Like most people, email has a tendency to take over my life. It’s how I most often communicate with people and I don’t want to miss out on what’s happening, especially if a client wants to ask my advice.

But email is the number one time killer – it will eat up your day if you’re not careful. Responding to emails as the priority means you’re responding to other people’s agendas, rather than developing your own business or doing the things which are important to you. And half the time, emails just need a quick scan and a fast “that’s fine” response.

So I changed my relationship with email and decided that I would only pick up email while I was between meetings, which, for me, means being on the bus. Travelling between meetings is dead time – I’m only staring out of the window or eavesdropping on strangers when I’m on the number 49 to Hove, so I might as well be doing something useful instead.

And it’s been great. I can catch up with what’s going on and my replies are much more brief than before, so I’m not hoovering up everyone else’s time. If it’s something complicated, checking email on my phone means that I’m much more likely to phone someone and have a real conversation.

Of course it doesn’t always work – I’m not on the bus every day for one thing but, on my other days, I’ve found that I can still free up my time for more useful and enjoyable things by only checking email at 11 am and 3 pm, rather than sporadically through the day.

Why not try taming the email beast yourself, and see if you can get a couple of extra hours per day?

I’ve just finished a session with one of my clients, looking at how she can be more productive by being in control of her to do list. This is an issue which comes up frequently and, while different methods suit different people, I thought I’d share some of the techniques which work for me.

Rule 1
• Anything which you aren’t going to do in the next 5 minutes needs to go on the to do list, even if it’s just a quick phone call. Otherwise it will be lost forever.

Rule 2

• Make sure your list is very specific and defined. For example “online marketing” is so wide and vague that you’re never going to get around to actually doing anything, whereas “spend 45 minutes reading the econsultancy report on SEO” is a clear instruction to do a very specific thing. That one is on my list for this week.

Rule 3

• Putting everything on your to do list will make it enormous, which can then make you feel dispirited and that you’ll never actually do anything. So you need to prioritise. I use Stephen Covey’s matrix to choose the things from my list which I’m going to do on any particular day, so that I don’t waste my time on trivia or get caught up in firefighting.



• Urgent things are the ones you must do in the next couple of days. Paying a cheque into the post or calling a client back would be an example of something which is both important and urgent, but reading a new email about how great the iPad is, might be urgent (because it’s a new email) but it’s likely to be unimportant.
• Important things are the ones which will make me and my clients money, maybe now or in the long run. The aim is to get the urgent and important tasks done first and then concentrate on the non-urgent but important things. If something is not urgent, and it’s not important, I just take it off the list and don’t do it. That probably chops out about a third of the list straight away – just don’t do these things.

Rule 4

• Each day, before you do anything else (including delving into your email) choose which things you’re going to do each day.

Rule 5

• Allow yourself time for people phoning you, getting distracted, eating lunch etc rather than filling your day to the full. Only put on the list for that day the things you can reasonably do, you can always finish off that day’s list, smile, and then get ahead with tomorrow’s stuff.

There are lots of resources to help you with your time management, and we can all do with getting more out of our day. In particular, I recommend some sessions with Clare Evans to support you in developing some excellent habits and talking to Susanne Barthelmes at All Sorted Consulting to make sure that all of your systems are working well for you. And of course, once you’ve done that you’ll be so productive that your business will be ready for the next stage, which is when you’ll want to chat to me about your strategy to develop and grow.

We’re all settling down after an interesting election and waiting to see how things will affect us. One of the changes which has been put forward is an increase in VAT, perhaps to 20%. The FT reports what is being proposed for VAT. This is a really bad idea for anyone who sells B2C (business to consumer). I’m going to rant a little bit now about exactly why this is such a dumb idea.

B2C businesses are unpaid tax collectors for the government. Anyone who sells more than 70k of stuff has to charge VAT on top of their prices. Of course, they take the VAT that they’ve paid for the goods off their VAT bill but this leaves a big cheque to Her Majesty, with no benefit to the business whatsoever.

VAT is a hassle

In terms of the transaction costs (or hassle, if you’re not an economist), collecting VAT at all is a major cost to businesses. How many hours are spent calculating VAT payments, filling in returns and making payments? Couldn’t we spend this time doing something which is of use to our customers or doing some marketing? Maybe we could do something real, instead of managing a complex tax system.

When the government decreased VAT temporarily for a year, the small retailers I work with had a huge job to change all the prices. Changing signs, checking all the copy on the website to make sure all the prices were accurate, amending prices to ensure that you weren’t charging silly sounding prices like £18.57 which don’t fit with pricing psychology principles. It took days, again, completely useless time. An increase in VAT will mean going through all of this again.

VAT makes things more expensive

An increase in VAT increases prices. This means that whatever you sell appears to be more expensive to the people you want to sell it to. You don’t have to be a genius to understand that increasing prices is going to put off some of the people you want to persuade to buy your lovely things. So by giving the government a bigger share of everything you sell, your business is at risk, because you’ll have to work harder for every pound you put in the till.

Less money in people’s pockets

Increasing prices means that everyone suddenly has less money in their pockets, so they’re less likely to spend it with you. Where consumers have less money, they’re less likely to spend – and this effect can be amplified, so that as soon as people think that they have a bit less money, they lose confidence and are put off spending altogether. Which affects all purchases, including B2B and non VAT rated items. Less money in the economy means a poorly functioning economy for all of us.

So we have higher transaction costs, more paperwork and hassle, a decrease in sales and a drop in consumer confidence. Could this lead us to the second part of the double dip recession some commentators have been predicting? Running a business is difficult enough at these times, without massive increases in VAT.

I advise people who are serious about what they want to achieve and I can tell when someone is ambivalent about their business.  If you’re not serious about it, why would someone bother to buy from you, or do business with you?

1.      When your voicemail message is BT callminder, so people calling you don’t know if they’ve got the right number or not

2.      When you never answer your phone or get back to people

3.      When you use a hotmail or yahoo email address rather than your own domain name

4.      When your website is obviously out of date, and hasn’t been changed for ages – this means that google won’t take you seriously either

5.      When you have are consistently late for meetings.  Being late shows a disrespect for the other person, and makes you look disorganised and sloppy – which is not someone that people want to do business with

Does any of this sound like you?  Any of it sound like people you do business with?  Time to get it sorted – your business can never grow until you take it seriously.

I’ve been working with a couple of clients recently on how to give equity to other people coming into the business, and it’s definitely a recurring theme which causes a lot of debate and difficulty.

Sometimes people have to decide who gets what at the start of a business, but more frequently the issue comes up when there’s an existing enterprise and the owners want to bring someone else in.

You might want to bring someone else in because you’ve found someone who can help you with the business.  Sometimes, that someone is me, so I might provide advice and support in return for a share in the business rather than my usual cash fee.  More often, I’m advising someone who has a business which is doing okay, but the existing business owners just don’t have enough time or the skills to do the thing which are needed to push the business to the next step.  Sometimes the business has outgrown the original owner, or you just need an extra pair of hands on board, and you can’t afford to pay the high salary that someone really good would need.

Or you might want someone with a lot of talent and experience, and want them to stay around for a while and be really motivated to work on the business.  This was why I went to work for a web hosting company as Operations Director 10 years ago – they needed someone who would work really hard to grow the business, and I wanted a share of the business because I was fed up of working for a salary and making money for other people.

Whatever your reasons, if you’re going to bring someone in to work for the company in return for equity, here are some areas to think about (more…)