Oli Gibson

By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.
-Robert Frost, American Poet

Finance is infinite, it is Time that is finite – Oli Gibson

What is a measure of lifestyle. Most people consider it to be the physical things you own or the amount of numbers in your bank balance. But I don’t, I think measuring lifestyle quality is a lot more than that. So I set out to find the best way I could to calculate lifestyle. It’s only when you start to ask the difficult questions such as the following that you can even consider redesigning your own life.

• How many hours do I work for each day of vacation?
• What percentage of my life do I really spend working vs. doing something I want to be doing?

Enter the Lifestyle Quotient (LQ) This simple calculation will show the real facts of your work life balance (or in-balance). The results will probably shock you. They did me. Remember there’s no point earning £100,000 a year if you never have any time to enjoy it.

To calculate your lifestyle quotient simply use the form here.

Now try and guess what your bosses lifestyle quotient is, after seeing that getting promoted to his job may not seem so tempting.

I’d just like to take this opportunity to wish everyone who has taken the time over the past year to read my musings here a very happy christmas and good luck for the new year.

I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for all of you out there so I thank you all from the bottom of my heart for reading and hope to hear from as many of you as I can in the future. 2010 looks to be a busy and exciting year and I have many plans for the blog here and other areas to get my ideas on lifestyle design out there. But I’ll save those for my next post, for now I’m off to enjoy christmas with my family and to consume a few to many portions of christmas pudding!

Best Wishes

Oli Gibson

I recently had the chance to speak to a very successful businessman and multi-millionaire. He has run a number of companies in the past and now is a venture capitalist of significant merit. Over the years he has collected a number of homes around the globe, many complete with their own staff and a small car collection worth around £20 million. So I was a little shocked at the reaction I received when I asked “How does it feel to have what so many dream to have?”

“It’s a nightmare” was his response, at first I thought he was joking but he carried on to say “I spend a lot of my time working with companies I have funded but seem to spend even more looking after everything I’m fortunate to own, I seem to be working for my staff”

Life isn’t about consuming as much as you can afford, all that excess baggage only slows you down. However this isn’t about turning you into a hippie who’s only possessions are the clothes you stand in. There are plenty of things you own that you don’t use, don’t need and probably don’t even want. Whether you notice or not this clutter creates indecision and distractions while consuming a huge amount of attention. It’s staggering how distracting all this is, until you get rid of it that is.

When I was racing in the Great Britain team I used to travel on a regular basis. The number of times I’ve dragged huge bags through airports, on to trains and into hotels that I only stay in for a few days before returning home is nothing short of ridiculous. The irony of this was I never used half the stuff I took with me, I only brought it for that ‘what if’ situation which almost never happened. I now try to travel light whenever I can and deal with the ‘what if’ situation only if it arises, trust me traveling becomes so much more enjoyable.

Think of your life as that bag, when it’s as full as mine was with all that stuff you’ll probably never use it doesn’t enhance your life like you expect. If anything it is detrimental to your enjoyment of life. Shed the weight and your passage through life becomes so much easier now you don’t have to worry about all that crap.

Times are changing. Success is no longer being wrongly judged by what you own. Finally what you have achieved is more important than what you own.

Image is everything, as a business it can make or break your success no matter how good your product or service is. For a lot of small businesses and start ups this image of being small can stop you getting your foot in the door with prospective clients who obviously don’t believe small is beautiful. But don’t worry here’s four steps that almost guarantee to make you look like a legitimate member of the fortune 500 club.

Use a Virtual Receptionist

Sounding like a blue chip company is half the battle and it can be won for a small cost each month by setting up an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) Service, better known as a virtual receptionist. My favorite in the UK is eReceptionist.co.uk where in about ten minutes you can set yourself up with…

⁃ A geographic or non-geographic number
⁃ Extension numbers
⁃ A professional welcome message
⁃ Call Screening
⁃ Voicemail
⁃ Even hold music!

One of the features I most like is voicemail messages can be sent to you by email, which is a much more productive way to deal with messages in my opinion. The service will also call my different phone numbers in order so will always reach me.

For someone like me who works remotely and does all business through a mobile phone this is the best way to look like you have that big office with lots of staff.

Don’t Use Your Home Address

This was another one of the challenges I faced when trying to set up a remote working environment, where do I get the mail delivered?

Don’t use your home address. It’s almost inevitable you will get visitors at some point and with google maps and google street view it only takes someone a couple of clicks before they have a detailed map of where you live and a picture of the front of your house. Not great for your own security and for your fortune 500 image.

Instead get yourself a PO Box. In the UK you can rent one at your nearest sorting office for around £60 a year if your prepared to go and pick up your post yourself. There’s more information on renting one of these on the Royal Mail website.

