As a firm of accountants, at K&H we are always looking out for ways to help our clients understand better what it is that we do for them. We are (quite naturally) convinced that our work is of great value, but sometimes when you don’t fully understand something, it is hard to see the value.

Balance sheets are a good example of this. Most business owners understand their profit and loss account, but few really know why their balance sheet is probably the most important part of their accounts. It is also the hardest thing to get right – it has to balance!

The book also reminded me to be on guard about using jargon, and that ‘jargon’ is not just obscure words and acronyms: words and symbols which we commonly use in the office and are not always understood (in the same way at least) by non-accountants, for example:
- ‘Net’ and ‘gross’
-  numbers in (brackets), red type, or with a dash in front are usually negative
-  ‘accruals’
-  ‘cash’ often means not on credit, rather than notes and coins
-  and of course the old chestnut of ‘debit’ and ‘credit’

If you’re interested in other book reviews that I have done, please have a look at my linkedIn page and follow my reading list there.

I’m planning to run a short informal session to explain balance sheets and cover some of the jargon.  Please let me know if you’d be interested in coming along.

The amazing thing is that this is true for even the richest people – i.e. the wellbeing of the (very) rich in unequal societies is less than that of the rich (but not as rich) in more equal countries.

‘Wellbeing’ covers things like: mental illness, obesity, teenage pregnancy, violence, interpersonal trust, self-esteem, life expectancy, literacy and much more.

The reasons are complex but rooted in the deep but conflicting human needs for status and social integration. We measure our self-worth against other people and so want to do better than them. This is stoked up by marketing and media that are designed to set aspirations artificially high, and make us feel inadequate unless we have the latest material goods.

The book talks about how greater equality can be achieved. In countries such as Sweden it is mainly by using fiscal policy (e.g. taxes) whereas in Japan incomes and wealth are more evenly shared to start with.

At K&H we are heavily involved with the Employee Ownership Association and it is interesting that the book focuses on this model as a way to achieve a fairer sharing of wealth. Technology is also likely to provide a levelling off of how resources are shared, and these are very positive signs for the future.

The prizes for more equality are well worth aspiring to. For example in the UK we would have 75% fewer murders and seven weeks more holiday every year if we could get to the position of the more equal societies.

Do you agree with this book, and do you think it should influence our government’s fiscal policy?

To see all the books I have read and recommended over the last few years, see my reading list on my LinkedIn pages.

However, as I got a Kindle last Christmas, I doubt I will ever not have a book to read ever again. Anyway, I thought I will test myself to see how many of the books I have read, and whether I could think of any to add to the list.

The answer is that, to my surprise, I have only read 7 of the books on the list, although all of them are in the top 13 (assuming the books are ‘best first’ order). Those are:

• Rich Dad, Poor Dad
• The E-Myth
• One Minute Manager
• E-Myth Manager
• Who Moved My Cheese?
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• The One Minute Millionaire

These would probably be in my own list of top wealth creation books:

• Good to Great – Jim Collins
• Built to Sell – John Warrillow
• Practice What You Preach : What Managers Must Do to Create a High Achievement Culture
• The Inside Advantage:  The Strategy that Unlocks the Hidden Growth in Your Business – Robert Bloom, Dave Conti
• The 4-hour workweek – Tim Ferriss
• Eat That Frog – Brian Tracy
• The Slight Edge:  Secret to a Successful Life – Jeff Olson

See here for the full Amazon list

Do you have any you would add to Amazon’s or my list?

• The only way to get anyone to do anything is to make them want to do it
• The deepest urge in human nature is to be important
• A quote from Emerson: “Every man I meet is superior to me in some way”
• To influence people, talk about what they want, and how to get it
• Henry Ford: the secret to success is seeing the other person’s point of view
• “A man convinced against his will/Is of the same opinion still”
• People have two reasons for doing things: one that sounds good and the real one
• The way to get things done is to stimulate competition- not to make money but to excel
• Say “and” not “but”
• “Praise is like sunlight to the warm human spirit”

The book ends with an insight into what made Carnegie (and so many other people) so successful: the ability to speak in public, ’a shortcut to distinction’, and praise totally disproportionate to merit!

Please have a look at the full review on my LinkedIn Reading List, and let me know what you think about HTWFAIP.

