I am getting healthier, more positive and more productive. I know that I am at the start of the ‘next phase’ of my life. Perhaps it’s a mid-life crisis, having turned 40 last year and having a death of someone close. Who knows?

One thing I do know is that I needed to ‘evolve’. My personal journey over the past seven years has been quite dramatic (maybe not to outsiders) and if I could have known then, that I’d be where I am now, I would have jumped at the chance.

Personal development is an area I feel strongly about. We all evolve, as life experiences determine changes in our behaviour and outlook on life. But, we can control the direction.

I want to share my thoughts on this area of my life a bit more on my Blog, hence the change. Feel free to unsubscribe if you just want to stick to business, or hang on in as you learn a bit about what I am doing.

For instance, over the next five years I will:

• Lose five stone in weight and become a healthy bastard.
• Grow my business to the point where I don’t need to work.
• Have some real life experiences, rather than reading about them or watching them on telly.

Sound familiar any of those?

Here’s a thought that drove this change this morning as you sit there reading your computer screen, possibly with an intense squint…

I am currently walking to and from work (a round trip of around 6.5 miles) at least once a week. This morning, I was steaming along and people watching (or staring as my wife says).

I was struck by a little girl walking to school with her mum. She spontaneously started to skip with a beaming smile. She didn’t care who was watching and she wasn’t judging her performance of skipping. She was just joyful for doing it.

Why can’t we adults be more childlike?

“Hello it’s Martin here from BT, firstly I am going to try and be friendly by asking you how you are today even though I don’t mean it.

Next, I am going to state the obvious about the Internet, a subject I know jack-shit about, but also don’t know that you know quite a bit about.

Now, I would like to sell you something that you know is shit even though we sell a lot of them to people who don’t, causing them to waste their marketing money.”

Stop wasting my time!

Since I moved on from that business, which was creating well over a million in annual revenue, to my new venture (less than £300k at the time), I realised that I had slipped down a pole in terms of the “how-much-they-give-a-shit-about-you-meter”.

I get that. I understand the investment of time and risk versus profit. And, of course, my timing coincided hot on the heels of the banking crisis.

Moving on a couple years and we are in a situation where banks are needed by small businesses to grow and take on opportunities. Being naive, I would have thought that track records count. This doesn’t seem to be the case.

In the past year, my ‘business relationship manager’ has spoken to me twice – basically to tidy the mess of a loan I took out seven years ago with them. The loan should have been paid off by now, but due to mis-administration, it is still ongoing and through my pushing, I have also discovered a four figure overcharge in interest payments.

As my new business grows – we have tripled in size over the past two years – I thought I’d look at options of banks away from the RBS-owned NatWest. Partly due to the lack of interest by them in my business, and partly due to the fact that if they can’t manage their own bank, what right do they have to take part in mine.

So, I met up with some sharp-suited, young twenty-something bankers from HSBC who took swipes at their local rivals as they straightened their Next Ties talking a great game about how they could help me where my current bank was letting me down.

The problem is, to quote Gordon Gecko from Wall Street,

It’s The Same Dog… Different Fleas

Apart from the lack of communication –  I had to chase them after three weeks of no reply – turns out they can’t help or even match our current facility. The balance sheet of our [growing] business doesn’t look good. Who’s does?

To some respects, I get the caution – it’s what banking needs. What gets me is this:

People who work at banks think they are the dogs bollocks. They think they understand business and they think they can advise you on how to run yours. They think they can judge your entire operation on your balance sheet or PNL. They can’t.

To compare me with RBS, for instance, as the business owner I don’t award myself massive bonuses while I lay off staff. I don’t need tax payers money to bail out my arse and I also ensure that my business offers a decent level of customer service.

On the high street, Business Managers in banks are like public servants. They think they understand, because they’ve read a book, or been to a seminar, but, they have no idea what private business is about. They have about as much enterprise as a union rep.

Luck – You Make Your Own

I managed to meet people along the way in my first business who bought into me (as a person). Because of this trust, some of these people will (and have) lent me money to grow my business. It costs me more but I don’t care – I want to share the risk by rewarding them. In the past 22 months I have borrowed £65,000, tripled the size of my business, and will have paid off the loans within 48 months.

