No Shortcuts

I'm back on a running kick at the moment and, having avoided running through the spring, I have suffered in the summer as I regained some fitness and some strength in my legs.

I was thinking about this yesterday morning as a hauled myself through Wimbledon Common on a cold and rainy early morning. If you want to run some distance, there is no shortcut to building up the fitness. No matter how much I might want to, I can't just start running a 10k distance - I have to build up to it. I have to put the time in doing the less glamorous things, the boring preparation.

It is exactly the same in business. I speak to lots of clients and potential clients who suddenly decide that change is necessary and then want to implement that change tomorrow. This is especially true with staffing decisions. 

I understand the frustration of dealing with staff, I really do. The firm - or chambers - may have put up with poor service for a long time and finally enough is enough. So they call me - or someone like me - and want 'something done'. Often we then have a difficult and frustrating conversation along the lines of it not being that simple. It takes time, it takes planning, it takes procedures. It takes patience if we are to do the thing properly.

There are no shortcuts in business. Plans have to be considered and then confirmed. Strategies have to be arrived at and then followed. Procedures have to be in place (and then followed). I cannot come up with a plan that gets around employment law...

If you want to run a business, you have to put your time in to understand the business, to understand the industry (so far so good for some lawayers) but also to understand staff and people, to understand the technicalities of how businesses work and of how to get the best out of them. That's the tricky bit.

So as in running, so with business. The boring preparation has to be done. The hard early work has to be put in. The plan needs to be established and followed. As with running, that means some difficult early mornings and evenings of just slogging away. As with running, however, it is all worth it in the end because suddenly you are in a position to not just do things better - you can do better things.

Training, then. There are (sadly) no shortcuts.

Using Experts - an update

A Board Meeting yesterday at the charity I chair re-enforced my last post about using experts.

I spoke with the Chief Exec before the meeting and one of the things we chatted about was the design brief from Bull Rodger. Neither of us is an expert in marketing or branding but both of us were, to be honest, a little disappointed that the work was outlined to take longer than we had hoped (and we conveniently moved past the point that Paul and Bull Rodger are doing the work pro bono...).

On to the meeting and our Trustee who does have expertise in this area looked at the proposal and said something along the lines of "Wow! This much work in that time. Brilliant!".

So. The lesson I am trying to learn better is this. Try not to make arbitrary judgments in areas where you know too little to make that judgment. Alternatively - shut up until you know what you're talking about...

Using Experts

I spend quite a bit of time working with lawyers and other professionals and telling them that they need to use experts to help them run their businesses. This week I've had a reminder that I need to do this too.

The first reminder was a comment from a friend that my own web site was no longer up to scratch. My site is very simple and I had been using iWeb to author it. Apple stopped supporting iWeb some time ago, sadly, but I had stuck with it - meaning that the pages it built were not optimised for new browsers, for HTML5 or for mobile devices. I knew that there was a problem with my site on Firefox, but had been trying to pretend it didn't matter. My fried - who does this sort of thing for a living - held my by the lapels and explained (loudly) that it was no longer ok. I (finally) took his advice and re-designed the site using a new product to me - Sandvox - which has produced a new, clean, site that works well, so far as I can tell, on every platform. Let me know what you think - www.mar-aon.co.uk.

The second reminder was in connection with a charity that I chair - www.livingrainforest.com. We are re-organising the charity and giving something called The Trust for Sustainable Living prominence. My good friend at Bull Rodger offered to help us with the rebranding of the TSL identity. Foolishly I had thought that we would meet and he would draw a new logo. As I often say to my clients - it's not as simple as that. Quite rightly, he needs to understand the charity and its context and its objectives and then he will be able to design an identity that will fit us properly. The Director of the charity pointed out that I had introduced the expert and so we should listen to him.

A valuable lesson - listen to the experts. If only someone had told me earlier...