new blog 1

  Appearances are everything, even in business . If you are perceived to be an expert in your field, people will respect your opinion, you can charge more and you will be in more demand. Of course, you need to deliver excellently because that is the proof of all that you say about yourself. But even when you deliver an excellent service, appearances are important. Delivering excellently alone won’t help you get very far if you are failing in the appearance department. Imagine you have a huge garden badly in need of timing you are right home one day to find that it’s all trimmed and beautifully landscaped and you immediately demand to know who the skilled garderner behind this work is, so that you can hire him to tend to the upkeep of your gardens from now on. Upon your request, the gardener turns up and he turns out to be hideous, unkempt, smelly, and worse. What do you do? It’s very hard to overcome our natural instincts and reason with logic when we are repulsed in some way about...

 Arnold Schwarzenegger is alleged to have said that he doesn’t do sequels when it comes to films, but that he made an exception for Terminator. Well, this post is a sequel to How to completely take over a niche and how my local taxi firm is driving me mad. What’s more, it’s a fantastic sequel because it proves the point I made in the original post perfectly. To recap, my local taxi firm is a joke. They run a 24-hour ’service’ in a one horse town and can’t manage to get at taxi to my door at 5:30 AM. The problem is not overbooking, nor is it traffic on the road. The problem my local taxi firm has is one of management: they have a poor system in place, and are too lazy to fix it. Maybe part of their laziness is due to complacency, because no other local taxi firm offers a 24-hour service, which makes them the only fish in a small pond. They have a monopoly, and they are failing to deliver an excellent service. In fact, they deliver an appalling service, one that I’ve had the mis...