What should the boss actually do?

By admin | Published: July 20, 2011

Being the boss isn’t always easy – once you’ve moved away from working in the business to working on the business, what’s the best way spending your time?

A new study by the Harvard business school provides some interesting pointers. The survey, of 94 Italian chief executives, tracked their activities and the study came up with some useful conclusions.

  • the average Italian boss works a 48 hour week, with 60% of that time being spent in meetings.
  • CEOs working longer days spend more time meeting with company employees and less time
  • the longer a CEO works, the better the company performs
  • most interestingly of all, time spent in meetings with employees is better spent than with outsiders-there is a clear correlation of time spent with insiders and increased profits. Surprisingly, there appears to be no such correlation in time spent with outsiders.

Furthermore, commenting on the study, Rajesh Chandy, a London Business School professor, observed that bosses spend only 3 – 4% of their working day thinking about long-term strategy. He concluded therefore that bosses should spend more time thinking about the future and less time networking with clients and contacts.

Conclusion? Perhaps bosses should consider spending less time networking and more time exercising the old grey matter in planning for the future

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Adopt a Dragon today

By Tim Bishop | Published: July 4, 2011

Once bitten twice shy. That’s the only reason why I can see that there hasn’t been a massive uptake of voice-activated dictation software. If technophobe lawyers can throw away their quills and manage to use it – surely so can everybody else My understanding is that when the technology was relatively new, say 10 years ago, the brave early adopters tried it and most found it wanting. As a result, understandably, they haven’t dared try again. But technology has moved on massively since then.

I’ve found voice activated software is now incredibly fast and accurate.  Why isn’t everyone using it ? Nuance, the company producing the market-leading software, Dragon, claim 98% accuracy. Not sure about that but it’s probably not far out. I have been using Dragon for 99.9% of my typing for the past two years. I can’t imagine going back to dictating for my secretary or returning to clumsy 2 finger typing. Why did it take it up in the 1st place? Necessity is the mother of invention. I simply found myself without a secretary for a while.

I strongly recommend Dragon NaturallySpeaking software. Version 11 is great and frankly the premium version, priced at as little as £100 or less is more than adequate. A number of my Solicitors already use it and we are in the process of rolling Dragon out to everyone. I estimate that by using Dragon, I am well on the way to saving my business between £50k and £100k pa !

2 top tips however to bear in mind :

Number one — get a good microphone. This makes a world of difference — I recommend the Philips Speech Mike — priced between £150 and £175

Secondly, particularly if you’re planning on rolling out Dragon to a number of colleagues or staff — get an external trainer on board. This should enable your team to learn from the experts — and will be a great source of both external validation and practical advice on implementation. If you want a recommendation for a good local specialist Dragon trainer — just e-mail me. For practical troubleshooting visit the Nuance website http://www.nuance.co.uk/naturallyspeaking/products/preferred.asp

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Telephone enquiries – the massive missed opportunities

By Tim Bishop | Published: May 25, 2011

A couple of years ago we did some research. We found that, on average, our Salisbury office was failing to answer approximately 6 telephone calls every day during working hours. This was despite having 2 receptionists and internal arrangements for other people to answer the main switchboard if reception was busy. That’s a staggering 1500 calls every year we were missing! And you can bet your bottom dollar that a fair percentage of those were potentially new clients – who probably wouldn’t take the time to ring again .What was the solution? Another receptionist, at the cost of almost £20k once you include national insurance and other on costs? Don’t be daft.

 The solution was much simpler and cheaper than that. We simply hired a telephone answering service to answer the phone when our reception team busy – at a fraction of the cost of a new receptionist. And what’s more, by doing so, we actually increased the hours that a living, breathing human answered the phone – rather than clients facing with a telephone answering message – and goodness knows how many other bits of new work we potentially miss when clients are reluctant to leave an answerphone message.

 On top of that, I received an e-mail today from the ever excellent marketing guru, Boyd Butler, of Great Legal Marketing, with some more interesting statistics. According to Boyd from some tracking work he’s done with estate agents, of 2,000,000 calls to estate agents, a full 8% of those calls remain unanswered and the callers don’t call back. His figures suggest a similar ratio for Solicitors You think that’s bad – apparently the unanswered call stats for restaurants is a staggering 18%.

 My advice is simple – engage a call answering service and seek an immediate improvement in client or customer care along with an increase in sales. But do bear in mind that not telephone answering companies are the same. I tried to engage a telephone answering service a few years ago and the results were a complete disaster – they set up a system so that far too many calls went through to them rather than being answered by our receptionists. What’s more, they then failed to send the e-mails containing details of the messages they had taken to us – for a whole week! Needless to say we didn’t pay their bill. They were lucky not to be sued. So if you want the name of a good call answering company [and the one we use is really good] and equally want to avoid the nightmare company we came across, feel free to drop me an e-mail.

