Category Archives: Services

The Good Jobs Strategy

The Good Jobs Strategy CoverIs only way a company can keep costs down is to reduce the cost of labor? According to Zeynep Ton (a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management), it’s not a requirement – it’s a just a very bad choice.

While reducing labor costs produces short-term benefits for share-holders, it will ultimately produce long-term negatives. People that are employed with minimal benefits, low wages, and poor schedules won’t be able to provide great good service, won’t follow corporate “best practice” procedures, and won’t have any job loyalty.

Instead, the author recommends paying well, scheduling well, and training well, based on 4 Business Operational Choices:

1. Offer Less. In offering a wide range of goods, your inventory becomes a risk: greater numbers unsold goods, goods that are lost in storage, and product choice overwhelm. With fewer choices, employees will be able to better recommend products in your inventory.

2. Standardize and Empower. Identify the best way to perform tasks and standardize them. Standardization makes training easier and provides consistency. Empower employees to go beyond the basic rules (based on their training) as needed, and improve the standardization as better opportunities arise.

3. Cross-Train. Train employees to do a number of related jobs well. For example, an employee that can operate a cash register, stock shelves, answer phones, and ship packages can flexibly adapt to the varying daily needs of a business. When fewer customers are around, employees can do other necessary work.

4. Operate with Slack. In trying to schedule the “right number” of employees for a shift, you’ll invariably have situations where not enough employees are available. Understaffing creates a drain on all aspects of the business. But cross-trained employees can adapt to providing the services that are needed.

Providing “good jobs” will have a long-term benefit your employees, customers, and investors.


If your company implements the Good Jobs Strategy, the slogan Fast, Good or Cheap. Pick two, will be obsolete.

Good Cheap and Fast

Revitalize My School Enrollment

I was running one professional ACCA institute and at the end of the day it stopped for some difficulties like some teachers due payment and student turnover and less new admission. now i wanna have this back in form again. Please do advise how shall I proceed for most cost efficient  advertisement as my first challenge is money!

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Jay’s Answer: To get things re-running, you need to start by doing some research about the past:

  • What specifically occurred to make people stop signing up?
  • Who were taking classes?
  • What was the profit for the classes per student?

Then, you need to understand what’s changed now:

  • Where are people signing up for similar classes?
  • Why do they NOT choose ACCA?
  • How can you create a sustainable budget?
  • Are other ACCA institutes experiencing a similar slowdown in business?
  • What have they done?

These actions don’t take money. They take time – which you likely have a lot of. Once you understand the past and present, you can start investing in your business future.

New Bus Route College Marketing To Parents

The school is is establishing two new school bus routes through the NE suburbs, in addition to the already existing bus route. This has come about following feedback and demand from parents surveyed. It is intended to begin the bus services in 2014.

Can you please provide ideas for a full scale marketing program (Web, Social Media, Print, Guerilla Marketing, Direct marketing, Press Release etc) for the new and existing College families?

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Jay’s Answer:  If there was feedback and demand, then it seems that there’s a market that’s ready. Do parents/students need to sign up for the route? Do parents need to pay for the service? Can you make the bus ride launch unusually FUN (live music, food, sing-along, etc.)?

Finding Clients For My Reiki Practice

I run a small reiki practice in the UK. www.3candlesreiki.co.uk and am struggling with marketing over all. I’ve recently been poundng the streets leaving flyers and cards in shops library’seetc and hopefully this “scattergun approach” will pay dividends. Hoever my online marketing is restricted to trying to keep on page 1 of google, bing, yahoo etc. However i was thinking as a marketing novice I’m probably missing a trick with the online strategy ( or lack of ) ( the health system over here ( NHS ) is totally locked down as far as reaching people on or offline, for obvious reasons ). Any ideas appreciated!

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Jay’s Answer: Your scattergun approach is likely to leave you very tired and frustrated. Not everyone is likely to become your client nor will everyone be interested in your approach. So, I strongly suggest with focusing on those that are your clients first. How did they find out about you? Why did they choose you? What have they told their friends about you? Then, find more people like them, in similar situations and approach them (through seminars, demonstrations, special offers, etc.).

Marketing my Safari Company

Please advice me on how to market or make interested clients find my safari company that i want to start in a few weeks from now.

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Jay’s Answer: As I see it, you have two basic problems:

  1. having people who are looking find you – and –
  2. having these people choose you (instead one of your competitors).

My suggestion is to start with the second point first – once someone finds you convincing them that you’re the perfect choice for them. Once you’ve achieved that, then you can get more website traffic and/or phone calls. Otherwise, you’ll spend money getting initial interest but not having anyone sign up.

Elevator Speech For Solo Travel Business

I need help with an elevator speech.  This is what I came up with so far: “At Travel Solo No More, we help the solo traveler get out there and see the world by reconnecting them with old friends or by establishing new ones in a warm and friendly group setting while building lasting vacation memories.”

