17th January 2012 / Posted in: Management, Operational management, Planning and preparation, Top tips
Most of us have so many meetings that it’s easy to slip into the habit of not preparing adequately in advance. As well as the common sense preparations about knowing where you are meeting, how to get there, arriving in plenty of time and taking all the relevant paperwork etc. Time with clients is precious so aim to get the most out of any meeting, and grow your credibility, by being well prepared.
Pre-mortems are really useful when working on large projects, tenders or pitches. See Harvard Business Review for more information.
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9th January 2012 / Posted in: Care Quality Commission (CQC), Management, Operational management
At the beginning of October Panorama revealed that over 150,000 social care workers are paid less than the minimum wage. The care industry employs over 2m people in the UK. It’s physically and mentally tough work, those receiving care are dependent on carers for many of their basic needs yet it’s poorly paid. Many are paid the minimum wage, many little more, and a significant number are paid less as their employers exploit loop holes.
In November the media announced that Dr Foster had published a report which revealed that the death rates in NHS hospitals in England are higher at the weekend. Their report showed a correlation between highest mortality rates and the fewest senior doctors available.
Last month concerns were voiced as to whether the Government should do more to monitor the finances of companies operating in the care home sector needs following the collapse of Southern Cross earlier this year.
The regulatory body in England - the Care Quality Commission (CQC) has developed a document - the Essential Standards of Quality and Safety - which is used to evaluate whether registered health and social care providers in England are compliant with section 20 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008.
Standards against which providers are evaluated include:
According to their website the CQC state that their job is ‘to check whether hospitals, care homes and care services are meeting government standards.’ Comparing these standards with the events reported in the press suggest that the CQC aren’t doing their job, and the failings at Castlebeck hospital in relation to mistreatment of residents have resulted in an investigation by officials at the Department of Health and NHS Management.
Whilst the regulated health and social care providers have exacting standards they are required to meet, how does the CQC demonstrate it meets standards required by a regulator? Previous healthcare regulators of the independent healthcare sector - the Healthcare Commission and National Care Standards Commission struggled with service standards and inconsistency between inspectors. Is Castlebeck just the tip of the iceberg and has anything be learned by the mistakes of the CQC’s predecessors?
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3rd January 2012 / Posted in: Business efficiency, Management, Planning and preparation, Priorities, Time management, Top tips
When we're busy we often don't allocate enough time to prepare for meetings with our clients or follow up after the meeting. Every meeting, or significant telephone conversation, presents an opportunity to sow seeds which may develop and grow the business with that particular client.
These three tips may help you make the most of these opportunities:
► Send a summary of what was discussed and agreed within 48 hours of the meeting. If you don’t already send minutes or action plans Minutes.io is a useful tool. A summary is useful ground work for future meeting agendas.
► Take time to reflect on the meeting and whether any additional information, or clarification, is needed to progress any work
► Plan the actions required by the client remembering to schedule time in your diary. As well as making sure actions don’t get overlooked, scheduling helps keep track of the time actually spent on each client/project
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19th December 2011 / Posted in: Financial management, Management, Operational management
‘Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity but cash is reality.’ This neat saying, known as the ‘Banker's Mantra,’ is everything a business needs to remember about financial control.
Here’s why. I’ll start with profit - the sanity. The reason for being in business is to make money, and profit is the measure of a business’s ability to make money .... or loss if it isn’t doing well.
Nothing in this life is ‘free’ so the Inland Revenue tax your sanity which is why some businesses may want to keep their reported profits to a minimum. However for the the purpose of this short blog I’m only focusing on operating profit, that is the profit earned from a business’s core business operations. It’s also known as EBIT - earnings before interest and tax.
As I’m blogging about profit and cash I’ll only mention vanity in so much as it’s all the revenue a business generates from its operations. As it’s the largest number in the profit and loss account it’s what companies can boast about.
A business can’t focus on just profit and turnover alone because the process of generating revenue needs cash because
all need cash.
These costs occur in advance of the product being produced and sold so cash is an essential ingredient. It doesn’t matter where the cash comes from - whether it’s generated by the business or provided by investors or borrowed from the bank, but without cash a business cannot survive.
Some business owners and managers think that if they are in profit they should have cash and can’t understand when they don’t. It’s sometimes caused by them focusing on the P&L, which doesn’t show cash movement, rather than looking at the balance sheet and cash flow forecasts.
The reason that profit and cash aren’t the same thing is timing. There are two aspects to this. Firstly cash is needed to produce and sell a product or service, and secondly accounting conventions use the tax date of an invoice as the moment the profit is recorded, not the payment of the invoice. For the majority of businesses the cash received for payment of an invoice is not on the day it is raised. Consequently there needs to be a buffer of cash to carry on the business.
