Expand your business by being an access point

Africa is poised to grow at a rate of 5% per year. The World Economic Forum discussed it in great length in Cape-town, where I was honoured to be one of the moderators. “Can Africa live up to it’s promise?’ It’s the question in the room at the moment. What does this boil down to; lots and lots of opportunity needs lots and lots of cooperation and trust. Many times at the WEF the talks were about spring board platforms for talent and new ideas. Such platforms need cooperation and trust. Does politics or economics drive Africa?

In the past Africa has had a reputation of being “difficult.” I’m not just talking about local laws or government policies but the overall supportive culture of BIG ideas.

Are there opportunities in Africa? Yes massive ones and it’s no secret, but the better question is “Where are the access points?”

There are opportunities in China right now that will blow your mind. There are opportunities in Tete, Mozambique, the fastest growing city in the world. There are opportunities in Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Bolivia-and you probably know of a few more. We’ve had the conversations and they go like this… “You know what city is absolutely booming with opportunity…” Then it goes into a long story that you heard from some guy, that CNN picked up and did a short story on and so on. The only problem is you have no idea how to get involved or how to reach there.

We all know there’s opportunity, but not all of us have the access. You might be someone that has an “access point’ and not even know it? Do you have a good reputation in your city, a positive stream of endorsements, and do you trust yourself with people and introductions? Do you relate well with people, are you trustworthy, can you keep a secret if you need? If the answer is yes you could very well be an owner of an “access point.” If you don’t have a good reputation then you might want to start mending the bridges, repaying your debts, and start being this link for people who know there’s opportunity but can’t get to them.

How to be an access point:

People will pay a lot for trust - be honest and trustworthy.

Trust is earned over time. If you are willing to breach contracts, sell out to a higher bidder when you already gave your word, or just blatantly lie, then forget being trusted, and do not expect to be an access point.

Be accessible.

Nothing is worse then having an access point that you can’t access. Answer your phone, answer emails, create a good reputation when it comes to communication.

Connect people up even when you don’t get paid.

It’ll add to your reputation which will in the end lead you to more opportunities. Be a networker of ideas. Think about how you heard about your current mechanic, your current doctor, your accountant, your lawyer. Chances are it was through word of mouth. Someone connected you with them. Now take that concept and expand it beyond the sharing of professional services to connecting people in different spheres, different parts of the world.

Open up your world.

There might not be an immediate opportunity but if you’ve met someone with confidence and high values then finding a connection point might be around the corner. Be attentive to conversation. It will be in the seeming random, non-formal communication that you can pick up people are looking for. Some of the greatest opportunities may lie waiting at the office coffee dispenser. Many times we focus on where we are at and what we’re doing and by default only see opportunities where we are looking. Lift up your head from your desk and look around you. See what is available.

Churchill said 'You make a living by what you get, but you create a life by what you give'.

Being an access point often means being a giver. Connecting people is at its core an act of giving, you are giving away an opportunity that you may not be able to take advantage of on your own. But the result is so much bigger than anything that you could do individually that it is too good not to. Remember the hosepipe, that as it connects the tap to the plants, it too gets wet.

An Inconvenient Truth

'For every dollar you spend, 10c will go to poor starving children somewhere in the world.' 'Shoes, let's give shoes to the poor children in Africa so they can walk to school.' 'Our product comes from sustainably harvested forests where we pour back into local communities every time you buy a bag of our over priced offering.' Corporate social responsibility has invoked some of the biggest load of marketing hogwash ever dreamed up by Wall Street spin doctors. It is another layer of gloss in the facade dreamed up to help you not think that your brand new jersey might just have paid the annual wage for some poor barefoot machinist in a Bangladesh sweatshop. Hey wait a minute, we live in Africa, surely we are immune to the fabrications and machinations of Big Brother capitalist empires. Nah not really. If anything we are to be pitied all the more for allowing ourselves to be made into the unwilling victim in grandiose schemes, created to placate to consciences of the stupid consumer elsewhere.

Now that I have stood on a few toes I can see people perking up and going, 'Wait a minute do not these community schemes work? Are not the recipients of all this aid, welfare, and exchange better off than they were before we got involved in their lives?' Perhaps. But why do you have the need to broadcast your philanthropy to the world? Could you not just do the work, engage in the schemes anyway, and if the occasional discerning patron inquires then you can point out that 'hey we really are doing some good work in the world.'