Timing is everything. There are opportunities right now. Business owners – entrepreneurs – who I speak to are doing fantastic business right now.

The banks (and the impotent bankers who work in business retail banking) just can’t (or won’t) see it.

We aim to be innovative and creative in all that we do.

I can’t think of a less innovative or creative way to say that.

It’s tough out there, without a doubt. Jobless graduates with huge debts; companies issuing profit warnings or laying off lots of staff. Even the Public Sector is not in it’s usual safe haven, with job losses and cuts all round.

But, I have a circle of five business owners I speak to regularly. We (me included) are all pinching ourselves wondering what we are doing wrong / right. Business is good. For some, it’s better than it’s ever been.

I’m not saying this to brag. I’m saying this to prove that  it’s not all doom and gloom.

There is plenty of business out there, whatever trade you are in: You may just may have to work doubly hard to get it. The days of waiting for the phone to ring are gone, which is bad news for the 80% of the sales people who operate that way.

You have to chase business. You have to work harder to prove that you have something different. Your customer is more clued up than ever – they have knowledge and choice at their fingertips and you need to have something special.

A lot of the time, the product and service is interchangeable – the key differentiator is your people.

Having people who get ‘it’ on your team makes a hell of a difference – not just an ‘employee’ but a stakeholder. Yes, they seem few and far between but they are out there.

Some smart arse (can’t find the reference) was once quoted…

“Yes, there is a recession, but we are choosing not to take part.”

Me neither…. wise words.

I’m giving up on Twitter.

Perhaps it may just end up being an extended break, but right now I fully intend on giving up on it as @craigkillick.

And yes, I realise that many of the reasons below could be sorted by deleting some of the people I follow but I think there is more of an underlying issue with my own productivity and focus.

Time = Value

In my last job at The Escape, I had the luxury of time which was focused on R&D. Hence, I ended up being an early adopter of many new platforms. Then, I lost the vision I had of where the web industry was going and I sold up.

More recently, the whole social platform on the web has become a little bit distractive and destructive for me, serving little purpose in my real world.

Conversations… Really?

Although web 2.0 gave us all a voice; all in all, the value in the conversations and relationships to be had is not enough for me to be worried about losing them.

Yes, I’ve met some interesting people. I’ve also met… lots of ‘other’ people. And, plenty of people who talk a very good game but can’t back it up.

There simply isn’t enough of a reason for me to stay in that respect. If anything, I’ve seen the growth of micro-celebrity and sycophancy on Twitter placed on some people with no discerning talent and no success in the real world. It’s like a digital Okay Magazine.

Moving into the beauty industry has opened my once tech-only-focused eyes onto the fact that a high percentage of the population couldn’t give a damn about ‘social networking’, how many followers people have and what this person or that person ‘tweeted’.

Business Focus

In reality, the most successful people I know personally use Twitter little or never. Don’t get me wrong, there are useful reasons for Twitter and good conversations to be had, but they are few and far between and in a world where time is valuable (especially when I have a small family and a business to grow) I need to reassess what grabs my attention.

When I am waking up in the morning wanting to check my Twitter feed and Facebook wall pretty much before everything else, there has to be something wrong with the balance of my life. And I know I have addictive tendencies, so this for me is a big issue for quality of life in general.

Judging by other peoples ‘tweets’, it’s an issue for many people I fear.

Please Love Me

I’m not enough of psychologist but some argue that if you boil behaviours down you come to a base of people wanting to be accepted / loved. Hello Social Media – the biggest platform ever for all those people.

Even this Blog is about ego – me writing hoping that someone thinks I’m clever.

And the very way Twitter works is bound to attract the passive aggressive people in society. Poor, poor me – the world is against me!

Permission Marketing Overload

And, if it’s not that, it it’s the companies (yes me included) trying to get a little bit of attention by displaying how clever they are. Yes, it may well be an opt in platform, but it’s been hijacked by the sales teams and marketers that can’t afford to be too subtle (or don’t know how to).