Taking this a stage further a company can be highly profitable on paper but because of the disparity between paying the cost of sales and overheads and receiving payment for invoices mean the company has no cash. If the cash outgoings are greater than the cash coming in the company may go into receivership. It’s called overtrading.
Profitability is a function of the company’s ability to maximise revenues from their cost base - namely their direct and indirect costs and assets. Having sufficient cash in the bank to continue the operations that generate profits is the proof of management’s ability to:
So - to answer the question - 'profit or cash - which is more important?' - cash is the most important as the business cannot continue to carry on day to day operations in the current market without cash in the bank and you cannot rely on banks to provide an on-going overdraft facility.
However the end game for any business is both - as profits are the purpose of being in business and these can only be enjoyed by the business owners if there is sufficient cash to distribute the profits.
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18th May 2011 / Posted in: General, Management, Operational management, Productivity, Strategy
What stops you sleeping? Other than your partner snoring, or car alarms going off in the night, we sometimes find ourselves lying awake mulling over business concerns such as cash flow, cost control, sales pipeline, winning new business, retaining existing business, managing clients, competitor activity, staff performance, being too busy and not having enough time for everything, work-life balance, etc. Every business is different, as is our individual capacity for managing stress, so I’ve chosen just three worries which have given my clients, friends and me sleepless nights.
I’ve been asked this same question by business owners who work for themselves and have a really unique set of skills and experiences, and others growing their business. The question they both want answered is whether, or when, they should take on staff. My answer to both is a question - ‘What is your exit plan?’ Do you want to turn the lights off, close the door and go home when it’s time to move on to the next thing, or do you want a business to sell? If you want the former then you’ll need to manage the business to maximise your revenue streams.
The latter is more complex because if you’ve been doing everything yourself, and your business is ‘your baby,’ you may have difficulty letting go. You may not be the best person to analyse your strengths, and the complementary skills required to share the load, so taking professional advice may save sleepless nights in the long term.
If you’ve been in business a number of years, and you have a number of long standing clients, a good sales pipeline and you’re reasonably effective at winning new business you probably enjoy what you do and feel quite pleased with the way business is going. But, it’s easy to feel too comfortable and take your eye off the ball in such a subtle way that you don’t even notice you are doing it. Compared with the early days you deliver services to your clients more efficiently, you’re more familiar with your clients, your hunger is less pronounced and you’ve drifted out of the habit of challenging yourself to ensure you’re going the extra mile. Your clients seem happy. Nothing is broken so there’s nothing to fix. You’ve become complacent, you haven’t noticed and it’s a dangerous place to be.
Then disaster strikes. What seems like a insignificant oversight really damages a long standing client relationship and they either terminate the contract or ask you to re-tender. The mistake seems disproportionate to the client reaction. Either way, you feel devastated and you lie at wake feeling guilty and worrying about your other client relationships.
This isn’t an unusual situation and one I’ve experienced as an employee. The reality is that statistics show clients move on every 7 years. Your oversight just provided the trigger.
Don’t lose more sleep - learn from your mistake to avoid repeating the disaster:
Have you ever sent a proposal to a client and heard nothing for weeks, sent information a client needed urgently and heard nothing, found yourself waiting for a signed agreement or purchase order to progress a project you’ve agreed with the client? Most of us have been kept waiting, and probably lost sleep over it thinking the worst.
What we forget is that our priorities are not our client’s priorities, and most of our clients have many responsibilities and priorities we don’t even know about, so the trick is not to worry. In my experience if clients are unhappy they’ll waste no time telling you. If you have a deadline to meet - don’t rely on e-mail - pick up the phone. Leaving a message or speaking to a colleague conveys more urgency than an e-mail. If there’s no deadline then give the client a week then e-mail or call. I had a client whose capability intimidated me. I was approaching a deadline, had heard nothing so plucked up courage to pick up the phone. It was a great decision. The client was clearly much happier to discuss the issues on the phone than ping e-mails back and fore. And, guess what - I feel more in tune with my client and I’m no longer feeling intimidated.
If I request information from someone I always e-mail a thank you as I think it’s bad manners not to do so. However I’ve found that my standards are not always the same as those of my clients or suppliers which can leave me feeling nervous when I've sent them something and heard nothing. It can be true that no news is good news as if you get it wrong you'll hear soon enough so if you hear nothing leave it a few days then call to check what you've sent has arrived safely.
It's easy to fall into the trap of being less formal about aspects of managing relationships with clients. To ensure everyone has the same perception of what was agreed at a meeting it's a good idea to write a succinct contact report, and when meetings are arranged verbally don't forget to send an e-mail confirmation.
This blog was written as a guest blog for Sussex Enterprise and published on their website in April 2011.
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