Getting a client, instead of an occasional buyer

cli·ent
–noun 1. a person or group that uses the professional advice or services of a lawyer, accountant, advertising agency, architect, etc.

But, I think we all know a client is much more than that, don’t we?

Clients pay for the service you provide for them. Give good service, and you will:
- Have a loyal client that keeps coming back for more, providing you in return, with steady income.
- Have a client that will give his friends good references of you, providing you with more work.
- Get an ally and a friend that will help your business grow, while you make theirs, grow.

Sounds great, right?

And how exactly do you get to that point?

Allow me to illustrate with a recent experience of mine:

A couple of weeks ago I wanted to buy a watch, so I went to the mall. There were about five stores that carried the kind of watch I wanted. So I went to the first store and requested the watch, and they had it, except they carried it in light blue and pink.

“Hmm, I’d rather it was black” I said to the sales guy. “We don’t carry it in black” he said. So I replied “Great, let me check other stores and see if I can find it. If I don’t, I’ll come back and buy one of these”, to which he replied “You’re not going to find it in this mall. We’re the only ones who carry this particular model, so you might as well buy it right away”.

“Thanks” I said, “I’ll take my chances”.

The second store I visited carried the watch and guess what: They had it in black! The sales lady was very polite, told me the price, allowed me to try it on… But I still wanted to see if I could get a better price somewhere else. “Thanks” I said, “I’ll check other stores and come back if I decide to buy this one”. “Great!” she said, “I’ll be here if you need me”.

Surely enough, I went to other stores, they all carried the watch in different colors, including black. Where do you think I went back to buy the watch?

See the difference? The first guy was interested in making THIS particular sale and getting his commission. The second lady was interested in what I wanted. I wanted a black watch, at a better price.

Sure, she wanted to sell hers too, but she was more focused on providing a service and letting the customer get the best deal (And of course, she was confident that I could not get a better price anywhere else). She was also very friendly and provided me with great service by giving me information and allowing me to try it on.

If I ever need to buy another watch, or if I know of someone that needs one, I’ll recommend that particular store. She got herself a client.

If I had bought the watch at the first store just because I couldn’t find it anywhere else, I would’ve become an occasional buyer and would have never come back. And I am not coming back.

Who’s more intelligent? I bet by now you get my point…

Think of providing a service, a great service, instead of thinking about how to make one sale. Think of what the client wants and give it to them. It may be that the client doesn’t actually buy from you now, but they will remember you and come back if they see that you’re eager to provide them with value, rather than just take their money.

All the best!

The 10 Major Causes of Failure in Leadership

In order to reinforce my past entry, allow me to transcribe now another passage of “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill, published in 1937.

Here goes:

The 10 Major Causes of Failure in Leadership

1. Inability to organize details.
Efficient leadership calls for ability to organize and master details. No genuine leader is ever “too busy” to do anything which may be required of him in his capacity as a leader. When a man, whether he is a leader or a follower, admits that he is “too busy” to change his plans, or to give attention to any emergency, he admits his inefficiency. The successful leader must be the master of all details connected with his position. That means, of course, that he must acquire the habit or delegating details to capable lieutenants.

2. Unwillingness to render humble service.
Truly great leaders are willing, when occasion demands, to perform any sort of labor which they would ask another to perform. “The greatest among ye shall be servant of all” is a truth which all leaders observe and respect.

3. Expectation of pay for what they “know” instead of what they “do” with that which they know.
The world does not pay men for that which they “know”. It pays them for that they DO, or induce others to do.

4. Fear of competition from followers.
The leader who fears that one of his followers may take his position is practically sure to realize that fear sooner or later. The able leader trains understudies to whom he may delegate, at will, any of the details of his position. Only in this way may a leader multiply himself and prepare himself to be at many places, and give attention to many things at one time. It is an eternal truth that men receive more pay for their ability to get others to perform, than they could possibly earn by their own efforts. An efficient leader may, through this knowledge of his job and the magnetism of his personality, greatly increase the efficiency of others, and induce them to render more service and better service than they could render without his aid.

