… In which we build the value of our name and see the benefit of doing things the way the true professionals do it.

THE NAME IS THE GAME

We are on a journey at the end of which hopefully we will be in possession of something that is of improved value. In the world of commerce, the thing that everyone wants to end up with is a valuable brand. For the self-employed, may I suggest that we aim for a similar goal, but in our case that thing of value, our brand, should be our name. I would suggest that this is preferably our own name; I have absolutely no idea why the self-employed choose a name for their enterprise that isn’t their own. What are you trying to hide? The thing that really winds me up is the ‘twee’ name. Seriously, what do you think having a twee name will achieve? Where have you seen a twee name succeed (I suppose they do sometimes but on the whole in the real world success and fame tend to tie to a real name). Here is a list … Ford, Sears, Marks & Spencer, Cadbury, Kellogg’s, Barry Manilow, Barclays, Carnegie, and on and on it goes. In any high street or stock exchange, so many enterprises carry the name of the founder. Are you shy, or perhaps ashamed of your name? The other great advantage of using your own name against a twee one is that it gives you flexibility. If you start as ‘The Coffee Table Workshop’, then for the rest of time you will make coffee tables, but if you are ‘Gladys Prong Designs’ you may find wooden toys prove more lucrative than coffee tables with no change of name needed.

Next, if you look at that list of names they are successes each and every one. Why? Because they are, or were, brilliant individuals. Does that daunt you? Why? Are you planning to be crap? “No, Geoff, I will become crap by accident!” You have been into crap coffee shops, rubbish enterprises; you have been driven wild by unreliable builders, sent insane by vague mechanics, frightened by apparently inept business advisors. You’ve seen it and yet you fear you might go the same way. Look, you have seen the bad, under-confident, the unprofessional, you recognize it, you acknowledge it, so DON’T DO IT.

This section of the book is about becoming well known but, of course, you have to become well known for being good. An awful lot of small enterprises are very well known for being bad! I recently had cause to do business with a small motorcycle repair workshop. The guy did a good job and charged a reasonable price, but on the internet the comments against him were horrendous and he was described as surly and unhelpful. The first point is that he didn’t even know these reviews were out there and, secondly, he didn’t feel it was important to do anything about them. With the world the way it is, as soon as you do anything bad, everyone gets to hear about it and your reputation can go global. Make sure you have a reputation for being reliable, good value, helpful and professional.

FAMOUS

Famous is another key word. You absolutely and utterly need to be famous but only in the catchment area of your customers. If you are a window cleaner, get famous in ten streets. If you are a hairdresser, maybe the whole town should have heard of you. Are you a collector and distributor of rare and weird insects? Then tell the world.

Positioning

Don’t think from this that I am suggesting that you become the most expensive, or that you should battle your way ruthlessly towards that top slot. What I am talking about is what the marketing men call ‘positioning’. You have done your meticulous research, you can see what a professional enterprise should look like, and you have seen what a rubbish enterprise looks like. You have spoken to the customers and you can see which customers spend what and where.

For instance, you decide that you wish to do sales training and you see that medium enterprises are the ones using external trainers. The small firms don’t appreciate the benefits and can’t afford it anyway, while the large companies have their own in-house team. Therefore, your market is clearly defined and you must pitch in at a level of professionalism that will impress and reassure those people.

What traditionally happens is quite the reverse; instead of calculatingly tailoring their professionalism to their carefully selected market and persevering at this level, most enterprises permit their level of crapness to allow them to drift into doing business with the people who are prepared to put up with it.

TRUST ME

So you need to be famous through reputation, but the greatest disaster you could achieve would be to become famous for being crap. I cannot emphasize this more toughly or more sincerely; the very heart and key to your success is to avoid at any cost any element of crapness or a reputation for crapness. Let me explain why.

Remember that the customer wants maximum benefit but minimum risk. New one-person enterprises could possibly offer good value – a benefit – but might be incompetent – a risk. May be unreliable – a risk. May be dishonest – a risk. You have just blown it on a score of three to one against. Just the tiniest whiff of shonkyness in the literature or the stationery will get the customer’s risk juices flowing. The dirty, ill-maintained vehicle backs that up. A few minutes, or worse hours, or even worse, days late, just about seals the deal. All you then need is a complete dumbo answering the phone and you are done, dusted, and six foot under – complete with attractive headstone.

Whatever enterprises I have been using as examples, these rules can and should be applied to your planned enterprise before you start, and that pace should be maintained or improved forever. You should view your enterprise as a marathon and one that gets better as you go on. You start perfect and get better. So many people start by sprinting: “Yes, we can do that, we will work all night if we have to, we’ve kept to the budget by going to a bit of extra trouble, I’ve bound all the paper in a file to make it easier for you, of course we will do that … anything for a customer!” After a week of that they are completely knackered and go for option ‘crap like all the rest’.

