Small Business Ru!es

There was a time very early in my business career that I asked a debt collector to follow up an amount that a woman had outstanding with us. The reaction I received was interesting, to say the least. I was not aware of it at the time, but this woman …

We know more and more about less and less. That is fine. The trick here is not to try to know everything and do everything yourself. This applies to the external experts you use to help run your business as much as it applies to staff. The greatest t…

One day I was visiting my brother in Boston, and we were strolling through the Boston Common. Just like in the Peanuts cartoon, we came across a young girl at a classic lemonade stand making lemonade with lemons, sugar, and ice. This isn’t some…

Every human is pre-programmed with certain things from birth. Our heart starts beating, we know how to blink our eyes, and we yawn when someone else yawns. Right up there is our conditioned response to the standard question you often receive when you…

Security is for cadavers. In our comfort zone, we tend to be conservative and security conscious. We can sink into a rut. If you want perfect security, then buy a coffin. If you want to do more than grow incrementally, then you need to practise some …

There have been many times when I have heard someone point to a successful business in a certain industry and exclaim, “Now that is the business to be in!” They mistakenly think that it is the industry that has been responsible for the su…

  Reciprocity theory is best reserved for those particularly challenging clients that you just can’t get over the line with the normal sales processes. I had one such client just over two years ago. When we first introduced our SLA concept…

  Business owners often tell me that one of their biggest fears is that they will take good, young, inexperienced staff members and train them and give them skills and experience, and then they will leave the organisation and chase the bigger bu…

While reading through the list of proposed sports for the 2020 Olympic Games, I noticed a new sport was being added. It is called “clayless pigeon shooting.” The concept is remarkably similar to the traditional clay pigeon shooting, excep…

I walked into a large whitegoods retailer to buy a new fridge for our staffroom. I made one statement to the salesperson: “I need to buy a fridge with a built-in water cooler.” No more, no less. He showed me the “only model that had…

I love it when potential customers visit our store and then walk back in some time later with a catalogue from another store. They walk up to a salesperson and tell them how much better/cheaper/faster the product from the other store is. Once that ha…

Good service is incredibly easy. Tell someone you are going to do X. Then…do it! Great service isn’t much harder. Tell someone you are going to do X. Then…do X+1. One of the greatest examples of this was delivered during the Sydne…

  We were doing some work for a legal firm many years ago, and one of the partners in the business wanted to know how I could stop a certain employee from wasting time in Microsoft Word. This particular partner was complaining that this staff me…

The clade of lizards known as chameleons is well known for their specialised cells, collectively called chromatophores, that lie in layers under their transparent outer skin that can rapidly relocate their pigments to influence the colour of the cham…

   Claire Swire wishes that Bradley Chait had read this rule. Claire Swire was the infamous subject of the “Claire Swire e-mail of 2000” when her boyfriend forwarded on a personal e-mail to some friends—and that e-mail was…

  Remember when you were a child still at school and you used to pass notes to your classmates while the teacher had his or her back turned? We all thought we were very clever, and we could pass notes or whisper to our classmates without being c…

  You have a new idea. You are uncertain of the consequences if it doesn’t work, and you are nervous about implementing it. Sometimes you don’t try it because you are nervous about the implications or the ramifications. Think about i…

Jack Gibson (coach of the Australian Rugby League Team of the Century) used to say, “In football, if you are standing still, you’re going backwards fast.” Jack was an innovative coach who also produced classic quotes. He used to use…