Operational management

17th January 2012 / Posted in: Management, Operational management, Planning and preparation, Top tips

3 things to do before a client meeting

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.

• Set aside time in the diary well in advance of the meeting to think, read minutes or notes from last meeting, draft an agenda and research any new ideas you have suggested previously or want to mention at the meeting
• Send an agenda, agenda items and any papers for discussion in advance of the meeting allowing enough time for the client, and anyone else attending, to read and prepare for the meeting
• Have a ‘pre-mortem’before the meeting, that is imagine everything that might go wrong in terms of the client not liking what you’ve presented, the client not agreeing to things you’d assumed would go ahead, obections about price etc. If there are two or more of you attending the meeting each come up with your own list of the objections you may face, explain your rationale for identifying them. Agree what are valid objections then together work out how you would overcome them should they arise. It’s an excellent way of challenging your own thinking and identifying any potential weaknesses.

Pre-mortems are really useful when working on large projects, tenders or pitches. See Harvard Business Review for more information.

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12th January 2012 / Posted in: Business efficiency, Operational management, Planning and preparation, Priorities, Productivity, Time management

Tips to boost your productivity

On 10th January I gave a 10 minute presentation,  at the Chichester College Business Breakfast Club, on what gets in the way of working productively. Judging by the number of e-mails, texts and tweets I received the subject and presentation were spot on. The slide presentation is on Slideshare and the following are the key points from the presentation:

• About 50% of the audience admitted to allowing their work to be interrupted by pop up messages on their screen, pings etc when e-mails, texts etc arrive. 
• Interruptions damage waste your most important commodity - time. Once used time has gone for ever.
• Interruptions are a distraction and reduce your ability to focus your concentration and effort on the matter in hand leading to lower quality work that takes longer to produce
• Many people use their diaries simply for appointments and sometimes to list reminders. Using your diary to schedule everything is a discipline and a disciplined approach to managing your time delivers results.
• To start using your diary effectively do a brain dump of everything you need to do - not just tasks, but strategic priorities or the actions needed to achieve these priorities. Go through this list and highlight everything you need to do this week then separate in to two lists for the week - one for strategic and revenue-generating priorities and the other for everything else.
• Schedule the strategic priorities into your diary first remembering that you can’t focus for more than 90 minutes at a time, effectively, then take a break. Make the most of the first 90 minutes of your working day - it’s when you’ll work most effectively  (See ‘The way we’re working isn’t working’ by Tony Schwartz.)
• In your breaks you need to do something different. If you’ve been sitting at your desk looking at Facebook or Twitter isn’t a break. Move around. Have a change of scene.
• Remember - successful people like Richard Branson schedule time to look at an action e-mails - rather than looking at umpteen times a day,  and also define one important or key task as the priority for the day.
• Electronic diaries make using different colours for different types of task easy so you can see what is fixed and what can be moved around.
• Like any new habit working this way takes a bit of time but once you start using your diary effectively you’ll:

1. achieve more priorities - providing you put everything in your diary and you don’t shy away from diarising the ones you don’t want to do
2. feel good about achieving more priorities .... and the business will benefit
3. be less likely to forget to do things as if you need to reschedule something you simply move it to another time
4. be better prepared for client meetings, phone calls etc because you’ve identified planning time in your diary
5. be in a better position to drive opportunities forwards and keep ideas on the agenda if you schedule time to write notes after all meetings
6. become more realistic about the time it takes to do something and hence better at estimating how long something takes - which is really important if time is money
7. find yourself working faster or more efficiently if you know you have an hour do to something - providing your interruptions are being kept to a minimum and you remember to take proper breaks
8. achieve things rather than getting to the end of the day and feeling a failure as you haven’t crossed anything off the to do list
9. discover if you really have more do to than time allows, thereby putting yourself in better position to evaluate what to delegate or outsource
10. have a better work-life balance
11. be happier!
12. It’s worth spending part of Friday afternoon planning your diary for the week ahead

If you work with other people the business will be more successful if everyone recognises that time is their most important commodity and knows how to manage it effectively.

Click here to go to the slides

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9th January 2012 / Posted in: Care Quality Commission (CQC), Management, Operational management

Are the Care Quality Commission’s failings at Castlebeck just the tip of the iceberg?

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:

• staffing - there are sufficient numbers of suitably qualified, skilled and experienced persons, at all times, employed for carrying out the regulated activity
• financial position - the service provider must take all reasonable steps to provide the regulated activity in such a manner as to ensure the financial viability of delivering the service as defined  in their statement of purpose.

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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19th December 2011 / Posted in: Financial management, Management, Operational management

Profit or Cash - which is more important?

‘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

• creating the products or services it sells
• getting these to market
• employing staff
• office facilities, office overheads
• purchasing assets such as computers

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:

• minimise the amount of cash tied up in stock
• cost control
• minimise the time it takes for invoices to be paid - the debtors
• generate a greater margin than depositing the same money in the bank

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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29th September 2011 / Posted in: Brand alignment, Branding, Employer branding, Human Resources, Operational management

Employer branding - did it start BC?

Yesterday, after listening to Alistair McIntosh, Organisation Developement Manager for the British Library present at the CIPD seminar 'Employer branding when resources are tight' it came to me that the principals of employer branding have been around for an awful long time. They just weren't recognised as such.

I remembered learning a quote from the Bible at school 'If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal (1 Corinthians 13:1).'

Many companies, regardless of their size, still think branding is just a marketing activity.  To their customers or clients they 'speak in the tongues of men and angels' but what the staff hear from their employer is something very different. It's not surprising that their staff don't feel loved as what they are hearing is the sound of 'a noisy gong or clanging cymbal.'  Furthermore it's not surprising that the staff struggle to speak in the tongues of men and angels.

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