The Fizz! Blog

Bottom up, not top down

Lots of business owners think of themselves as the person who gets what's left when everything else has been paid.  If it's not enough for their lifestyle, they'll often blame the economy, or the industry/market they're in, or some other external factor.  A rather fatalistic view.  Not always, but often.  We often refer to this as top-down thinking.

Some business owners have an idea of how much they need/want/aspire to be paid - the amount they need/want/aspire to be left when everything else has been paid - and try to build a business that will end up with the ability to pay them that amount.  If they realise that's not going to be possible, they know they need to take some action - change their pricing, redesign the business, start a new business, get a job, whatever.  We often refer to this as bottom-up thinking.

You can probably guess which people tend to be more successful in the long run.

www.fizzhq.com

 

 

Fast support isn't necessarily good support

We work with a few software providers - some of old-school software, some of cloud products - and sometimes need to ask them questions.

The cloud provider that we interact with most often generally provide very very quick responses to support emails.  They seem very proud of that, which is completely understandable and reasonable on the face of it.  However, in almost all cases in our experience they haven't read the question properly and give you an irrelevant answer.  Example for accountants: Q: "The VAT Control Account is set as an equity account.  How do we change that?" A: "Yes, that's right, VAT is an equity account" (it isn't).  You then get an automated email saying your case has been closed, and asking for feedback on how well the person did from 1 to 10.  You obviously click "1", then you get contacted again and they generally actually engage with the problem properly.  It's maddening, especially since it's so predictable.  The problem isn't with the questions; we write carefully and, I'm pretty sure, unambiguously.

This is annoying for us but actually misleading for customers who aren't accountants.  If the person asking for support isn't an accountant (or isn't a very good accountant!), they're quite likely to happily accept the wrong answer as being accurate, and will think the support is brilliant because it's quick.  So, well done for giving the impression of giving brilliant support.  But you haven't.  It's rubbish support, delivered quickly.

I have no real hope that other providers are any better, sadly!

www.fizzhq.com

What we get out of Twitter

People often express surprise that Twitter is a tool that we find valuable in our business - most small businesses we speak to seem to think it's a waste of time.  I think that the key is that we know exactly what we use Twitter for:

1. Listening to people - it's interesting what's on the minds of clients, contacts and others.  Often people are concerned about things that it wouldn't have occured to me as something on their radar.  Sometimes they're unconcerned about things that I thought would be important to them.
2. Making it easy for our clients and contacts to direct their contacts to us if they want to.  A large part of our client base are big Twitter users.  If one of their friends or contacts ask "Does anyone know a good accountant?" then it's really useful for us to have a presence on Twitter that's at least somewhat credible, so our client can signpost us to them.  We're not trying to use Twitter to find new clients that are completely unknown to us, just to make it easier for "friends of friends" to find us and engage with us.

Note that the number of followers we have does not feature in either of those purposes in any respect - it's of no interest to us.

I'm not saying that we're using Twitter as best we could, and I'm not saying that we're using it the only way a professional services firm should.   But we have thought about what we use it for, and it works for us.  Many businesses we speak to, when put on the spot, don't actually know why they're doing it.

www.fizzhq.com

 

Maybe we should talk about the negatives a bit more

Twitter (as used by business owners at least) tends to be relentlessly positive.  Every day is brilliant, every event is exciting, every meeting is wonderful.  You can understand that nobody wants to be negative about their business in a public forum, but by and large so much of it is similar that we all end up ignoring it.

Actually meeting people face-to-face at events can be much more interesting.  All the time we'll bump into enthusiastic tweeters we know at real-life business events, and although their Twitter feed might be "Brilliant!  Exciting!  Wonderful!", the reality is of course much more nuanced.  Sometimes it's "Brilliant!", but sometimes it's "Awful" and mostly it's somewhere in between.

Last week we had a really interesting and illuminating chat with a local business at a networking event about the area of their business that isn't really working well at the moment.  We've a really high opinion of the business, and talking about the negatives didn't prejudice our view of them - it led to a really thoughtful discussion about their industry, the differences between local towns, different ways one could look at a problem and so on.  It was very thought-provoking (for us, anyway, and for them too I hope!), and certainly the conversation that was uppermost in our thoughts as we left the event.  Maybe our side of the conversation was helpful to them on this occasion and maybe it wasn't, but I know from my own experience that simply the process of thinking about an issue enough to explain it simply to an outsider can be be really helpful.  Even if they've no useful input, expressing the problem coherently can be enough to spark some ideas of your own.

Of course, it's probably not a brilliant idea to focus on the negatives in your business on Twitter - 140 characters might make you look more bitter than thoughtful, apart from anything else.  But it might benefit many of us if we were to talk a bit more about the aspects of our businesses that could be better, not just the parts that we think are already brilliant.

www.fizzhq.com