending 4 and a half months abroad.

Dispite having my stuff stolen (not a big deal), I want to share with you some of the things that made these working holidays possible.

1.    Switch to O2

They have this bolt-on you can add to your call plan that means you can receive calls and send texts for free. It’s £5 if your in spain for the month and £7 if you are anywhere else in Europe. Vodafone have something similar but you pay 75p for a connection charge and nothing else. I’m not sure about other phone networks – check though.

2.    Get a redirectable 0845 / 0800 number

This is vital. When your customers call you, they don’t want to hear a funny beep then you answering. Get them to call a central number then you can re-direct it wherever you want. If I wanted to hire a call centre to do my call answering, I could now because I have this 0800 number that everyone calls.

3.    Use HolidayLettings.co.uk or Holiday-Rentals.co.uk

I could write an entire blog post about how to drive a bargain with these apartments, but I’ll say this. They have to pay for that mortgage whether you go or not, so look at the calendar and if it’s empty – make them an offer!

4.    Make sure the place has Internet

We’ve made this mistake before and it’s costly. Make sure you check that Internet is available in the apartment, won’t cost extra and is broadband. Holidayhome owners often say there is internet if it’s possible to use a 3G dongle which is NOT what you want. Make sure you check.

5.    Only check email twice a day

Depending on the timezone you are in, the UK working day might have been rocking for 2-3 hours by the time you get up so check email first thing and then again in the afternoon/evening. One thing I recommend is booking something to do around midday every day. This forces you to do whatever emailing you like and then go have fun!

6.    Do not get caught up in “running” the business

The objective of a working holiday is to do the things you never get the chance to do in the office like marketing, writing new website content, designing a new product, getting contracts sorted and all the other things that have been on your to-do list for months. Leave the admin crap to when you get back.

7.    Stop accepting cheques

They’re a nightmare to accept and you need to physically be there. The best thing to do is say to all your customers that you no longer accept cheques and it’s bank transfer or nothing. This means you can be wherever you are in the world and all is good. We use a combination of Direct Debit, PayPal and Internet Banking. I can access all of these from anywhere I have the Internet meaning I can always keep tabs.

More importantly – go have fun! I’ll say this much – If you can’t go away twice a year for a few weeks and have a break, you have serious problems. I can almost guarantee you didn’t start your business with the idea of working 70 hours a week, earn less than your staff and get no holiday. Change it or forever be a prisoner in your own creation.

Written with love…