5. Lack of imagination.
Without imagination, the leader in incapable of meeting emergencies, and of creating plans by which to guide his followers efficiently.

6. Selfishness.
The leader who claims all the honor for the work of his followers, is sure to be met by resentment. The really great leader claims none of the honors. He is contented to see the honors, when there are any, go to his followers, because he knows that most men will work harder for commendation and recognition than they will for money alone.

7. Intemperance.
Followers do not respect an intemperate leader. Moreover, intemperance in any of its various forms, destroys the endurance and the vitality of all who indulge in it.

8. Disloyalty.
Perhaps this should have come at the head of the list. The leader who is not loyal to his trust, and to his associates, those above him and those below him, cannot long maintain his leadership. Disloyalty marks one as being less that the dust of the earth, and brings down on one’s head the contempt he deserves. Lack of loyalty is one of the major causes of failure in every walk of life.

9. Emphasis of the “authority” of leadership.
The efficient leader leads by encouraging and not by trying to instill fear in the hearts of his followers. The leader who tries to impress his followers with his “authority” comes within the category of leadership through force. If a leader is a real leader, he will have no need to advertise that fact, except by his conduct, his sympathy, understanding, fairness and demonstration that he knows his job.

10. Emphasis of title.
The competent leader requires no “title” to give him the respect of his followers. The man who makes too much over his title generally has little else to emphasize. The doors to the office of the real leader are open to all who wish to enter, and his working quarters are free from formality or ostentation.

I think many latin american leaders, in all areas, fall into these negative practices, don't you?

All the best!

The 11 Major Attributes of Leadership

I’ve been reading another book. It’s called “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. It was published in 1937, when Andrew Carnegie appointed Napoleon to study the characteristics of great achievers in America and to write a book that would summarize such characteristics.

I’d heard a lot about this book, so I decided to give it a try. I’m not finished yet, but I want to transcribe a passage of it here, since I believe it relates to the way I view design leadership.

So here goes:

“The Major Attributes of Leadership

1. Unwavering courage.
Based upon knowledge of self, and of one’s occupation. No follower wishes to be dominated by a leader who lacks self-confidence and courage. No intelligent follower will be dominated by such a leader very long.

2. Self-control.
The man who cannot control himself, can never control others. Self-control sets a mighty example for one’s followers, which the more intelligent will emulate.

3. A keen sense of justice.
Without a sense of fairness and justice, no leader can command and retain the respect of his followers.

4. Definiteness of decision.
The man who wavers in his decisions, shows that he is not sure of himself. He cannot lead others successfully.

5. Definiteness of plans.
The successful leader must plan his work and work his plan. A leader who moves by guesswork, without practical, definite plans, is comparable to a ship without a rudder. Sooner or later he will land on the rocks.

6. The habit of doing more than paid for.
One of the penalties of leadership is the necessity of willingness, upon the part of the leader, to do more that he requires of his followers.

7. A pleasing personality.
No slovenly, careless person can become a successful leader. Leadership calls for respect. Followers will not respect a leader who does not grade high on all the factors of a pleasing personality.

8. Sympathy and understanding.
The successful leader must be in sympathy with his followers. Moreover, he must understand them and their problems.

9. Mastery of detail.
Successful leadership calls for mastery of details of the leader’s position.

10. Willingness to assume full responsibility.
The successful leader must be willing to assume responsibility for the mistakes and the shortcomings of his followers. If he tries to shift this responsibility, he will not remain the leader. If one of his followers makes a mistake, and shows himself incompetent, the leader must consider that it is he who failed.”

11. Cooperation.
The successful leader must understand and apply the principle of cooperative effort and be able to induce his followers to do the same. Leadership calls for power and power calls for cooperation."

All the best!

Design on wheels

Tokio Showroom: Where is Japan going and what’s the future of the automobile?

