Teleworking and creatives… do they mix?

Afternoon All.

It looks very appealing, but is “teleworking” really workable?

Is ‘teleworking’ the way of the world going forward? The lonely figure sitting in a cafe working remotely from her team, her office, her collaborative influence?

That’s what the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, is after.  She recently announced that she will commit 12% of Australian Public Servants to a teleworking arrangement… what does this mean?  They will basically have the flexibility of working remotely, from their homes, their favourite cafes, from the Great Ocean Road…. basically wherever they want.

The cynic inside me wonders is there a hidden agenda here for the Gillard Government, is it to justify the enormous cost of the NBN to the tax payers by giving them a new “shiny thing” and new “buzz word” to focus on?  ”Working from home”, as we all know it, is nothing new. Large and small companies alike have been doing it for years… so why the new name and the new focus on TELEWORKING?  I would hate to assume the worst but it is hard to ignore.

Teleworking has worked really well in a lot of organisations. In fact, I am doing it right now whilst writing this blog.  I am sitting in my local cafe sipping on lattes and getting my creative juices flowing.  But will this always work?

In the industry that Nexus CG and myself belongs to, Marketing and Advertising, it’s all about being creative. And whilst I can be creative by myself sitting in a cafe writing a blog, if I was to develop a new marketing launch for a new product for example, would I really do as good a job by myself as I would with my esteemed work mates?  I doubt it.

You see what I’ve noticed about running a team of creatives is that they quite literally feed off each other.  They get more and more creative based on the people, the environment, the mood, the activity and the conversation around them.  They will always create something quite magical with their teammates in comparison to creating something on their own.  So for Nexus CG, I can’t see teleworking being a workable system for the majority of time.

This isn’t to say I wouldn’t be open to it. On some occasions I totally get the need to get away from the office to get a whole load of work completed. I do that every Wednesday; it means an uninterrupted day of work. But can I trust my staff to do the same thing?  Absolutely.  For me, teleworking can only work if you trust your staff - and if you don’t need that collaboration time.

What a lot of people seem to forget is that most businesses are started from home, or “the coffice” (cafe office)- and Nexus CG was no different. I started it from my mother’s house and it was a great way to keep costs low.  One thing that many people don’t realise is that you can become very lonely working by yourself. And that loneliness is almost catastrophic to the creative juices because you start focusing on the loneliness and not the creativity.

So maybe teleworking is for some industries and not others…. maybe teleworking is for some people and not others… and maybe we as employers need to look at each person’s situation individually and create a teleworking policy for them… not the company.

For me I would need to work through many considerations in order to either agree or disagree to the individual teleworking policy. These are:

• How much work experience does the individual have? The less experience the more likely they are to feel lost in a teleworking scenario.
• What kind of work is the employee doing?  Do they need to be around peers to do the best job possible?
• Insurance, where will they be working and will I need to “sight the premises” in order for my insurance company not to “crack the sads”?
• What are the implications of taking customer’s IP out of the office? Will our customers be ok with this?
• Will our customers see this teleworking policy as almost like “outsourcing overseas” and therefore lose that element of control and human interaction?  The whole notion of outsourcing their marketing is challenging enough for most of our customers.
• What kind of person is the employee? Do they create better work surrounded by a team and in a positive environment?
• What kind of environment will they be working in and is it “workable”? For example, a busy pub in Richmond is probably not ideal to hold customer teleconferences re their branding.
• There is obviously a massive cost saving for teleworking but is the money a good enough reason to potentially sacrifice the quality of work through creative collaboration?  I think not.

Thank you Julia Gillard for the “Shiny new buzz word” and thank you for trying to deflect from the real issue of the cost of the NBN. However for me and for Nexus CG, we will work on an individual teleworking policy… and not offer a blanket “12% of workers will be teleworking” because of that 12% who knows if it will actually be the making or breaking of their careers?

I care about my staff and their development too much to just simply add a metric to their careers in order to hide an agenda… surely we should be focusing on developing these people for sustainable growth in a workforce that is seriously struggling with skill shortages.  How will these people learn from experienced peers I ask?

Here are a couple of pics of Team Nexus CG. I would hate to lose this kind of collaboration and integration:

Would love your opinion on this one….