Look at the extremely rare, quivering, frightened creature that is our potential customer; when you see that poor thing cowering, what do you need to do to get its trust? Reassure and stroke – guarantees reassure, kept promises reassure, third party recommendations and testimonials reassure, appearance reassures, and the quality of communication reassures. Now apply these simple elements to your enterprise – if you can’t tick all these boxes I cannot save you from your inevitable doom.

GIVE ME A RING

Phone answering and office services often get people into a sweat. This is the beginning of the reputation-building process – the beginning of the ‘experience’ of your enterprise. I have likened the successful self-employed person to the jungle guerrilla, travelling light with a bag of rice and an AK47. It’s unlikely, you may think, for them to have a social secretary, but in these days of smart phones and portable media you, in theory, should always have a phone and the ability to respond to emails with you. Actually, at the time of writing this, revolutions are breaking out all over the world and Presidents are being toppled – not by Kalashnikovs but by iPhones.

Your mobile phone rings and as opposed to shrieking “YO!” or “Ello” or “Yep?” what prevents you from saying, “Gladys Spongs phone, how may we help you?”

Or, sometimes I’m told, “I get my Mum, wife, brother or dog to answer the phone.” Picture that scene: “Hello?” “Is that International Food Hygiene? “No.” “Not Mr Watson?” “Oh! You mean my Barry! He’s on the bog at the moment, he had a curry last night … he could go through the eye of a needle!”

The solution is simply to train your mum. Insist, demand, bribe or threaten, the phone WILL be answered, “Thank you for calling International Food Hygiene, I’m Hilda, how may I help you?” “Oh yes, is Barry there, please?” “Who is calling, please?” “Terry Jenkins.” “Well, Mr Jenkins, I’m afraid Mr Watson is in a meeting at the moment but if you could give me your number I will get him to ring you back in the next few minutes.”

This is not a book on customer service but I do recommend that while doing your research you read a few of them (especially the ones I wrote!).

You may feel that I speak with forked tongue when I speak of travelling light, being a guerrilla, or paddling a kayak on the one hand, and then talking about prestigious full-out professionalism on the other, but there is no conflict – just don’t have a kayak with holes in it.

INVEST IN QUALITY

The problem I find with new enterprises is that they tend to get their priorities wrong. They are prepared to lease hat stands, yet they shy away from investing in the customer-facing part of their enterprise that really can add value. Take yourself into any small shop right now and look at their price tickets – are they orange Day-Glo stars with badly handwritten prices on them? Who on earth invented and markets Day-Glo stars and what really, I ask you, was the thinking behind it? “I know, if we make these ghastly things, desperate small shopkeepers can make their depressing, failing shop look even more shonky and cheap!” And if it is your shop we are visiting, what were you thinking when you bought a packet of Day-Glo stars? It is unlikely to make you famous through good reputation but is likely to make you famous for being crap. That’s positioning, OK?

I remember laughing at a cartoon of a little figure looking at a mountain-size pile of manure. At the top there was a sign which read, ‘The Heap’ and at the bottom a sign with an arrow which read ‘You Are Here’. If that is where you want to be, that is where Day-Glo stars will put you, along with a whole host of other things like self-produced leaflets, horrid cheap business cards, a tatty personal appearance, an amateur website, dirty, rough-looking premises, or a tatty van that says ‘You’ve tried the rest now try the best’.

It frustrates the living daylights out of me when small enterprises make these mistakes. This really isn’t rocket science – if you watch what a large professional enterprise does and you offer the same standard of professionalism and appearance you cannot go wrong. Anything less than that is just rubbish and all you will do is earn a reputation of being ‘not very good’. I chose those words carefully because words like ‘outrageous’, ‘disgusting’ and ‘fearsome’ are big, powerful, thought-provoking words which most enterprises also fail to achieve. They tend to go out with a whimper, not a bang, and are just not very good.

Let’s just ruminate for a moment. Where are we with this? I want to stop here for a while and take stock before we move on. We have gone from the uniformed plumber to professionalism to my back bedroom, and the key messages from this are that:

• we need to be very clear about our market and who our customers are before working out what our positioning should be;
• from careful research we need to see and understand our competition in order to establish how our positioning compares;
• we have to test our offering against theirs and at least equal it in every detail, even if it means offering the same level of guarantee, money-back reassurance and the promise to put things right immediately. You may feel that this is a high cost option for a struggling, self-employed person, but if you lose your reputation it is going to cost you a lot more than that, it could cost you everything;

We have to understand that this is base camp – you cannot get away with being a bit more crap as long as it’s a bit cheaper. Sure, if you want to open a truck stop café, it won’t be bone china, Melba toast and roast quail, but it must at the very minimum be as good as any truck stop anywhere, or do you know what it is the trucks won’t do … er … stop!