I saw Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares for the first time…thanks to Richard. It made me realise two simple things:
1) Get the basics right. You make your way up from the bottom there is no shortcut to get to the top…so get the basics right and then work your way up…
2) Never get a job by lying about your abilities… because sooner or later the truth will come out.
I had a trivial thought yesterday while walking towards the station…what if you change all your direct debits to go out of your account on the 1st of every month. I know a lot of people already do that but then there are a lot who do not. This will ensure that you know how much money you have every month for your own spending.
I know so many people who really do not know how to manage their money and end up paying (unfair) bank charges. This is a small tip that might be helpful.
Going back to Trizle’s post where I got mentioned by very kind Andrew… I believe that being able to accomplish a task (which in this context is referred to as ‘Success’) has a close relationship with the time available to do that task because sometimes one is completely stuck in something which takes longer than expected and was never contemplated originally.
Therefore, saying “you will never fail” actually implies that you have enough motivation left after so many unsuccessful attempts at a task and you still have time to work on it.
“Citius, Altius, Fortius” - “Swifter, Higher, Stronger”
Baron De Coubertin
I just saw this post on Trizle and here’s how I think you can find and look after the best customers.
Mr W runs a restaurant and because he is a very astute person requests his customers to fill in a small feedback form with their details (name and address) and general comments. He uses these customer details and stores them in an Excel sheet (which can be done in any spreadsheet) for later use. Referring to Seth Godin’s post How to be remarkable (point 10), in order to keep people interested he invents new meal deal options prints them out on postcards (let us call them meal deal postcards).
These postcards are then posted to the list of customers he has recorded in the excel sheet earlier. Every time a customer calls in the restaurant, if they bring their “meal deal postcard” they get to eat the meal deal which is quite subsidised as compared to the normal prices. The waiters are supposed to make a note of these meal deal postcards (name and the postcode) on the order form for the customer.
Mr W then uses the customer (who brought their meal deal postcards) details on order forms and compares it to the list he has, to identify the regular customers and the new customers. He also does a bit of housekeeping which means if a customer has not been in the restaurant for several months their name is struck off this list. This helps in keeping the list manageable. Regular customers get even better deals which keeps them interested all the time. The customers who come back are certainly the best customers in two ways; first of all they give the place a lot of business and secondly word of mouth publicity brings more customers.
I have managed to get rewrite urls to work for this blog. It was not difficult at all but I was just being lazy (not a GTD attitude I know)…so no more of “index.php?p=12″ in the url instead you will be presented with a pretty url for example “sayo_nara_hideous_urls/14″ (more meaningful and is same as the post title). It was not that difficult…tweaking the php code a little bit and adding few rewrite url rules (regular expressions rocks) in .htaccess will do the trick.
Nevertheless, there are few things that still needs to be fixed:
1. What if I use characters like ‘?’ or ‘…’ in my post title or categories? I think then it will just fall over so I need robust rules to handle that situation.
2. I could not get the search function to show up in a pretty url way…but these two are my next actions.
I do not understand why customer facing organisations run without any prior resource planning. For some reason all the bank employees were participating in some mass exodus at about 13:30… or they were just busy not doing anything…contemplate the following scenario:
1. Only two cashiers are serving in a bank with a capacity of eight…
2. One window has been allocated for money exchange purposes but I am sure they can all carry out the usual services when it is unoccupied…
3. One is kept free to look after the business customers…
4. Then there are two staff members chatting in one corner as apparently they are personal bankers so they won’t come and dirty their hands in petty cashiers job…
Conclusion: I queued up 15-20 minutes for a 2 minute job…
Does this bank need any further competition?? The answer is no…it does not because it is actually competing against itself by driving its customers away. I am not sure how can these customer-centric organisations completely ignore the most important entity - “Customers”.
As far as resource planning goes, it is a known fact that majority of people use their lunch hour to perform the miscellaneous bank transactions and I would have imagined the banks are astute enough to lunch around those times as opposed to during those times….but unfortunately I am wrong.
I sincerely hope 2007 brings you all the joy, success and happiness that you were after in 2006.
*(image taken from BBC)