Cheers

N

Small Business and Marketing

HI All

“If people don’t know you are in business… how can you expect to STAY in business?”

Little ole me

I am sitting in my office having an amazing realisation today… you see 3 years ago I started Nexus CG with the help of my Co-Director Sheila – and up until about 18 months ago, I worked out of Sheila’s house, never drew a wage and we were quite literally doing everything from stuffing envelopes, to finding new business and creating operations manuals…and everything in between.

However, today, we both sit on the second storey of our beautiful office, and we can hear the creative discussions going on downstairs between our staff members – today we have 5 others in – and they are creating some magical stuff.  So it is really a great opportunity for us to sit back and take stock of what we have achieved in such a short time.

It, obviously, hasn’t all been tea and biscuits… or champers and nachos… it has been 3 years of working out what works and what doesn’t work- and being flexible and honest enough with ourselves to make the necessary changes in order to be successful.

This isn’t the same story for a lot of my contemporaries.. did you know that there are 100,000 new businesses in Australia every year, and of that 100,000 80% of them won’t survive.  I could almost put money on the fact that those 80% of failed businesses never had or implemented a:

• Business plan
• Sales Strategy
• Marketing strategy
• Marketing calendar of activities

… and they simply lay all of their hopes, dreams, wishes and money on the belief that ‘If I build it, then they will come”.  I would like to say one thing to this attitude…”Grow the f*** up!”  Why should people help you in your business, if you are not willing to put in the effort to help yourself?

Marketing and sales are not the easiest of activities… granted… but you have to do it in order to stay in business – no matter if you are an online business, a coach, a printing company or even a football club… no matter what you do, or who you are marketing and selling needs to be core of what you do until you reach a point where you can hire people to do this.  Another thing I would like to add… a couple of facebook status updates, does not a marketing strategy make!

So folks – try something different, stand out from the crowd of new businesses out there – don’t be one of the 80% who fail simply because you can’t be bothered to create some marketing – or get advice as to how to go about it.

We don’t get it right all of the time… but we are always trying new things to be different… here is just one of the things that we are implementing to “get noticed” by some new people…

So go on… give it a go… after all:

“If people don’t know you are in business… how can you expect to STAY in business?”

Cheers

N

Has Google Made Us Arrogant In Business?

Afternoon All…

I am not sure if you are all aware, but some of the staff and clients from Nexus CG, my housemate Kim, and I are training for this year’s Run Melbourne Marathon… I am specifically running the half marathon – which is a bit of a challenging slog I can tell you!

Anyway – this challenge has me up and running about 3 times a week, and this morning was no different. I got up, got dressed and started my run. About 3kms into the run I started to notice a little niggle in my right calf muscle, but as I have loads of problems with my legs, I chose to ignore it – as “it will go away”… but it didn’t – in fact, I had to suddenly stop as I was in agony! I thought.. “oh crap – what do I do now? I know… I remember a search on Google recently told me to RICE – Rest Ice Compress and Elevate – that’s what i will do” – Google, and therefore I, know everything.

As the day has gone on – my predicament has got me thinking.. what has created this arrogance that I believe that I can self diagnose through a search engine rather than go and see a doctor and get a team of experts around me to aid me in my plight to be better by the weekend so I don’t miss any runs? This got me thinking even further….

This is what I see business owners do all of the time. Now I am still a new business owner, only 3 years young, but there is something that really bothers me… When someone suddenly becomes a business owner, it’s like they become an overnight expert in ALL things business. They are suddenly a marketing expert, a sales god, a CPA or even an IT wizz – they believe that because they have downloaded a few special reports or YouTube clips that they know how to do all of these aspects of business better than the “real experts”.

Now this is the part that confuses me… suddenly they realise that their “calf muscle” isn’t getting better as quickly as they thought, or their business isn’t generating as much revenue as quickly as they thought so they finally go and see a doctor.. or a “real expert”, but when they sit with that expert they start to tell them what’s what, and what they are not prepared to do and what they are to prepared to spend.

Reality is that in Australia there are over 100,000 new business each year, and of those 80% of them won’t last five years. The businesses that don’t survive fail for many reasons – one of them is not surrounding themselves with a support crew of experts that know their SME better than the business owner does. Being successful in business doesn’t have to be lonely – it can mean bringing in people who do it better than you do, that are smarter than you… and who understand elements of business better than you do.