Bye Bye

So, for now at least, I’m hanging up my Twitter fingers (which are increasingly aching by the way). If anyone is looking for me (and I doubt it) I shall either be outside, getting some Vitamin D and fresh air or at my desk focusing on growing my non-digital business.

Fun while it lasted though.

I was chatting to his high street neighbour (and competition with the sandwich / café  shops they both own) at the weekend before either of us had found out about the closure.

He was telling me how business for him was ‘okay’, but he had managed over the past couple of years to analyse where he made his money and had subsequently stopped selling a number of items.

It’s an essential part of business – optimisation.

But, sometimes you have to go through the pain, before you see why. With suppliers suggesting products that ‘fly off the shelf’ or that ‘everyone’s asking about’ it’s no wonder that struggling retailers will try new things.

But, it’s a fools errand.

You end up joining the bland “vanilla” retailers, rather than getting well know for something.

In our salons we are being brutal with new ‘inovative’ products. I often get told how much a new treatment will make us and how in-demand it is and in the past, we invested the money in training and equipment… Only to realise it’s not so popular.

The more you focus, the more you get better at what you do; the more you get the reputation.

Think Small.

The main waiter knows me, knows what I like and is always friendly without being over friendly. Like I said, I’m a fan.

Because of their approach, the place is also successful. While all the other restaurants in the street are half full or empty, this place is bustling on a Thursday evening.

But I’ve noticed it slowly changing over the last six months. It doesn’t seem the same place is it used to be. Last week, for instance, our order was slightly wrong, the staff were slow and when I went to use a loyalty card I have, I was told the offer had changed from 10% off to free desserts.

There are business decisions behind these changes, that are looking for short-term gain, probably cost-cutting.

The problem is, it changes the proposition completely. To be honest, this place has been losing it’s sparkle for me for some time and last week was the end of something special. It’s still an ‘ok’ restaurant but I no longer want / feel compelled to talk about it to people. It’s no longer remarkable.

Being Remarkable

Marketer Seth Godin talks about being remarkable as giving a service / experience that compels someone to make a remark about you. Being just another business in your industry is easy – but then again so is being remarkable when you think about it.

I am currently reading The Referral Engine by John Jantsch, a book that offers ideas and structure to making your business worth being talked about. It’s worth a read.

A couple of stories for you from our Basingstoke Beauty Salon this week. Claire, the Manager (and my wife) gets it.

A woman came into the salon a little stressed. She was very busy, needed something doing quickly because then she had to try and get a hair appointment and then had a long list of other things to do. Claire calmed her down, arrange for her treatment then quickly phoned a hair salon round the corner to see if they could fit her in. They could.

Another lady walked in off the street, a little shy, a little unsure. Her eyebrows were too thin and she didn’t know what to do and had never been to a beauty salon. Claire reassured her that through a course of a specific treatment they could grow them out. But she didn’t stop there.

She wrote down the name of a product on a slip of paper, told the woman to pop to a specific beauty counter in the local department store and get the specific eyeliner product she’d written down. When she came back, Claire demonstrated to her how to use it then got her to do it herself so she was comfortable with the procedure. She booked a course of treatments there and then and is no doubt out there talking about the salon to her friends.

Value Needs To Be Earned

Valuing your customers and concentrating on what is remarkable about you (in their eyes) not only helps keep your existing customers happy, it turns them into fans and advocates.

Customer Service that Excels is Marketing

Don’t exceed expectation; change it.

News International are taking a bashing right now and it’s getting worse by the day. I have to wonder if they can survive in the UK.

As a large shareholder (not majority) of BskyB, they are often seen as the owners. Sky is synonymous with Rupert Murdoch and vice versa – and this perhaps reflects right now in the share price.

Anyway, if News International gets into a pickle, and if Sky get into a Pickle, I would guess that football is going to get into a very big pickle.

Which clubs are so reliant on the ongoing well-being of the game simply to survive?

The banking crisis came about purely because people had gambled on continual growth.