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Winning a case at the employment tribunal – the odds

By Tim Bishop | Published: May 8, 2011

Following on from  my earlier blog on ”Employment tribunal claims – always worth fighting?”, I have just come across some interesting  information from the Employment Tribunal Service statistics which may help you in making a decision whether  or not to defend an employment tribunal claim.  

According to the figures, 82.9% of redundancy compensation claims are successful at a full employment tribunal hearing compared with just 52% of unfair dismissal claims and a mere 18% of race discrimination claims. So although it’s unscientific, you might wish to bear these figures in mind next time you talk to your employment lawyer after an employee threatens you with an employment tribunal compensation case.

 If you want to know more about unfair dismissal, visit our specialist unfair dismissal compensation website

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Do Judges eat often enough?

By Tim Bishop | Published: April 24, 2011

Following blogs about lap dancers, tramps and Fair Isle jumpers, the subject of my latest blog is all about the eating habits of our judiciary. According to the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, research done by Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev found that the eating habits of their country’s judges had a significant impact on whether or not a prisoner was paroled. The extensive research, of eight Israeli judges, and 1000 applications for paroled made over a period of 10 months found that at the start of every day, about two thirds of pro applications were successful. However as time passed, the judges consistently became less charitable and remarkably, the rate of successful parole applications dropped to 0. However after meal breaks, the rate of parole approval rocketed back up to almost its original high position prior to falling once again as the day went on.

The research carefully ascertained that neither the sex nor ethnic nature of prisoners made any the difference, nor did any other issues they can market e.g. the seriousness of crimes committed or length of prison sentence - the pattern that remained was the periodic judicial grumpiness.

The most popular explanation is a simple drop in blood sugar levels. The theory continues that decision-making is hard work, and therefore as people (and even judges are people) get more tired they start to look for easy answers – which in this particular scenario resulted in a simple no – a denial of parole. This theory is backed up by the fact that favourable decisions took 7.4 minutes whilst decisions refusing parole took just 5.2 minutes. Equally favourable rulings involved longer written verdict – 90 words compares with only 47 words rejecting parole.

All very well you might say but what does it mean to us? Well on the basis that most staff work a seven or eight hour day with perhaps only one food break in the middle, should we as employers be taking more care about insisting staff take lunch breaks, and arranging for more complex tasks to be done first in the morning and straight after lunch? These implications are of particular importance in some industries. EU drivers, for example, aren’t allowed to drive more than 4 1/2 hours without a break and airline pilots must follow detailed checklists. Is there any scope to using this fascinating insight in your business? Do let me know.

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Yell? You can hear the screams from here

By Tim Bishop | Published: April 13, 2011

You thought your sector was doing badly in the current economic climate? It’s just been pointed out to me how very badly the share price of Yell.com is doing. Today a yell.com share is worth just 5.86 compared with 57.6 in April 2010 and  634.50 all the way back in February 2007 i.e. it’s worth well under 1% of its value just 4 years ago! Ouch!

Conclusions? Firstly that the way we do business is changing and that the rate of change is only likely to increase. Agility and a flexible long-term business strategy is even more important now than ever before. It looks like Yell, despite the huge power of the Yellow Pages brand, have simply been far too slow in adapting to the new web-based business world.  Secondly, wise businesses are increasingly transferring much of the marketing and advertising spend online – but, I guess, not enough to yell.com. I guess it’s now not much time before Yellow Pages, along with the other directory simply vanish.

What will I, as a Solicitor in Salisbury, do about it? Well, apart from throwing away my quill straightaway, I’ll certainly have an even closer look at reducing our spend in paper directories and possibly on yell.com itself – and more importantly transfer more of my marketing resources across to my internet strategy – and in particular developing the promotion of my microsite strategy – to ensure that the Intellectual Property Lawyer, Franchising Solicitor, Lease Extension, Professional Negligence Claim and Probate UK sites, along with all my other microsites, will dominate the Google listings for my chosen keywords – allowing a relatively small Hampshire and Wiltshire law firm to compete with the big boys nationwide.

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Employment tribunal claims – always worth fighting?

By Tim Bishop | Published: April 10, 2011

Unsurprisingly, the increase over the last few years in employees rights, have resulted in a responding increase in employment tribunal claims. Although the maximum awards for unfair dismissal compensation and the like are steadily rising, you do need to be aware that there is a significant investment required in actually defending such a claim – not only in the costs of your employment solicitor, but also in the time and stress imposed on your own business.

 Before deciding whether to defend, have a good look at how strong the claim actually is. It is also worth bearing in mind that although the maximum payout for unfair dismissal claims increased in 2011 to a maximum of £80,040, the average unfair dismissal claim payout in 2009/10 was only £6275. What’s more, recent research has suggested that the cost to your own business, in staff time lost, averages £9000 – and that’s before you even start to pay legal costs!