How do stand out from the crowd of 100,000 new businesses every year – you try something different, you protect your investment dollars by spending money on the support crew that will create a return for you – one thing I say to my customers all of the time is “just because you build it, doesn’t mean they will come” – so creating a reason why they should come is important – and Google will only get you so far.

So gang… Google needs to be your back up – your disaster plan, not the support crew that is going to get you and your business raking in the cash, seen by thousands of potential customers, or the clever little bugger that will maximise your tax return. If you have already spent thousands of dollars starting up your business – don’t you think that you should find that little bit extra cask to secure your return – and not base your success on the whim of a search engine?

Oh… and one final thing… it’s all well and good going to the doctor, but listening to them and taking their advice is a whole new ball game. This is the same thing for when you start to pull together your support crew… listen to them, hear what they are saying, and most importantly… take their advice – they have done more than watched a YouTube clip or two ..

This approach may just make you turn from:

 

 

 

 

Into……………………………….

 

 

 

 

Just saying

Cheers

Naomi

Don’t be boxed in by your generation in 2012

Morning all…

Happy New Year!

You know what I love about the beginning of a new year…. the ability to start a fresh, and this year is going to be no different.  What is going to be different, is how I am going to start a fresh for 2012…. fear not, this is NOT a blog about by new years resolutions, but more of something that I have noticed as a young entrepreneur running a business with multiple staff from different generations.

It’s interesting that up until maybe 5 years ago, the different generations didn’t have nearly as much focus as they do today – the focus on the differences in the generations has been very helpful in many ways… it’s allowed us to understand our fellow peers and it’s allowed us to be more understanding when working with different generations than ourselves, but it’s also helped us to do something else…. it’s allowed us to make excuses for bad behaviour, laziness, lack of learning, and a common disregard of basic human kindness.

What do I mean?

Simple… the more we understand about our own generation, the more it seems that we (as a whole, and yes I am generalising) have allowed these common traits to define the reasons behind us not living up to all that we can be.  ”I am a gen Y and therefore you should know I don’t want to start at the bottom, I want to be CEO by month 3 of employment, you can’t blame me for it, it’s my generation” or “I can’t help not liking the Gen Y’s, as a Gen X I believe in working hard for what you get… and the fact they don’t get it isn’t my fault… I am a Gen X after all” or even this, ” I am a babyboomer and you need me…soon you won’t have anyone with the experience that I have, therefore I am indispensable”.  No matter who you are, just because you happen to fit into a nice neat generational group, doesn’t mean you can blame your faults or lack of success, or arrogance on your generation, or the generation of others.

You see I have had examples of those who use their generational label as a “crutch”, but then I have witnessed those special few who have well and truly ignored every aspect of their label and become exceptional people in spite of the excuses they could have used.

Recently, we hired a marketing intern Christie.  She has been magnificent.  She is a 24 year old female, working hard to start her career.  She came to Nexus understanding that the 8 week summer internship was unpaid… but she recognised that she would get a load of experience, and the opportunity for a permanent paid internship at the end.  Christie was unique – the others that were interviewed all pulled out… the first few because they didn’t want to complete the interview task I had set, and the remaining few because they didn’t want to “work for free”.  Christie on the other hand, not only produced the best proposal for her set task, but now she is working for us – I don’t know what we ever did without her.  A Gen Y, willing to start at the bottom and work her way to the top… breaking all the rules!

We also have a babyboomer, who is breaking all of the babyboomer rules…. Lynne, our HR Manager who at the age of 53 has embarked on an adventure of a lifetime, moving to Australia from the UK to help us in the Nexus office… this is a major learning curve for her, and she has also thrown aside the “babyboomer characteristics” and is completely open to learning… and learning from her younger peers.  She has learned how to use a MAC OS, MYOB the Australian lingo and has yet to lose her mind.

