Wiggs’ way

By Lance Wiggs, December 22, 2009 @ 9:13 am

Let Lance Wiggs help with your tricky business problems. Email him at advice@idealog.co.nz

Farming money

What’s your take on Facebook apps, like Farmville? Which will make money and which will just sink?
Wallflower, Auckland

Dear Wallflower
There are over 350,000 applications on Facebook, and over 100,000 apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch.The application market is like the music market, with stars, hits and a sense that nobody really knows what is the next big thing.

So sure, Farmville is making money now, but will it still be reaping rewards in 2011? Maybe, but Farmville will certainly sink at some stage, hopefully beaten by the plunging of the obnoxious Mafia Wars into obscurity.

Facebook itself will also sink at some stage. We’re witnessing the decline of the once-dominant Bebo in New Zealand (they withdrew from Australia recently). We saw MySpace rise and fall, and before that … well, does anyone remember NZMusic.com?

Blink and the in-crowd at social sites move on, and Facebook is so popular now that the in-crowd is shifting—mainly to Twitter. The more experienced Twitterati, meanwhile, are eyeing next-generation platforms like Posterous and Google Wave.

It’s very hard to predict what and when social networks will succeed and fail, but there is probably a simple test to determine the point of failure—and it’s almost certainly related to the date that your mother joins the network.

Meanwhile, why not stop playing with Farmville and get some real chickens, cows and sheep? Put some chickens in the yard and delight in fresh eggs each morning, get a group of friends together and buy some cows or simply plant a garden of your own.

Love & war

My business partner is also my girlfriend, and we plan to get married over summer. Will this change threaten our business? Should one of us find something else to do? (She’s as unlikely to enjoy that idea as I am.)
Old Romantic, Christchurch

Dear Old Romantic
There are plenty of husband-and-wife businesses around, and many of are very successful in both the personal and professional sense. There are some simple rules, though. First is that the girlfriend or wife is the boss. That’s been true for almost every husband-and-wife business I have seen, whether the male knows it or not.

Second, get away from the business periodically. This is obviously good for the relationship, but also great for the business. Planning a holiday and walking away from work every so often means you need to leave it in the hands of someone you trust. This in turn means that you are not being consumed by the day-to-day activity and can work on, rather than in, the business.

Finally, as you indicated by asking this question, you need to take a periodic step back and discuss the situation. Are you each happy in both the personal and professional senses? Is the relationship still more important than the business? Keep monitoring, and more importantly, reacting.

I’ll get back to you

I’m a procrastinator with things I hate (like credit control!). Do you have methods for dealing with yucky stuff?
Procrastinator, Wellington

Dear Procrastinator
This question is close to my heart—I’m writing this minutes before deadline.

The best way to get yucky stuff off your hands is to find someone else who will actually enjoy the task. You’d be surprised at what different people enjoy—some derive a great deal of satisfaction by calling laggard customers and obtaining overdue money. In the US I was lucky to have a cadre of assistants who fought with each other to proofread hundreds of pages of writing, while I find myself enjoying working with contracts, threatening letters and potentially emotional situations.

If you can’t find someone else to do it, consider the next best option: ignore it completely. This sounds counter-intuitive, but before we let something stress us out we should make sure it is a priority, and not just urgent but not really important.

Which leads me to prioritisation. Many systems will take your money and promise you’ll become organised, but I’ve found the simplest approach is to write down three priorities for each day. I use a whiteboard. If you work in a team, you can do it together and check in later to see how you did. If a task keeps slipping from day to day, break it into smaller pieces. And if you’re still failing to do it, ask for help.

Worth trust

According to research I read, over 54 percent of people in the past six months stopped buying a company’s products or services because they lost trust in it. How do you build consumer trust these days? It seems we’re all tarred with the same brush.
Ethical, Auckland

Dear Ethical
It’s easy to lose consumer trust: just ask Cadbury, Telecom, the pork industry or any New Zealand finance company. Building trust is a lot harder. It means showing through action over time that your company is honest and has ethical values. That’s not so hard if you are honest and ethical yourself, and you’re a one-person company. It gets much harder as you grow, and at some stage your staff will increasingly use their own judgement.

At that stage you have to rely on their values. To do this you need to not only employ staff with the right values, but also give them guidance about the desired values of your business.

The first thing to do is to actually write down your company values; BHP Billiton’s charter is an excellent benchmark. Make the values simple and robust and include things such as how you deal with your employees, customers, wider community and suppliers.

The next, critical step is to educate staff and enforce your values. Use them yourself with no exceptions, regularly sell them to staff and other stakeholders, and set and enforce clear expectations that compliance to values is not optional. Once again, it’s very difficult to propagate values throughout an organisation and frighteningly simple to destroy them, especially from the top.

We are intolerant of unfairness in New Zealand, as our top place in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index proved yet again this year. Local and foreigncontrolled companies should take note: behaviour that is tolerated elsewhere gets short thrift here. A good litmus test for any decision is to ask whether the result could end up on Twitter, Facebook or even Fair Go.