The event is at The Sheraton Skyline, Heathrow from 6 to 9.30pm on Thursday 24 June. Tickets are at a special subsidised rate of £99 + VAT. For more details, contact Bernadette Brownlie.

I can highly recommend everything on the list (including a K&H Goal Getter strategic planning day for item 4, of course) EXCEPT for item 3, which you should only get if you are very disciplined with your time.

Here’s the list:

http://www.e-myth.com/cs/user/print/post/top-10-holiday-gifts-for-a-technician

See what you think.

This applies to many of the things we have achieved in business. My client and mastermind of K&H’s new website, Julian Sharples, recently brought to my attention a very good example of this: Fixed Price Agreements (FPAs). This was prompted by words of praise for this method of charging in, of all places, Gordon Ramsay’s autobiography ‘Playing With Fire’. In the book Gordon says:

“Accountants come in two sizes: they are either expensive or f*****g outrageous. In the early days, we needed little more than straight auditing of the company books. This meant that they checked over what we had stuck in the computer for the last twelve months, added seasoning, such as a bit of depreciation, agreed the tax computations with the local taxman, and signed off the accounts for the year. Nice and straightforward, and it probably didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Martin, who was to be tragically killed just as we began to appreciate his full value as a financial advisor, not only met our needs efficiently and on time, but had come up with the brilliant idea of an FPA, a fixed price agreement. This meant that he estimated what his auditing services would cost, divided by twelve, and we set up a standing order so that the fees didn’t hurt so much and Martin’s practice could eat regularly. As our needs grew during the year, the cost might rise and there would be a simple adjustment at the end of the year.”

We have been using FPAs at K&H for eight years now, and many businesses are coming to accept that this is a better way to charge their customers. At the time it seemed like a huge leap of faith to move away from time-based billing but whenever we take on new clients from accountants who still charge in that way, it is a breath of fresh air for them to have certainty about what they are being charged, and to have the cost spread over the year.

Pricing has been the number one way to make quick improvements to the fortunes of every client I have worked with on business development. Gordon Ramsay has reminded me that it is not just the amount but the method of charging that you need to think about.

There is always a way of changing the way you charge to differentiate your business from the competition and help your customers. Does Gordon’s second favourite F word (Fixed) apply to your prices and service levels?

Have you ever been surprised or inspired by business ideas found in unlikely places, like celeb autobiographies?

I don’t usually do book reviews in the conventional sense. I prefer to take the ideas from my recent learning and experiences and weave them into my own thoughts and blog postings. (Is that what some people call plagiarism?)

I am making an exception for this book because we are offering a limited number of free copies to readers of this page (see the end of this posting to see how), and I would not expect anyone to waste their valuable time on a book (free or not) without knowing a bit about it.

What’s in it?
The book contains 176 key messages, with empty boxed-off spaces in the body of the text for the reader to write in their actions. These messages are in categories such as:

• Tough decisions
• Get selling
• Back to basics
• Opportunities
• Invest

I think that the main value of the book is in the last two of these sections. There really are enormous opportunities for anyone prepared to take their blinkers off and take advantage of, for example, the much lower barriers to entry in existing markets that exist in recessionary times.

It was first written in 2008 and then revised and reprinted (twice) in 2009, so its topical credentials are good.

The bits I liked
Whenever I read books I highlight the ‘good bits’.  Here are the things that I highlighted:

1. Recession exposes poor working practices
2. Now more than ever, we need to be brilliant at the basics
3. The way out of recession is innovation
4. Get out of the spiral of price cutting now
5. Use students to get work done cheaply and well
6. Know the facts - measure and manage all the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
7. Use adversity to get your team to act like a team
8. Recruit for attitude now more than ever
9. Only sell to FANs (those with Funds, Authority and a Need)
10. Do ‘real marketing’ – targeting, segmenting, adding value at minimal cost etc
11. Communicate simply and effectively. The phone is better and quicker than writing, even if you have to leave a voicemail.

Conclusion
The book is subtitled ‘A blueprint for business survival’. Personally, I would have chosen something a bit more direct,  e.g.  ’Everything you should have been doing in your business anyway, and which the downturn will not force you to do’.

I think that if you are just setting out on your business development journey, or if you are already on the way but risk being blown off course by all the negativity around at present, this book is a great way to (re)focus on the right path.

Get a free copy
If you are a client of Kirkpatrick & Hopes and you would like a free copy, please contact Bernadette Brownlie or any of your contacts at the office.