I am so very proud to be surrounded by people who are choosing to “do away” with the labels of their generation and ensure that they are a success no matter what.  I personally get offended when others offer me excuses for my ambition, my drive, and my passion to succeed… “Naomi you are a typical Gen Y”…. am I?  Or am I someone who is willing to give it a go, irrelevant of my age, gender, generation, or others perceptions of me…

I wonder how many of you are as brave as Christie, or Lynne… and are willing to shed the badge of honour you call your generational gaps and try something new this year… be you… the successful version minus the excuses.

Happy 2012… generations without boundaries!

Cheers

N

 

100 Brands in 100 Weeks – so it begins!

Afternoon!

Hope you all have had a great weekend and looking forward to the cup just as much as I am…. I have a feeling “So you think” will come through with the goods and so that’s where my money is going.  He has been consistent, elegant, successful and has never let Bart Cummings down – wouldn’t it be great if all brands in Australia were that reliable!

We have had so much feedback about the new campaign that ist’s almost taken us all week just to get through and answer all the emails, posts, phone calls and questions coming our way – what a great sign.  It means we are all wanting the same thing…better customer service in Australia!  I have also been approached by some media outlets for interviews so this could get “interesting”.

I wanted to give you a brief outline of how this is all going to work as we are starting with our first brand NEXT WEEK!

We have decided that in order to be as fair and unbiased as possible, that we need to look at ALL areas of each brand including; telephone sales, commercial sales, corporate sales, consumer sales and even support to get a really good overall view on what is happening from an organisational culture – because we don’t want to base it all on something that one person has said once to a client…. get my drift?

We are also going to do this from a National level – we know from experience that customer service and sales differs state to state in our “land of plenty”, so it’s only fair to ensure we are capturing the full picture.

As the head of this campaign I have also made an executive decision to protect my team, no one from the Nexus team will be named whilst completing this exercise – so if there is any fall back, it will lie solely on my shoulders.  Hope you, as my readers, can understand why.

On Monday of every week I will be announcing to the Nexus team the brand in which we will be investigating, I will also divide the task up and give each member a role to play.  They will be given a “character, questions, objectives and objections to present to the brand” – and they will report on their findings.  On the Thursday of every week I will collate the details and write a blog stating who, where, how and what went down.

To be completely fair, I will also send a copy of my report to the brand themselves and give them an opportunity for “right of reply”.

If you think I have missed anything, please post or send us a comment – we are always happy to receive feedback.  Of course, we are also still accepting nominations to add to the list as well!

I am off to have lunch outside before heading to the gym….

Have a good one everyone!

Cheers

N

The GOOD the BAD and the UGLY of Sales in Australia

HI All

We are nearing the end of the year, and the dreaded Christmas shopping is rapidly creeping up at a very nagging pace.  There are so many great aspects of Christmas but the crowded shops, the irate sales assistants and the endless cues at the toilets are not them!

I think Christmas “Cheer” has dissappeared over the recent years alongside friendly and helpful customer service, whether it is a telecommunications company, a clothing store, a cafe or a bank reality is the friendly, helpful sales assistants are very few and far between.  And quite frankly, I have had a gut full.  As a sales trainer I am constantly dissappointed by the service I have received – and I am really easy to sell to if you simply show me some care and consideration… but that doesn’t seem to be part of the sales training these people are receiving.

To really understand what is going on here – I have decided to run a new campaign… “100 brands in 100 weeks” this will see me and some very eager and enthusiastic members of the Nexus team go undercover to one top name brand every week and assess their sales capabilities, the friendliness and their overall customer service.  oooh  and we are going to write all about it right here in this blog!  Yes we are going to name and shame a few, but we are also going to give praise where deserved.

The names on the list will be kept top secret until after they have been assessed – and then the information is there for you to read and do with what you please.

We are currently in the process of drawing up the list of names – and there are some on there that make me more than a little nervous, but excited all at the same time – BUT WE NEED MORE!

We want to hear from you as to who you would like us to investigate – it could be a large retail business, it could be a large car dealership or it could be your energy company – whoever it is we want to know about it.  Post your requests here and we will decide whether or not to add them to the “list”.

This campaign probably won’t earn us any friends, but it will get the truth out there about customer service and sales in the Australian market place…. oh and this will be written about in a large business magazine as well! – So keep following us to get all the juicy info here FIRST!

Have a great day, and I look forward to seeing all of your “100 brands in 100 weeks” requests!

Cheers

NA