My problem with corporate social programs is that I wonder if, more often than not, they are motivated by what they can get out of the deal rather than what they can give. That this is not charitable work at all but simply another transaction to be benefited from and marketed to the level of stupidity. Why should we invite the local politician to the opening of a new borehole in a rural community? Is it in the hope of currying favour with his party by giving him a soapbox to stand on? What ever happened to the idea of seeing a need and filling it, without any extra reward, thanks, or gratification, apart from the knowing in your soul that you changed lives today.

I question whether sometimes the 'we give back' slogans are not just a way of tapping into the emotions of a client who gets a little buzz every time he buys the product. That you are selling a convenient form of giving that makes a customer feel better because he no longer has to think about making a real difference in his community because 'I gave to Africa today'. And that 'little buzz' is capitalised on to make him keep buying the product. I question if we have got it all wrong.

That the wrongness stems from the very start of our companies, from the very core of our being. We all have dreams. That is Lesson One from any book on self actualisation that 'You Have a BIG Dream that YOU can Achieve.' Then we spend the next twenty five chapters learning how to make OUR dream become a reality, a reality that benefits US. That our visions for our company, for our lives ignore the real needs of those around us. Because we are so focused on ourselves when a need comes along we immediately view it through the tinted glasses of 'how WE can benefit from our own act of charity'. That the prosperity gospel often comes across as 'Give so YOU can receive'. That the focus of our giving becomes about us and what we can get, not about the recipient, forgetting that in any harvest part of the harvest is sown again to perpetuate the cycle.

Vision is not a bad thing. Dreams are not a bad thing. But they should be tools rather than the real end goal. What point is there in building a great company but failing to build a great nation in the process? At the end of your career how different will the housing that your workers live in be compared to now? What would it take to improve the lives of those that work for you, and in a manner that does not result in them being in indebted servitude to you, but in a way that equips them to get up the rung one extra step? Housing is one example, but there is electricity, sanitation, education, health care. Then there is the non-humanitarian aspect of the planet we live in; our wildlife, flora, and aquatic systems.

Our giving back needs to be part of who we are and what we do. It does not need to be publicised or advertised. It should be done in a manner that allows maximum benefit (think above 90 percent of the proceeds) to reach the intended target, not wasted on advertising, fancy stage hire, or salaries of executives managing the process. It should be well targeted; take care of your own community. Where is the benefit of building a rural education centre if your own staff cannot afford to send their own children to school?

There will always be need. While no one person can solve every problem or give to every need, there is something each of us can do. With pure motives and sucking up the inconvenience of the actions, we can all find a way to quietly and genuinely help with no obvious reward.

Make things better. Not for the pomp and circumstance but because it is the right thing to do.

Time Marches On

DO you hear it? Listen carefully. It is very, very faint and easily drowned out by the louder random noises that clutter your life. There it is the subtle sound of sand running through the hourglass of
your life. It is the invisible, inevitable process of time ticking away never to be regained, never to be reused.
This morning, unless you are one of the unfortunate souls whose time was permanently cut short, you woke to 86 400 seconds of precious time to be spent in any way you see fit.
Here is a nasty experiment, subtract your age from 70. Now take that number, divide it by 0,7. The answer is the average percentage of your life you have left.
If you are on the other side of 35 the answer is a real shocker.
We do not really have a lot of time. So I get rather annoyed when someone tries to waste it.
I spent some time on the doingbusiness.org  website, part of the World Bank Group, after someone suggested I look at it.
If you google “doing business in Zimbabwe” the first search result is our national profile so I would say it is worth having a look.
The results were not very encouraging: 90 days to register a business from scratch, 106 days to get electricity to a new factory, 53 days on exports.
It was a painful read. Ninety days to register a business is only three months, but compared to South Africa’s 19, America’s six, and China’s just over 30, it looks like a living hell.
Did you know that there are 49 taxes and rates to be paid during a business year?
It is all there giving potential investors a snapshot of business in our nation and the burden of bureaucracy that snares us up.
The burden that wastes the little precious time that we all have.
Now you may question the accuracy of the results on the website all you like, but that is what the world sees and reads.
The real question is anyone doing anything about it?
As consumers are we demanding better services from our authorities or are we all blindly fetching the municipal inspector when we have already paid a fee that would cover his transport.
Inefficiency costs us. We can rant at the authorities all we like for the lengthy processes they put us through, but we then proceed to put our clients through the same pain.
Why should we wait for more than 20 minutes at the doctor’s office for a scheduled appointment?
If the meeting is from eight to 10, why does it start at 8.30? We have a culture that tolerates tardiness and excuses late delivery.
How much quicker would you get things done if I deducted 10 percent from your fee for every day you failed to deliver on time?
You cannot manage time. You know this. You cannot speed it up, you cannot slow it down.
You cannot command the sun to set earlier or later, or the seasons to halt their progress from one to the other.
You cannot manage time, but you can manage yourself.
Time management is self-governance.
Plan
Use “spare” time to plan your day. Spare time includes that increasingly long drive to work.
Reschedule your daily programme if it makes you more effective. If getting to work takes you an hour, try leaving earlier to beat the traffic.

