At age 35 with three transmissions shops and a staff of 20, I was drawing a professional manager’s salary and making what I thought was a “reasonable” profit. I owned the workshop premises and [...]
(From the Bristol Evening Post): Outside Bristol Zoo is the car park, with spaces for 150 cars and 8 coaches. It has been manned 6 days a week for 23 years by the same charming and very polite [...]
In a former lifetime the MD of ProfiTune, Peter Rowe, developed and marketed workshop management software for the automotive trade and, in that era his friend, Mark Boyce, developed vehicle [...]
When the season is good everything grows – including the weeds. “I like a good drought. It tends to get rid of the deadwood”, my farmer mate Curly used to say – and he wasn’t talking [...]
Kaizen is the concept of making continuous incremental (small) improvements to a working concept until it nears perfection. The progression from early post-war Toyota vehicles to the Lexus is a [...]
If you own/manage a small or medium business, you are working around 25% more hours than you were 10 years ago – and using an older (and probably less fit) body to do it with! Run any piece [...]
If you don’t have a written Code of Conduct (or Team Charter) then the people in your team are making it up as they go, and you can expect some painful, and sometimes costly, mistakes. One [...]
Oops! A UK bank recently alienated 2000 of its richest and most valued customers after deciding to use a new electronic mail system to market a new range of services to them. It had one of its [...]
The author of one of the all-time Great Business Books (Good to Great) has done it again. Jim Collins has now looked at how and why even the best companies can crash and burn, and he provides [...]
It’s interesting to watch the fallout from the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and see that my clients in small and medium businesses are doing better than “OK”. Apart from those in retail, [...]
