🎯 Work Smart Wednesday - July 3, 2024
Contentious advice about how to use guarantees, how I like to plan my day, and a quote on time and efforts
Work Smart Wednesday
👋 Hey there!
Here is your weekly dose of Work Smart Wednesday
In these emails I will share with you 3 things to help you work smarter.
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1. 🛡️ Contentious advice about how to use guarantees
This might be contentious, but I truly believe this is the best way of using guarantees.
How can you offer a guarantee when you cannot 100% control if a client gets the results or not? What do you do if you know 90% + people will get the result you guarantee, but 10% might not for various reasons?
Below are two clips from a more consulting-style session I had with a client recently where we discussed how to use guarantees in his business. A guarantee probably isn’t what you think it is, and most people use it incorrectly in their businesses.
My client, John, was worried about offering a guarantee as he wasn’t fully in control of client results. John helps writers to finish their book, so while he can guide them and offer a lot of help, ultimately it is the writer who needs to write. So, what do we do about a guarantee in this kind of business?
Long story short: Guarantees are promises, yes, but they are primarily a marketing tool. You should offer the best guarantee possible.
Sometimes great guarantees mean people take advantage, but rarely. The benefit of more sales normally outweighs the cost.
Example:
You don’t have a guarantee and you average 100 sales per month, with a refund rate of 5% (5 refunds per month), making you “net sales” of 95.
When you offer a great guarantee, you can often see sales improve 2-4x. However, lets assume a modest 30% uptick. So, now you make 130 sales per month thanks to your new shiny guarantee.
However, some people don’t quite get the result for various reasons and some other people take advantage of your guarantee so you refund rate also doubles to 10%.
You now make 130 sales, but as your refund percentage grew you now refund 13 people monthly. Your net sales are now 117 (130 sales minus 13 refunds). You just made 22 more net sales per month, it was 95 without the guarantee and now it is 117.
Even though refunds increased, you still made more money and have more happy customers because more people were confident enough to buy from you because of your great guarantee.
While you should only guarantee results you truly believe you can get people - and we need to manage client relations so even refunded people leave happy - we all know that life happens and sometimes things get in the way. Don’t let that stop you from offering a great guarantee. You can literally calculate how much it benefits your business, and how many more people you will be able to help.
Ultimately, this all ties into working with good clients. You should only work with people you truly believe you can get the results for. And you should only work with reasonable people who understand that sometimes external forces cause unforeseen issues. Equally, you should be reasonable, and do what you can to keep the customer happy and deliver on your promises. A good guarantee helps everybody win.
Shorter clip (2 mins):
Longer, more in-depth, clip and explanation (10 mins):
2. 🕘 How I like to plan my day
Monday was the first day of Q3 - the third quarter of the year. Splitting the year into quarters can really help us to get major projects completed quickly, and break up the year into manageable chunks. However, I like to take this concept a step further…
Ever struggle to regain focus after something "knocks you off balance"?
Unexpected problems arise, but they don't need to completely wreck your day. This is a problem that ties into my post last week about being the best version of you in each situation. Here is a neat little trick to prevent wasting days due to unforeseen issues:
One of my clients, Anton, who runs an ad agency often had unexpected issues crop up that destabilised his day.
We cannot always control external forces - algorithm changes, children, internet connection - but we can make small changes in how we react to those forces so we can still get stuff done.
While the approach I take is tailored to each client and their situation, for Anton we implemented a system where we split our day into 4 "quarters".
Q1 Morning
Q2 Early Afternoon
Q3 Late Afternoon
Q4 Evening
We assigned just one task for each quarter.
We make sure tasks are not directly related to avoid knock on effects - the success of Q2 doesn't depend on the completion of Q1's tasks.
This small change in how we see our day has two huge advantages:
1️⃣ Firstly, it helps us to have a single point of focus. We know what we need to complete this quarter and how long we have. We also have some "slack" in the schedule, the task rarely takes 4 hours. We can truly focus.
2️⃣ Secondly, when something goes wrong it may destabilise one quarter, but we have a clearly marked spot where we get to try again next quarter. We can mourn the loss, take a break, and go again. It becomes MUCH easier to regain focus and to start afresh on important tasks.
For Anton, this shift in perspective was a "new paradigm shift for real". It has helped catapult his productivity and his business is running much smoother and making much more money now.
Try splitting your day into quarters this week, I would genuinely love to hear how you get on with it.
3. 💡 Quote I'm pondering
"Some things just take time, no matter how great your talent or efforts. You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant” - Warren buffet
This quote reminds me of two things:
To keep calm. Focus on the direction of travel, not the speed. Things take time.
To allow for plenty of slack in time estimates. If I think I can do it in 4 months, give it 6. Do my best to beat the estimate, but understand that things take time.
I like to break big tasks down into little chunks, and to always give myself more time than I think is needed. Things take time, often more than we think, and different people take different amounts of time to do something. Bake extra time into your estimates and averages. Don’t rush things, do it properly even if it takes a little longer.
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That's it! I can't wait to hear what you think. What did you find most useful? What do you want more or less of? Reply to this email now and let me know
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Have a great week,
John
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