Explore different routes to home and work
I take a different route home in the evening to my morning trip simply because it is so much quicker.
Under promise and over deliver. Leave a little margin for error on the end of every shipment, but personally ship within the time-frame.
Do not use your margin as an excuse but use it as a way of showing great service when your product arrives “early”.
Show up early for meetings
Include travel time when planning meetings. Do not set a meeting for 10am when you know that you have one earlier that only ends at that time.
It is so easy to overlook this when staring at your diary that works in one hour long blocks.
Leave a margin for travel if you are not hosting consecutive meetings at the same location (anyone doing business in Johannesburg knows this).
If someone is 15 minutes late for an hour long meeting then they only get 45 minutes of your time.
If you are 15 minutes late and have not had the decency to call or reschedule give them the whole hour, but make sure you call before your next meeting to reschedule.
Listen carefully. Do you hear that? The sand of time is still flowing away in the hourglass, you had better do something with it.

Busy and Productivity : The Great Myth

'Bingity bingty beep' goes your phone as yet another Whattsapp text from some random group pops onto your screen. 'Boip' another email enters your inbox. 'Plop' the messenger drops a REAL letter on your desk. Your Skype notification informs you that Adam in America has come online (you never speak to him, but it is good to know he is online). The ticker on your twitter feed keeps going as another one of the important people you follow (in case they ever actually bothered to notice your own posts) spews out some random comment about their breakup/new single/world peace. Perhaps it is time to check Facebook again and see if your news feed has changed in the last ten minutes. What about Instagram and Linked In? 'Boig' goes your email...or was it the phone? So busy. There is no time. So distracted. So unfocused.

We live in this illusion of being busy and think that being busy equals results. Then when an opportunity presents itself we are too busy to give it a second glance. But are we busy or are we just distracted. With all the extra sources of information and distraction in our lives it is easy to think that we are solving the world's problems when in fact we are getting nothing done. Being busy and working hard is only half the equation. You should also be effective. Unless Facebook is an effective part of your work (and you better have a good measure of how much revenue you generate from spending time on it) save it for another time or deactivate your account and watch what happens to your time.

Rare are the humans that can truly multitask. Sorry to break it to you there but your mind is capable of a single chain of thought at one time. Need proof? Think of the happiest event of your life. Now simultaneously think of the worst. See you can't., flip flopping between the two does not count. You can jump chains of thought but you can only ride the train of your mind on one piece of rail at a time. That means every time your phone rings while you are focused on your computer screen you have to leave what you are doing, answer the phone, and then try to recapture that molecule of neuronal firing you had five minutes earlier. Voltaire said that no problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking. Sustained thinking people, he did not say 'the assault of broken thinking'. If you find yourself jumping from task to task every five minutes you will probably never get any of them done effectively.

So how can we take our 'busy' and translate it into 'effective'.