Now when you provide a your address leave off the PO Box and add the road number and name of the sorting office where your box is located. Thus PO Box 222, Nowhere, UK, SW14 5GY becomes Office 222, 18 Northcross Road, Nowhere, UK, SW14 5GY.

Thanks to an email from reader Sohaib Ahmed I have another alternative to using your home address. UK Postbox is a service that receive your post and scan it so you can access it online. They also allow you to send post by sending a message online. This is brilliant if your looking to work remotely as you can deal with post anywhere in the world. There are some disadvantages which can easily be noted through the website, a main one being security of your personal details, as I assume your post is scanned by a human. However like I said before this is a great alternative especially if you travel alot.

Use Multiple Email Addresses and Phone Numbers

This is pretty easy. Don’t let your websites contact us page have only one contact number or email. Set up a few different email addresses for different departments such as “human resources,” “sales,” “general enquires,” “media/pr,” and so on. Most web hosting companies will allow you to host a huge number of email accounts so don’t be afraid to set up a good few. At this stage it’s easiest to have all these email addresses just forward to your own account however as you grow you can start to forward them to the appropriate people.

For phone numbers set up a virtual receptionist service like I showed you above and add different extension numbers for each department. Again these will simply forward to your phone in the beginning but as you grow you can change them to forward to the right people.

Don’t be CEO

This is often the biggest give away, it screams out start-up or sole trader. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be CEO of your own company but it’s best to give yourself and alternative title. The best probably being “Director” because it can be added to depending on the occasion. Eg “Sales Director,” “Operations Director” etc. Remember it’s best not to be seen as the ultimate decision maker in negotiating situations because it often gives you the opportunity to walk away or to play the ‘my boss told me’ card.

Follow these four steps and I believe your company will see more success. I’m not saying small isn’t beautiful, in many cases it’s best but sometimes you need some weight behind your claims and looking big can defiantly help. Like always if you have any questions or queries as to how you can apply some of these ideas to your business drop me an email – oli@oligibson.com

In my last post I explained the 80/20 principle and how it could be interpreted. If you haven’t already read this post you can find it here – The 80/20 Principle.

So how can you apply the 80/20 principle to your business to make your life easier and to increase your profits?

Sounds to good to be true doesn’t it? But I promise you it isn’t, I can reduce your work load by 80% and in all the extra time you’ll have you can watch your profits grow!

Let me play out a scenario for you. You run a company with 100 customers. To apply the 80/20 principle you analyse those 100 customers and realise that over 80% of your profits come from only 20 of those 100 customers. (obviously it may not be 20% of your customers that make up 80% of your profits, you may find it to be 10% or maybe as low as 5% but it will almost certainly be 20% or less). You also notice that 3 of your customers take up a disproportionate amount of time.

Now here’s what I suggest you do. First take control and fire the three customers who take up all your time as long as they don’t contribute more than 10% to your bottom line, do it NOW! Most business people take the stance that the customer is always right but remember they’re not if they don’t contribute significantly to you when costing you a huge amount of time and stressing you and your workers. Obviously you’ll take a small financial hit initially by firing a couple of customers but trust me you will make this up and more with no problems with the huge amount of time you’ve created yourself.

Now you know over 80% of your profits come from less than 20% of your customers (lets call them the A group). These are the people to focus on. That doesn’t mean spending all your waking hours pestering them, simply to remember that these are the customers you need to keep. You will probably find that these are also the easiest customers to deal with and satisfy because they know what they want and how much they want etc, you just need to supply them at the right price.

Next step. Look at your remaining customer base, you’ll find most of them would order from you wether you chased them up or not. I find a lot of people are spending almost 90% of their time contacting and chasing clients that they don’t need to, especially considering the financial benefit is very small. Stop contacting these customers. Allow them to contact you and order from you whenever they like but don’t waste your time contacting them, very few will stop ordering from you and even if a couple do the loss in revenue is minimal compared to the time you save.

Finally you should profile the customers in ‘the A group’. It’s likely they have similarities that make them such good customers for you. Identify their common characteristics and then go out and secure more customers that fit those characteristics. The key thing to remember here is not to go mad, only bring in 3-4 new customers to start with otherwise you’ll be back to square one, more customers does not necessarily mean more income.

End result? You have reduced the amount of time you spend working by at least 80% and the customers you now have are good quality ones. I can almost guarantee you will see your profits increase soon after you implement this, even though you had to take a small reduction to start with. Plus the fact you now have more time to focus on developing the business and pushing it forwards.

If you have any questions about anything I have discussed here leave a comment below or you can message me on twitter @oligibson