Financial fraud: is this the biggest hidden cost to your business?
Small and medium businesses have many advantages over their larger rivals. They also have many disadvantages, which centre around the more limited resources they have to get the job done. One of those...
View ArticleThe 2,000th StrategyAudit blog post
2,000 posts published. A milestone, achievement, a joy. I tried to do a count of the notes, links, ideas, half written posts, and completed but inadequate posts in my One-note files and gave up. It...
View ArticleA marketer’s explanation of Standard Deviation.
Marketers often hear the term ‘Standard Deviation’ during research debriefs, and conversations with operational personnel managing quality. Many do not know what the term means, and in what context...
View ArticleA marketer’s explanation of Standard Error.
The ‘Standard Error’ is another of those confusing statistical terms marketers need to understand. It is often confused with, and is as misunderstood as ‘Standard Deviation’. While they are related,...
View ArticleThe essential task that delivers process improvement
Nothing these days is done in one place, by one person, beginning to end. There is always a process in place, a chain of events that has to all work together in a co-ordinated manner to optimise the...
View ArticleWhere do your ‘edge’ opportunities hide?
Edges are often fuzzy, but are where the action happens, in nature and in business. At the edge, there is less homogeneity, more opportunity for the different and interesting to be seen, trialled, and...
View ArticleThe leadership quality no ‘Top 10’ list includes.
There is a huge hole in every ‘top 10 characteristics of a great leader’ list I have seen. They all list approximately the same things, by different names, and in different order. Honesty, integrity,...
View ArticleIs ‘Sales’ really just a numbers game?
Contrary to much advice, sales is not just a pure numbers game, the quality of the numbers make more difference than the numbers themselves. Throw the net widely to attract prospects, the more the...
View ArticleThe 6 most common mistakes with marketing metrics, and how to fix them.
Many if not most marketers, approach metrics that seek to increase their accountability with about the same enthusiasm they would approach a snake of unknown species in their backyard. Warily. The...
View ArticleHas the ‘manufacturing piper’ now been paid?
The old saying that ‘he who pays the piper calls the tune‘ is almost always true. The piper in this case has been the orthodoxy prevailing over the past 40 years in Australian manufacturing. I have...
View Article6 simple questions to better manage your time.
Time is the most important, and only non-renewable resource we have. We all have exactly the same amount every day, week, and month. It is how we use it that counts. It seems common that almost none of...
View ArticleTen questions to ask when planning marketing with hindsight
Hindsight planning is a process of putting yourself as realistically as possible into the ‘headspace’ where you have achieved the goals you set, and then ‘plan backwards’. It sounds like a semantic...
View ArticleThe hidden problem with Cost of Goods Sold
Standard accounting practice is to calculate a standard cost of goods sold, and apply it to the P&L to calculate gross margin. It is a system that has worked well, is well understood, and can be...
View ArticleHow to create a ‘Sticky’ customer.
I like the word ‘Sticky’ it resonates somehow, and says, ‘hard to get rid of’. As a kid, we had a ‘sticky’ dog in the family. I remember we once left the dog by accident at a relative’s place across...
View ArticleIs this 5-part framework for media choices of value to you?
There are a huge number of choices to be made when considering how to best reach and communicate with your ideal customer. None are disconnected from the others, but like anything, all have their...
View ArticleA marketer’s explanation of Standardisation and Continuous Improvement.
Anyone who has read ‘The Goal’ by Eli Goldratt, the original brain behind the theory of constraints, will remember the story in the book about Herbie, the slowest walker in a scout group in a...
View ArticleFive questions to transform your unique value proposition into revenue
Your unique value proposition is the reason people will consider engaging with you, and when there is a choice, you, rather than the other options. The clearer you are about the focus of your...
View ArticleWhy Twitter should not have expanded the character limit to 280.
As regular readers would know, I write a lot. There are a number of challenges faced every day as I scribble another blog post. Using several words when one might do. Writing long sentences. Using...
View ArticleHas Schrodinger’s cat invaded parliament?
The Prime Minsters performance on ‘Insiders’ yesterday reminded me of Erwin Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment. This was an absurd illustration of wave function collapse, a characteristic of quantum...
View ArticleIs a QR code the ultimate sales tool?
The first QR code I remember seeing was in the early 2000’s, I think. It was a video taken in New York Zoo that showed people clicking on what looked like a square of code in front of an enclosure,...
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