You should have a priority strategy. There are a number of strategies that work for different people from simple numerical ranking of your to-do-list to more complex time framed algorithms. I do not really care about what you use but decide what is important and what is not. Here is one that I use regularly. Take a piece of paper and divide it into four squares. Label them: High Priority/High Urgency, High Priority/Low Urgency, Low Priority/High Urgency, Low Priority/Low Urgency. Put what you need to do into one of the boxes. Then start tackling the first box. Not sure about what is high priority, here is a list of things that should take priority from Emergingideas.com . Priority: thanking people, doing the biggest task first, reading and writing more, connecting people, producing results, being helpful, being present, brainstorming, following up and following through, finishing assigned responsibilities.

Invest time into activities. Chunk out time to do things, enough time to bring you to completion of the activity or to a set point. In order to get this article out I need to chunk at least an uninterrupted hour to write it out (that does not include the other chunks set aside for brainstorming, the research, and conceptualising of the article). For that hour my phone is on silent (real silent and not vibrate), my secretary knows not to interrupt me unless the world is ending, and I am alone in my little world focused on producing the best possible article for you to read. See you didn't know that you were that special.

If you absolutely have to use social media then chunk it as well. Set aside the time to do it, and set an alarm so you only spend the allocated amount of time to the task of gossiping through news feeds. Treat emails with the same contempt. Check them twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, and less on weekends if at all. If it is really that urgent the person will call you. Turn off your smart phone feeds (it will save you internet cap), or switch them onto silent at least. Control the volume of information coming at you, come up with reporting strategies that allow you to keep tabs on your business without micromanaging every order and task.

The successful are busy but they never respond 'I've been busy'. Shift your perspective to being effective. You will probably still be busy, but you will get what matters done.

Leave and Work

THE Easter break has come and gone and if you are like me you are back at work relishing the idea of a short week due to the past long weekend.
My calender resembles Swiss cheese the way the next two months are peppered through with breaks.
We have pretty good leave and holiday terms here in Zimbabwe and unless you are paid hourly or facing a crippling overtime bill there are no complaints about the extra time off.
Seeing as we have all this free time floating around I thought we could address it a bit, the good and the bad.
Breaks are important. There is no doubt about that. Humans need regular rest time, physically, mentally and spiritually.
Across the world we have weekends, time off and holidays of various lengths, most of it enshrined in legislation and contract.
Keeping the Sabbath holy has been around for thousands of years. So here is the good part.
Take a day off once a week and do nothing. Nothing is not quite true.
Keep physical exertion to a minimum but take the day to reflect and recharge.
Engage in spiritual activity, the Sabbath is not so much about rest as about honouring God. Meditate. Think or read. Now for the part no worker really wants to hear.
The flip side of taking one day off a week is you have to work the other six! What, work six days a week and not five?
That is correct. What about the weekend? Is not the two days off at the end of the week entrenched in the core of our very souls?
No it’s not, now work. I am not just talking about office work you munchkin.
Work on your home, your garden, your family or your vehicle (if you wash it with your kids you get to hit car and family at the same time).
And if you want, work on your business. Make your day productive, not just spent vegetating in front of the “idiot box”.
“But you don’t understand I am so tired after Friday”. No I understand perfectly, you are lazy.
Working that extra day is a 20 percent boost to your life’s productivity.
So I had a job. I got a month vacation leave, 12 days annual leave, 11 public holidays, three months sick leave, periodic compassion leave, and weekends.
It is a wonder I got anything done. Between the first three alone that works out at over 15 percent of my time off work while I got paid for doing nothing.
I am not against leave.
I just think we need to be a little smarter about it, both as employers and employees.
Would two weeks leave a year be enough? Perhaps not, but it is a question worth asking.
I can see mental cogs turning, employers going “but we would need to increase salaries to make up for the extra time worked”, employees going “work more you got to be kidding me right”.
The real issue is that we need to shift away from a mentality that seeks to screw over the system for everything it has got, to one that values productivity and fosters growth.
In the organisation that offered me the job above no one worked overtime, people would stop working 30 minutes before the end of the day in order to pack their bags so that they could leave right on time.
Any attempt to put in any extra effort earned you the wrath of your colleagues.
It was a very destructive community and I got out as soon as possible.
Now I believe in breaks and vacations. There is nothing more energising than an extended time away from your desk.
But use the time wisely. Rest a lot but also use the time to achieve things you would not normally be able to do.
Too many people go on leave and just sit at home and do nothing more than wear out a path between the fridge and the sofa.
It is fine to do that once in a while, but not for an entire month. Plan your leave time. Go away.
Travel and expose yourself to other ideas. Even if you cannot get out of the country, head somewhere locally and not so you can just sit in your hotel room the whole time either.
Google things to do and see in the area. Use your holiday to expand yourself, take books to read, plot family activities, explore a different culture.
Do not do so much that it tires you out, but stay productive all the same.
Keep a journal, jot down ideas for the office that may come up so you can put them into practice when you get back to work.
Switch off your phone, forget your email, and remember what it is like to live without interruptions (see how much you can actually get done without interrupting your chain of thought to check your Facebook account every half hour).
Make it a memorable time in building relationships within your family.
Take the concept of productivity and expand it beyond the boundaries of your office.
I went through two and a half books this weekend, they were fun, easy reading but expanded me a little bit more in terms of exposure to good writing.
There is a balance between work and play. Too much work and you will have an early heart attack.
Too little and you may not have enough money and starve to death.
In the words of ancient wisdom “A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest and poverty will come upon you like a thief and want like an armed man”.

