Blog

I took this picture at Chichester Harbour on Monday.

Pricing is the bane of most small businesses. It is a balancing act between not undervaluing your services on the one hand and not driving away potential customers on the other. However pricing can be a powerful way of attracting the right sort of customer, for example a £40 Swatch will tell you the time as well as a £3,000 Rolex but the aspirations, attitudes and interests of the wearers might be markedly different. As part of your marketing analysis you will have gone through the P's of Product, Placement and Pricing and identified the segment you are trying to reach.

I was at a 4Networking Session a few weeks ago and gave the usual 40 second pitch to a group of about 18-20 people. I accept that this is a breakfast meeting, and not everyone is at their best at this time of day. During a 1-2-1 session afterwards I asked Brad Burton what he thought I did for my clients. Brad is surrounded by MBA's and knows what they are capable of but somehow the content and message of my 40 second pitch hadn't registered.

It's blindingly obvious, but networking is an extremely good way of meeting people who may either be able to use your services or refer you to someone else who can.

This is a bit of an experiment. I'll explain why after this;

I am looking for my next interim role. There are a number of areas where I can help you:

This has been an interesting week. The seminar on 9th July went well and there is now a waiting list for the next one. Email me if you would like to come. I also visited some very good networking sessions. During a conversation with a fellow net-worker I had mentioned a quote I had read, "The stone age didn't end because the cavemen ran out of rocks".

This week I had a very enjoyable day facilitating a couple of sessions for the tax faculty of a reasonably large accounting firm. During the introductory session the faculty head put up the strategy statement and said, rightly, that organisations that stick to their strategy do better than those that change it frequently.

This has been bothering me for some time, and it relates to my previous posting of the "too difficult bucket". Obviously the role of government is to govern. Government is supposed to bring together a diverse range of resources and assets and deploy them to make large scale change happen in a way that individuals or small groups could not. Government has two main areas of responsibility, the first is execution; actually doing stuff, the other is policy making; dictating how others should do stuff. We seem to have a government that does not govern so much as fiddle.