Stop giving it away

Well here we are at the end of another decade. It's a good time for us to look back and compare where we are now to where we were in 1999, but you can do that later when you're on your eighth double vodka and telling all your mates how much you love them.

This week I wanted to leave you with a thought about how we can all do more business next year. It's nothing to do with better customer service, calling more prospects, sending out more gifts or any of the other things I have suggested in this blog. No - it's more that we all work on a simple basic principal and, as the title of this blog suggests - stop giving it away.

Allow me to elaborate. Oh go on, what else are you going to do? It's bad enough you're being made to work on New Year's Eve, and if you had some proper work to do you wouldn't be reading this would you?

My wife is a singer. It's not her full time job, although she would dearly love it to be, but none the less she does get paid for what she does. She sings as part of a duo and a few weeks ago they were booked to sing in a restaurant. Now the restaurant asked them to entertain the customers between 8.30pm and 11.30pm and a price for this three hours was agreed.

Everything seemed straightforward, except that just a little before 11.30, the manager asked if they could carry on for a little longer and, not wishing to disappoint, they carried on and the evening finally wrapped up at around 12.30pm.

The manager, duly satisfied that the evening had gone well, came over to pay the entertainers and........and I suspect you know what's coming here......paid them the originally agreed amount.

Was the manager out of order? Absolutely - he agreed upon a set amount of money for three hours' work and then paid the same amount for four hours' worth. Cheeky, but not entirely his fault. You see, from a moral perspective, he should have offered to pay more when it came time to settle up, but the responsibility actually rests with the people charging, and NOT with the people paying.

The fact is, when the manager came over and asked them to continue, their response should have been a little more like this:

"Of course we're happy to carry on and we're delighted that everyone is enjoying the music. I'm sure you'll appreciate though that we agreed upon a figure based on our working for you for three hours, so if we are going to extend that, we would have to charge more."

Risky? Well it can be. What they risk is that the manager would have thought of them as inflexible and purely working for the money. If that's true, then that manager needs to think more about the way he's running his own business. If someone came into his restaurant, ordered a meal and then, as they're eating, asked for a whole bunch of extras, he would charge them for it. It's not cheeky - it's business.

The worst thing that could have happened for the singers is that they were not invited to sing in that restaurant again. How likely is that though? As a result of their singing, customers were staying longer and therefore, spending more. That manager's profits were up as a direct result of the entertainment that he had booked, so would it not be fair for him to reward them accordingly?

Regular readers of this blog will know that I do not believe in "giveaways". Everything that you give to a potential customer is an investment. You are literally buying customers, and as long as they are spending more on you than what you spent on them, your business model is going to work.

Did the singers have any other options to guarantee that they were not giving their time away? Of course they did. If they didn't feel comfortable charging for the additional hour, then they could have tried this:

"No problem at all Mr Manager (how weird would it be if the bloke's name actually was Mr Manager?) we're happy to carry on for you but before we do, how about you grab your diary and we'll set up our next engagement with you".

Sure it's bold, but is it any more bold than the manager asking them to work for free?

This is my plan for 2010 and beyond, and I invite you to join me. Together, we're going to stop giving it away. We won't give away time. We won't give away knowledge and more importantly, we won't give away money. All of our businesses are built on profit. I'll gladly work for you, come up with ideas, create campaigns, provide samples, create visuals and everything else that I am able to do to help you make the most of your marketing, but I am going to ask that you make it worth my while.

So let us all march boldly into a new decade with a clear mission in mind. The recovery on our economy doesn't need to be put into the hands of moronic politicians who make promises that they cannot keep. It's up to each and every one of us to truly value who we are, what we do, and what we can do to help each other.

Have a fantastic new year and please keep reading and recommending this blog.