The Great Gym Deception

Gyms have to be filled with the biggest load of body dysmorphics in
the world; each trying to achieve some Adonis inspired impossibility
of perfection and becoming even more dysmorphic in the process. Last
week, if you remember, I griped about my gym subscription, I thought I
would carry on with the trend. Many people go to gym essentially out
of fear; fear of rejection by the girl across the room, fear of the
fat-induced heart attack, fear that you do not live up to the
photoshopped expectations of the Men's Health cover guy. Others go to
satisfy the macho-image of bench pressing a ludicrous amount of metal
in the name of manhood. Seriously when else do you ever lie on your
back and push a weight off your chest. Unless you are a mechanic and a
VW golf falls on top of you I fail to see the practical benefit of the
bench press. “Ah but bru it gives you better pecs.” Sure, that's a
great reason for performing a non-functional exercise with massive
shoulder wrecking capabilities if done wrong. Despite all this I
really love gym. A convenient way (not the only way) to get some
exercise in and a great endorphin release. I still cannot justify the
expense at the new subscription rates though.

Here is my problem with gyms. They are a luxury experience at the high
end of my expense bill. Like most businesses in Zimbabwe they are
targeting the small minority of people with an above average income.
All the gyms are basically competing for the same, finite pool of
individuals. It is like being in a room of starving people and
fighting over the same small pot of sadza instead of cooking up
another batch from the ingredients in the kitchen. Only one gym in
recent history came into the local market with a strategy of targeting
new clients and even then I do not see it happening any more. What we
have is a pool of professional gym hoppers, people who shift from one
gym to the other. What we do not have is large numbers of people who
have never done gym before trying it out and sticking with it. What we
do not have is a sustained marketing strategy aimed at converting
people over to the product, no one is increasing the size of the sadza
pot.

It takes effort to come up with a way of targeting new clients and
building a relationship with them. The process can be scripted and
systematic, but it needs to be intentional. As a business you cannot
sit around and expect clients to fall into your lap. You have to be
intentional about targeting them, reaching out, and keeping them. Nor
should you be waiting for a lull before you jump into action. It needs
to be part of your process from the opening all the way through. If
you focus on enriching the lives of the client rather than lining your
pocket you will probably do a better job at keeping them. So for the
gym, that means being a little more concerned about my health and
fitness than about just increasing your fees, because if you take care
of me well enough I may just bring a friend along to train.

This is not a gym unique problem. It affects almost any business in
the country right now.

I was reminded this last week of a quote from the 1954 movie Sabrina,
where Linus Larrabee is explaining to his brother his motivation for
business;

'A new product has been found, something of use to the world. A new
industry moves into an undeveloped area. Factories go up, machines go
in and you're in business. It's coincidental that people who've never
seen a dime now have a dollar and barefooted kids wear shoes and have
their faces washed. What's wrong with an urge that gives people
libraries, hospitals, baseball diamonds and movies on a Saturday
night?'

If we keep fighting over the same pot of food we will never grow as a
nation. If we never bother to grow other people and enrich their lives
we will never grow as a nation. If our business is all about just us
getting money, getting fat, and never giving anything back we will
never grow as a nation. It is that simple. We will become a bunch of
greedy, corrupt people, happy to screw each other over in the name of
gain; a bunch of people the rest of the world will never want to deal
with because all we ever do is take.