I am a travel consultant and my ideal client is the person that does not have anyone to travel with for whatever reason. My ideal clients are 35+ mainly women, not well traveled, interested in meeting people, traveling together and making new friendships. I would love to eventually build the group to include men; maybe do a couple of events involving them. I know so many people that would like to travel but they don’t have a partner and don’t want to go on vacation with couples. This group will cater to them.

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Jay’s Answer:  What you wrote is too long, and unfortunately not very memorable.

I previously wrote the article “Is Your Elevator Pitch a Monologue or a Dialogue?“. Using these principles, you could change your speech to:

I help the single traveler explore the world
I plan friendly group trips for people who want to travel together
Where in the world have you always wanted to visit?

If you’re trying to craft a speech for a networking group, you’re likely better off sharing a tiny story about a recent solo traveller: “Jane had always wanted to see Ireland. But her husband didn’t want to go and she didn’t want to do it alone. I helped set up a friendly group trip, matching her with other solo travelers. She had the time of her life.”

Creating a Win Without Risk

A Winning Business Hand

(Photo by Images Money)

Are you having trouble convincing your target audience to hire your services? From their perspective, you’re an unknown risk: questionable results, questionable interactions, and questionable effectiveness. If you’ve got a well-established network that will support your claims, you’re much closer to getting the new client. But is there anything you can do to jump-start the client into hiring you?

If you’re trying to convince someone who’s normally risk-adverse, you need to start with a small project, that easily is a “win”, and that’s risk-free. Your goal for this first project is to build trust by achieving your promised goals. You want to your new client to think, “That wasn’t so bad. Maybe we should tackle another more difficult project!” A small project has the bonus of building familiarity in communication. You learn how often they need to talk, what issues they’re looking for, and how they make decisions.

If you try to start with a big project, you’re likely to have some immediate challenges: unexpressed needs, unfamiliar communication styles. and unknown problems. You compound the difficulty of the project by not having your “basics” well-established: clear goals, clear expectations, clear timelines, clear billing agreements, etc. Without the basics, you’re likely to make a lot of false assumptions, wasting time and energy (and decreasing the confidence in you).

Don’t worry that by starting small you’re minimizing your capabilities in the eyes of your prospective client. Consider your first project together as a first date – you want to make it a memorable success. The goal of the first date is to have a second date.

As your new client gets used to your wins, they’ll be willing to both gamble on you more.

Lead Designer Wants To Work Off Site

We are a small full service marketing agency. Our lead designer’s spouse has an opportunity in a different state. Before I truly consider whether such a plan would work for us, I would appreciate input on pitfalls and advantages you may have experienced from such an arrangement. The designer wishes to remain a full time employee.

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Jay’s Answer:  The success of this depends on a number of factors:

  • what the other designers think about this change
  • attitudes about remote employees w/in your company
  • the employee’s ability to self-manage, self-motivate, and self-direct
  • how much f2f time is truly needed

If you can accommodate the employee, your own management skills will need to grow, since you’ll be communicating differently, and won’t regularly see them at the cooler.

The team’s attitudes are paramount. If the team’s all for it, and have a plan in place to keep the quality as-high, then you can try it as an experiment, and learn from the process.

Some teams/company cultures vitally depend upon tight integration face-to-face while others can learn to have team members who are seldom physically close, but who work very well together.

Restructuring Marketing Dept. Of Shopping Mall

Background: I work for a shopping mall mgmt company in China. Our mall is 10 yrs. old and we are lagging behind the new malls that are opening (the others are mostly high-end malls; we are a wide range). Our new goal from the big boss is to double the income from our in-house Marketing dept. (We sell ad spaces around the mall, and rent out our event spaces) Our team has decided to reorganize the structure of our Marketing dept.’s O-chart (first dept., then all others will follow). But of course, that won’t be enough. We need to update the entire processes and hire more qualified managers. FYI we don’t currently have a Marketing strategy or plan to work off of. I’m new at this job, but I’d like to help our company as much as possible.

What kinds of things should be included in the marketing DEPARTMENT mission? And what KPIs are important for our restructuring? Thank you for your help!

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Jay’s Answer: Without a strategy, you’re going to be doing a lot of guesswork, and likely without any solid data to help you make informed decisions. Now’s a good time to understand who your customers are exactly. Why do they come to your mall? Who would your older mall be more attractive to? What can you offer that other (newer/fancier) malls can’t? How can you attract more people that are likely to prefer your mall?

How to Solve Our Labour Problem?

What is best way to solve labour problem? To give them high wages? because they get high wages in other sector than our sector….i’m owner of bakers but employees get high wages in diomond sector i cant get employees easily…

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Jay’s Answer: Wages are a very poor long-term motivator for employees. Yes, people gravitate to jobs that pay more, but there are many other job benefits that people look for that you can provide: flexible hours, training, education, interesting work, charity support, retirement benefits, etc. Focus on what you can do for them and that would be attractive to them.