Do You Punish Or Reward Your Customers?

Posted on May 19, 2010 by Lachlan MacPherson

Why companies insist on punishing their loyal customers that they depend on I’ll never understand. Whats more, they do it over and over and again and expect them to come back to them.

This vent is against so called “fees” that business like to use to punish their customers. The fees I want to focus on are the ‘late fees’ that are synonomus with the video rental industry. It is their bread and butter that they reply on and the extra income that comes from this is a large percentage of their revenues, yet they understand to some extent that customers will fight tooth and nail to avoid paying that extra $1 fine.

Pick Up The Phone!

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Lachlan MacPherson

In all honesty, if your business is not getting the results you want, there is one thing you can do right now, without question, that will help your business in leaps and bounds.

Pick up the phone!

Talk to previous customers that you have done business with. Talk to your current customers. Talk to customers that enquired or stopped purchasing 3 ,6, 9 or even 12 months ago but chose not to go ahead. Whoever it may be, human contact can go a long way in helping you succeed.

Utilising Software As A Service (SAAS)

Posted on May 16, 2010 by Bronson Quick

I’ve been a student a few times in my life, so I understand what it’s like to be tight on cash. The first time was at uni doing a Bachelor of Microelectronic Engineering, the second time was at TAFE studying Applications Programming and the third time was at another uni doing a Bachelor of Accounting. Granted, during my stint studying Accounting I was working full time so money wasn’t an issue during that period of my life.

However, when you’re a full-time student you’re quite often struggling to make ends meet and I can understand and relate. I was talking to one of my friends on instant messenger the other day while she was at uni and she was having a bit of a rant about how she wished her lecturers would stop giving her documents in .doc and .docx (both Microsoft Office formats) and it got me thinking.

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People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.

Posted on May 6, 2010 by Lachlan MacPherson

I just came across this video on TED and felt compelled to share it. TED is a fantastic resource for inspiring talks from everyone from Bill Gates to Al Gore.

In the presentation Simon Sinek goes on to explain what it is that makes a truly inspiring leader different from everyone else. The main ‘premise’ he states is that most people in their every day lives start with the ‘what’ they do and use that to come about the ‘why’ they do it. Great leaders do this in reverse, the ‘what’ they do is simply a by product of what they believe.

For me this video really struck a chord as this is something that I think about everyday. The WHY.

Taking Online Thinking Offline

Posted on May 5, 2010 by Bronson Quick

I was going about my daily morning wake routine, which generally starts with a few barely audible groans as I wake up and use gravity to roll out of bed and stumble over to put the kettle on while I rub the sleep out of my eyes and attempt to recollect the evenings dreams. (I should mention that unfortunately, not enough of those dreams involve scantily clad Swedish vixens having pillow fights). After I’ve made my coffee I usually fire up the computer to read my RSS feeds in Google Reader, then see what inane ramblings my friends on the other side of the world have made on the “Zuckerberg Platform of World Domination”…err, I mean Facebook.

This morning one of my mates had a status update about her “managing to assemble some IKEA furniture after several hours” and it got me thinking.

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Tips To Speed Up Your Website

Posted on May 1, 2010 by Bronson Quick

During the week I was finishing up “Phase 2″ of one of our projects and realised that I hadn’t done some tweaks to speed up the clients site. So I thought it would be make a fun blog post to document the process I take and to note the speed improvements. Just remember that speed is a factor in Google’s rankings as I discussed in that blog post.

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