I want to leave you with another quote from Sabrina, “Making money
isn't the main point of business. Money is a by-product.” Have a great
week.

What Really Matters

Grey's Anatomy has to be one of the most emotional television series in the world (well the current season anyway).
It is a behind the scenes, dramatic look at the world of emergency medicine. It still, however, gets it wrong.

It really fails to get across just how much effort goes into performing a surgery.
Yes, they show the cutting and sewing, but in the essence of high moving drama they leave out a whole chunk of the administration bits.
They leave out the sterilising of equipment, the major disinfecting and cleaning, the often numerous trays of theatre equipment that are on standby, the systems of booking theatre time, of ordering and pumping anaesthetic into the theatre, the waste disposal.
Unless you are in the medical field you have no idea what the real goings on in a theatre are, you just don’t see the complexity of the backend.
Primarily an IT term in website design, the backend refers to the whole bunch of stuff that takes place behind the scenes that the client never gets to see. And for the most part the client does not really care.
Most clients only care about the front-end, the bit that they interact with and that they see.
For the most part the client doesn’t even think about what happens at the back, unless you are like me, of course, and are fascinated by what makes things tick.
I am the sort of guy that will fly into a new city and be intrigued by how they dispose of the daily waste of 10 million people without you really noticing that the rubbish disappears every week never to be seen again.
This is probably an intrigue that is fuelled perhaps by the failure of my rubbish to vanish more than twice a month. But then Zach is a bit of an oddity.
As a client, if you think about it hard enough it makes sense that there are systems that happen behind the scenes, that there must be banking, billing, accounting, stock ordering, tracking, data capture and storage etc.
But in all reality it never really crosses your mind. For a patient in theatre all that matters is that they go in, are operated on and resuscitated with their problem solved and preferably without pain.
And that is the crux of any client interaction in any business, I go in with a problem and you solve it for me as painlessly as possible with a perceived cost-benefit in my favour.
It is only when the backend has a problem that interferes with the front-end that the client may actually care.
So how do you build a great front-end and a solid backend to support it?
Well start at the beginning of the problem-painfree solution-cost benefit idea.
Learn to identify what your clients really want. The man who walks into a sports shop asking for a new set of golf clubs does not just want a new piece of sporting equipment, what he wants is to better his game of golf.
If you just sell him a set of clubs he may be happy, if you sell him a set of clubs that improves his handicap he will be ecstatic, and will tell his mates on the green what a difference you made in his life.
That may require a better sales pitch, better research into what each club does, a little scientific application into what the best club length to golfer height ratio is, and an indoor driving range to practice his swing on so he can see the benefit while in your store.
But I am getting ahead of myself. First really ask what the client wants experientially. Once you know the problem you can accurately identify the solution.
Solution solving if more of us did this our lives would be better. Now for a little application of the KISS principle. KISS stands for Keep It Simple Stupid.
Fifty step solutions help no one. Both in the front-end where your client will hate it and in the backend where some poor staff member has to work the magic.
The more steps there are, the greater the chance that something may go wrong.
The more parts, the less the chance of perfection and (not always) greater the cost.
Building a simple system takes as much, and if not more, time as a building a complicated one because you have to cut through the crap.
ZBC changed strategy from giving fines to offering solutions. You can buy your radio licence disc there in the car park.
You are no longer penalised on the street. They cut out a whole system that was open to circumvention, which annoyed people on end and involved a lot of administration. They identified the problem and found an answer for it.
Now the last bit, perceived cost benefit. At the end of this month I will be cancelling my gym subscription.
It just went up by 50 percent and no explanation given. Whatever backend processes created this decision I could not care.
I can find better ways of spending US$1 000 a year (new prices) than on fitness, and I can find cheaper ways of keeping fit.
There is no change in terms of benefits for me after this massive cost increase beyond the level of inflation.
So for them to make money at the new rates they have to hope that one in three current members do leave.
Cost benefit is difficult to gauge at times and requires a chunk of research (more that “wow we need more money”).
However, if you can correctly identify and simply solve your client’s problem they will probably be willing to pay a little bit more.