That’s the title of last week’s Motor Magazine article article about the 40th Tokio Showroom, a showcase of the latest in car design.

Where’s colombian design when it comes to shaping the future of mankind? Well, I’ll let the link speak for itself (Beware it’s in spanish).

All the best!

Four Design Influences

As designers we pull from different sources to build our aesthetic awareness, our “visual culture” as a friend of mine used to call it. Here are four sources of design inspiration that I think can influence the way designers create, for the better.


Music:

Saturday night, a concert in Bogotá, the Iceland queen, Björk. She opens up the concert with a costume that made her look something like a mix between a mushroom and a jelly fish.

I was listening to the music and comparing the beats to the movements she made when she danced, how she expressed the music visually, with her body and how that connected with the stage design and the whole production including the other musicians and the different elements that were placed onstage that made for the visual experience of the performance. It was simply amazing.

There was another time in my life when this was very palpable. When I was in high school I had an art teacher. She once played some music for us in a boom box and asked us to draw what we felt. The results were rather interesting and varied, depending on the person. While some people drew in a linear form, others went back and forth with their shapes, up and down, changed colors.

Music has mountains and valleys, punches, speed, tone, it’s big or small, it’s very obvious or subtle, it can be deep, steep or narrow. Music can become something visual, something that has a shape, a size, even a color. And if it’s something visual, then it can be used to create design.


Food:

The other day I was watching Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations on TV and he was visiting this restaurant in Spain, called “El Bulli”, where his chef and owner Ferran Adriá has a very unique proposal to gastronomy.

It turns out that Adriá and his team believe in innovation in both the dishes they make as well as how they present them, that’s why they work on a lab a great portion of the year, as if it was a chemistry project.

His team includes an industrial designer who has two functions: One, to come up with the symbols that identify the internal processes in the lab and two, to come up with the best crockery and the best cutlery to present the different courses.

How cool is that? Can you imagine working as a designer for something that is not obviously design related?

Check out El Bulli’s website and go to the section called “1983-2005 general catalogue” and see the amazing shapes, the innovating dishes, the way it’s all presented, not only as an aesthetic proposal, but as a culinary experiment, using ingredients and combinations that nobody has dared to use.


Art:

This is, of course, an obvious one. How has art impacted design? What a big question! And nowadays you often can’t draw a line between art and product design. Who is to say that an iPod is not artful? And remember the Bauhaus? Where’s the line there?

To me, art is anything, any medium that is used to express human emotion. Would you agree with me if I said that product design (and any kind of design, for that matter) is influenced by emotion?

How does an art piece make you feel? And how do certain design pieces make you feel? Is there a connection? What elements can we take from art, to apply to design?


Other designers:

Here’s another obvious one, but do young designers actually take the time to research other designers in the world?

When I was in college, we reviewed the work of French Philippe Starck. Little did I know that the guy was still alive! I thought that since many of his pieces were modern design icons, maybe he was already dead. Silly me…

Anyway, this is a French designer that has designed some of the most representative pieces of modern industrial design, from culinary objects, to entire hotels! And there are tons of pictures of his designs on his website. This is a great source of inspiration, to see how design problems can be solved with ease and style.

The point here is to research, to find out what who the big designers are right now! What they’re doing, what trends they’re creating! And then ask ourselves, what do I bring to the table?


There are many other sources of influence for designers. As Latin American designers, are we tackling on all of them? Are we researching, acquiring visual culture? What other influences can you suggest? Books, movies, local culture, history?

All the best!

Time Tracking Tool

Like most designers, I hated Excel. Then one day the best boss I ever had (an engineer, by the way) introduced me to the wonderful world of spreadsheets.

Excel is a very powerful tool once you get to know it. I don’t know that much, actually, but I have developed a few tools to keep track of design traffic and time. Last year I wrote about time measurement and mentioned briefly how to go about tracking time and tasks.