We also have 10 copies that we are offering free of charge to non-clients on a first come, first served basis.  Please email mail@kandh.co.uk asap if you’d like one.

Once you have read it, please post a comment here to tell us your views.

Raving Fans! is about the need to turn your customers into fanatics who will rave about your business. The book is written in the parable style of Ken Blanchard and follows a newly appointed manager. What the manager learns is that there are three steps to creating a “Raving Fan” culture within a business:

Step 1 – Decide what you want. You do this by creating vision of perfection centred on the customer.

Step 2 – Discover what the customer wants. It is crucial you have the flexibility to adapt your own vision if necessary to fill the gaps and meet the needs of the customer. But you also need to accept that sometimes the customer wants something you can’t give them, something that falls outside the limits of your vision. Be prepared to let them buy these things elsewhere.

Step 3 – Deliver the customer’s vision, plus one percent. There are two elements to this. First, you have to deliver, consistently, all the time. Second, you need to promise 100% but deliver 101%.

The key messages that Kirkpatrick & Hopes are using to help us are:

• Consistency really is crucial and the only way you can guarantee consistency is by having great systems. System Builder software is helping us and can help you
• Beware of how dogmatic you are in applying systems. They are guidelines, not rules. Use systems to guarantee delivering to customers the minimum standard of service consistently; use the ‘Raving Fan’ mindset in your team to deliver even more than that (the extra one percent).
• Don’t limit your ‘Raving Fan’ ambitions to customers. You should look at everyone who comes into contact with your business as a potential ‘Raving Fan’, including your own team.
• Complaints are a golden opportunity to find out what the customer wants and to create a new ‘Raving Fan’.

Raving Fans is a great book, you can read it in a couple of hours. It has many examples of how different businesses have created Raving Fans. I am sure these will inspire lots of ideas about how you can do the same in your business.

Anyone who has visited K&H’s offices in the last few months may have noticed a large (10′ by 4′) painting on the wall of one of our meeting rooms. The painting shows a landscape on which there is a road. The road represents a time line covering the modern era at K&H, from about 1995, and goes through to the present and into the future. At various points on the road are different buses – each representing K&H at that particular point in time: a run-down, worn-out bus struggling uphill in 1995 and a super hi-tech multi-decker going into the future. The purpose of the mural is to provide a powerful, metaphorical focal point for the changes that K&H has been through and is still going through. The future bus represents the Vision that makes the discomfort of the present worth going through. Creating and communicating a Vision for the future are essential components of any effective business strategy.

The inspiration for the mural was partly the latest Harry Potter film (Prisoner of Azkaban) and but mainly the “First Who…. Then What” chapter of Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great.

Good to Great is the result of a 5-year research project by 21 people from about 1996 onwards which looked at 1,435 companies. The objective was to find out why some of those companies went from being merely good to being great – outperforming the competition by 4 to 6 times.

Crucially, however, they only looked at companies that had already been around for at least 15 years before making the leap, and that had sustained that greatness for at least 15 years afterwards.

The result was that only 11 companies met the criteria set. Those 11 companies showed some significant similarities in the causes of their greatness, and the book examines these detail. The characteristics that were found to be common were:

• Level 5 leadership – the people who led the company through the transition from good to great were not the stereotypical, larger-than-life charismatic bosses that you might expect. Instead they were quiet and humble but very determined and focused individuals
• First who …then what – Here’s where the bus comes in: getting the right people “on the bus” was done before formulating the business strategy
• Confront the brutal facts (yet never lose faith) - tough decisions have to be made and acted upon. Don’t compromise
• The hedgehog concept - focus on the one thing that you can be the best in the world at and which you are passionate about and can make you money
• Culture of discipline – If all your people are committed to your vision and consistent in their commitment, you don’t need hierarchy, bureaucracy or excessive controls
• Technology accelerators – Technology does not drive success, but the good to great company uses carefully selected technologies to facilitate it
• The flywheel and the doom loop – The good to great transition does not happen overnight, and no single act or event is decisive. Instead it is like trying to get a huge steel flywheel turning: it will hardly move at all to start with no matter how hard you push. But once it does start moving, it has massive momentum

Good to Great is one of the most powerful business books you will ever read. It is one of the few business books that is based on solid evidence and experience, no just ideas.