Like I said, hypothetical

I wrote an article on this about three months ago and these developments come as no surprise to many, many people.

(And, with austerity cuts not even fully taken hold yet, you have to wonder how bad it will get before it gets better.)

In 2009, I heard a prominent business person say that any idiot could have made money in the past twenty years. People were spending, prices were rising, inflation was manageable so people kept on spending… And the banks kept lending.

But, we now realise we all spent too much and savings have to be made one way or another.

My worry is that some retailers simply aren’t flexible enough for the change; or, even worse, some of them can’t even see the changes happening… This weeks events would point to the fact that some of them don’t.

The Changing High Street

During those good times of the nineties and noughties, retail evolved (again) with the advent of the Internet, but also in the development of out-of-town retail parks and I’m not so sure that some of the traditional high street retailers took it seriously enough.

Ultimately the developments have changed the face of the inner city/town high street and shopping centres. There are opportunities, but not the same ones as twenty years ago.

Take my local shopping centre, Festival Place in Basingstoke. When I was a kid, there was a row of shops in the shopping centre… Tesco, Boots and WH Smith. That area of the town is now a sub-text to the busier parts of the shopping centre and contain an empty shop, a sports shop, a nic-nac shop and a bank. Tesco went out of town with a huge supermarket, although they did come back with a metro store (as well as plenty of Tesco Locals dotted around the town).

The big draw of the shopping centres isn’t even necessarily the Department Store anymore, which is a very recent change. It’s something like the new Apple Store opening that will drag the punters in.

The modern, state-of-the-art shopping centre as a centre piece to Basingstoke has left the old ‘market town’ area relatively redundant with a fraction of the foot-fall and a migration of retailers away from the area. (For me this is an opportunity for niche retailers, but that’s another article).

And still, whether in a shopping centre or a high street, I keep seeing vanilla, instantly forgettable shops and brands.

The Four Ps of Marketing

Depending on which book you read, there are either four, five or seven Ps of marketing.

If you take the traditional four Ps you have…

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion

Apply these to the companies currently falling upon hard times and it’s no wonder they are failing. They’ve lost touch with relevant value propositions for a target customer.

Even the old traditional market place – the place for a good bargain – has been replaced with Primark, Wilkinsons and Pound Shops.

The fundamental oversight on the part of the people running these retailers is astonishing.

What Are People Really Buying?

Last night, I really enjoyed episode two of Made in Britain – a BBC Money Programme, charting the UK as part of the global economy. The presenter, Evan Davies, talking about the value chain and branding, walked through a trendy coffee shop (33:25 minutes in) and as he did, he mentioned the evolving nature of a consumer and the relevant relationship of the economy (retailer). The transcript goes something like this…

“When people enjoy a good education, they become more affluent. Their whole way of consuming changes. They have more time. They can afford more than basic subsistence. They begin to think about self-expression and what they say about themselves.

“Fairtrade chocolate… It tells me I care about other people; or that I can afford to care. Italian and Brazilian menu choices tell me how worldly I am. The newspapers (shows a shot of The Times) remind me how clever I am. And then there is the dazzling array of coffee choices that says so much about oneself.”

“The more affluent and educated the consumers are, the more frivolous they tend to look. They seem to be more worried about the froth on the coffee than the coffee itself.

“And modern economies respond to those kinds of consumers. They adapt to produce things and to serve the more trivial needs that rich consumers have.

I’d call that identifying a target market, or knowing your customers and what they want.

Summary

There’s more to come. Consumers are savvy. They can come to your shop to check your products then finds a cheaper price online. In fact, they don’t even need to come to the shopping centre in the first place.

But, take a look at the high street and some shops are doing very well. Basingstoke town centre can accommodate two Starbucks, two Costa Coffees and two Neros, as well as a range of other coffee shops and cafés. Apple are investing in high street retail, which is a massive boost considering what they sell.

People still want the retail experience. They want to hold things, smell things and see them for real rather as pixelated images on a bright screen. They want to mooch, stop for a coffee, then carry on browsing.

Supermarkets offer scale and value – they do not offer experience. Opportunity knocks.