Today I want to go deeper and share with you a tool I created to track the time and activities you do on a daily basis.

It’s pretty simple. With it you can:

· Establish categories for your activities.
· Know how much time you’re spending in such activities, and filter by category.
· Find out if you’re wasting time in meaningless tasks.
· Find out if there are tasks you can delegate, empowering your employees.
· Measure how much time you’re spending at the office.

Also, as I said in the article I mentioned earlier:

You may find that it's more effective to hire a consultant to take care of certain time consuming activities or you may even ask for your suppliers to absorb such activities which would make your operation even more effective.

You need to be aware of how long do your typical projects take, in order to have accurate planning, and how much to charge.

You can plan more strategically ahead of time so that you know if you need to get some outside help for that big project that will be coming next week or if you have some free time to spend on leadership activities with your staff. In other words, when you know how long will your projects take and how they're organized in any given time frame, you get a broader vision of your business.

So without further ado, here’s the tool and the instructions:

I call it my "Follow Up Activities" spreadsheet. You can download the Excel file here. This is the file as I use it, and this file has been filled for activities for five days, as an example, but feel free to adapt it to your needs!

It’s basically a table with the following fields: Month, Day, Start, Duration, Category, Description and Comments.

Month: This is a text field. I like to name it "00-mmm" where “00” is the number of the month (for instance June would be 06) and “mmm” is the first three letters of the month’s name. Why? Because it allows me to sort by number of the month, instead of the name, so that January will always be at the top, for example.

Day: This is a number field. Type number of the current day.

Start: This is a date/hour field. Type the hour of the day in which that particular activity started, in 24 hour format.

Duration: It’s a date/hour field, with a formula where the duration of the activity is calculated by the starting time of the following task minus the starting time of the previous task. In the picture above the formula would be =C4-C3 for the first cell and then that is copied down on the cells of the D column.

Category: This is a text field. You define the categories of activities. In this example I’ve created seven categories. There’s one called “Breaks” where I record the times I spend on breaks and lunches.

Description: This is a text field. Type a description of the task. I use the same name for the same activity for example I always write “Packaging database” for that particular activity instead of using several different names for it.

Comments: This is a text field. If you wish to add something else like who you met with or if the project was billed, etc.

Now for some instructions:

· Data should be input by the minute, every time you change activity, you need to go there and input that information. This is key, and it needs to be done rigorously and with discipline. This way you always have current information and you're not stuck with having to type several days worth of information.

· The last activity of the day is called “Exit”. You only type the start time, but you must erase the formula in the “Duration” field for this activity.

· When the day ends, I like to use the “Comments” cell of the activity to add up the total hours I spent at the office that day. This is just a SUM formula that adds up the duration of all the activities. For instance in this particular day I was at the office nine and a half hours.

· There’s another worksheet in the Excel file, called "PT%", where I’ve added a Pivot Table report that will tell me how much time I’ve spent in each category or task. Pivot Tables are dynamic, and I can change the fields at leisure. For instance, instead of percentage, I can change it to hours.



· And I’ve also added a graph to illustrate those times.

Neat, huh? Well, I think so. Do leave some comments if you have some ideas about how to improve this tool!

All the best!

Resources: PivotTable reports 101.

Design resources: 2 articles

Here’s two articles I read this week from How Magazine, that I want to share with my readership.

Get A Life (And Other Remedies for Creative Atrophy) by Jenny Pfalzgraf.
When creative impulses are few and far between , designers often turn to outside sources for a boost. Whether it's hiking in the mountains, getting a tattoo or bringing your pet iguana to the office, this freedom to explore your inner child feeds your business finesse.

The Proof is in the Process by George Shaw
A teacher once told me, "Anyone can be creative on their best day. If you want to make a living at this stuff (graphic design), you've got to be creative on the days when your car breaks down and your wife leaves you." I thought he was trying to get me to listen to country music, but eventually, I figured out what he was talking about.

All the best!