My advice – it’s always worth taking brief legal advice from specialist employment law solicitors – that initial advice shouldn’t cost much and you may be surprised that a good commercially minded solicitor may well suggest that you give some serious thought to settling as the cheaper option.

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Our successful microsites

By Tim Bishop | Published: April 9, 2011

Readers of this blog who know me, won’t be surprised to hear me enthusing about dedicated micro sites. I’ve been building a stable of these dedicated legal sites for some time now and my target is to use them to produce additional work for my law firm of around £400,00 every year.

The 1st site is around 18 months old and last year these sites produced something like £80-100k new work – so the sites are working well and we are well on the way.

So what are our best performing 3 sites to date?

 Collective Enfranchisement – a site dedicated to the specialist field of leasehold enfranchisement, lease extension and right to manage company work. This was our 1st site and has, probably, been our most successful to date -driving new work by using both natural SEO and pay per click strategies. The plan is to gradually drop the pay per click campaigns as we  gradually creep further up the Google rankings nationally for the various search phrases I am targeting.

Intellectual Property Lawyer – this site, promoting our intellectual property services, is just over a year old and is already producing good quality national and regional work. This site has been similarly supported by a pay per click campaign which I’m gradually running down as we start to dominate the Google listings.

Professional Negligence Claim – this website is under 6 months old and is already producing quality work. It deals with a wide range of professional negligence claims – including accountant negligence and architect negligence and provides a lot of information including how our no win no fee professional negligence service works. Perhaps because I was significantly more experienced when I came to launch this site, it started to appear well on the 1st page of Google for various target phrases much sooner than earlier sites -which bodes well for the future sites I have planned. There is no pay per click campaign supporting the site – so all the work coming from is purely from our natural position in the listings.

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Fighting Friday afternoon absence

By Tim Bishop | Published: April 8, 2011

I’ve just been reading some recent employment research (the boring things I force myself to do to bring you this blog!)  showing that employees skiving off for parts or all of Friday afternoon is costing British business an incredible £50m every year! What do you reckon are the top excuses? Long lunches, external meetings near the employees home, GP appointments, taking the car to the garage and picking up the kids from school.

What should you do? Try keeping an eye on the situation and look for any pattern of behavior. Don’t be afraid of challenging excuses – remember, you are paying them to work!

PS  When I leave work early, that’s definitely not skiving. That’s giving myself quality strategic planning time!

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Lessons from a public sector experiment?

By Tim Bishop | Published: April 1, 2011

Any good entrepreneur knows that taking risks is essential if you really want to grow your business fast. Formula 1 legend Mario Andretti put it better when he said, “If you are in control you’re not going fast enough”.

However the public sector in Britain, which takes up such a huge amount of our gross national product, is nothing if not risk averse. I was therefore really encouraged to hear of a fascinating and innovative approach in respect of a tiny part of  public sector spending in an innovative project by the excellent think tank, the Joseph Rowntree foundation.

To my surprise, the city of London has more rough sleepers than any other London Borough except Westminster (I wonder if they included sleepy MPs nodding off on the backbenches during late-night Parliamentary sessions?). The charity, Broadway,  identified 338 rough sleepers, many of whom had been on the streets for a year or more. Despite strenuous efforts to get some of these off the streets, many of the rough sleepers suffering from real mental health drink and drug problems simply refused. So Broadway tried a quite remarkable approach – they gave each homeless person hundreds of pounds and allow them to spend it however they wanted to. Incredibly this worked!

Broadway targeted 13 of the rough sleepers who’d been living on the streets for the longest period (between 4 and an incredible 45 years). They weren’t offered the usual – a  hostel place and a soup kitchen etc. They were asked a much more basic question – what do YOU need to change your life?

What would you expect – after handing over the cash (averaging £794 each), did the 13 people who engaged with the project splash out on a drink, drug or gambling binge? No – not one of them did so. Although one asked for a TV and a new pair of trainers, another requested a caravan on a travellers site in Suffolk – which was duly bought for him. Incredibly, 11 of the 13 moved off the streets as a direct result. Now admittedly there were the additional costs (not identified) of employing the project staff, but the cash actually spent pales into insignificance compared with the estimates of how much the government spends each year on each homeless person, in respect of prison, health and police bills etc – a whopping £26,000.

The conclusion? Apart from the fact that we should continue to experiment with handing over more control of the public purse to those who actually use it, the lesson it taught me was all about control. This seems to me to be yet further proof that handing over some element of control to staff both empowers and motivates them. Like most entrepreneurs, I suspect I have a bit of a control freak tendency “I know what needs to be done, so please do it my way”. Perhaps the rough sleepers of the Square Mile have something to teach me?

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