Author: admin

A good CV is updated regularly, to keep it fresh and bursting with sunny goodness! You never know when your next opportunity is going to pop up and say ‘hello!’ so, like all boy scouts, it pays to Be Prepared.

However, CV writing tends to be a retrospective activity, and it occurs to me that it would be fun to write out three achievements to go into our 2015 CV and then to spend the year that is 2014 working to achieve them.

We can burden ourselves on a to-do list that is too full of intentions and possibilities, instead of one that has our clear goals set out at the top – floating free of the clutter.

And given that this is about #BetterBusiness we can also have fun thinking about our business, or organisation, as if it was a person and write a CV for it. What has your business achieved over the last two years? How would you summarise its profile in less than five lines of text? And most importantly – what are the three key target achievements for it this year, and do all you staff know what they are too?

With a CV for 2015 in our mind’s eye we can focus on what is truly important, for ourselves and for our business.

So, this week….think about three key achievements, for you or your business. What is it that will drive success for you this year?

I know what mine are – feel free to email me with yours and I’ll share back!

Next week: The Importance of Being Well.

This a tale of two cheeses. It was the best of cheese, it was the worst of cheese. Ok, that’s enough cod-Dickens for now and it serves to introduce a dairy-based learning point this week…

Do you only sell your products based on them being cheaper than your rivals?

Many people do, often in the mistaken belief that they are in a commodity market and therefore customers will only choose to buy their products or services if they are the cheapest.

However, people don’t make rational decisions and are much more influenced by emotions and convenience than they might admit to. For example, in a local food shop they have special offer cheese by the front door. If you choose this cheese and put it in your basket you’re more likely to ignore the regular priced cheese, two rows away. However, a quick look at pack weight says that the special offer cheese is actually more expensive, kilo for kilo (I’m sure Dickens would have moved with the times and used modern weights and measures).

The point here is the special offer cheese is supplied by a big name brand and has been heavily marketed to promote it’s champion cheesy values.

The price difference between the two cheeses isn’t much, but there is a difference and this means people are not really making ruthless shopping decisions based solely on price.

As the great Theodore Levitt (marketing top banana) said “anything can be differentiated”….and this means telling our customers what makes us different, special and worth the money.

Doing this enables us to sell to people on a combination of price and value-adding differences. Our price might only be £0.50 higher, but it’s still higher! If we sell on price alone then we’re going to have a race to the bottom and that’s no way to build a sustainable business.

So, this week think about what makes you and your products and services special. Why would I be willing to pay 50p more for them?

Next week: CV For 2015