Big D

Edition 166  Monday 26^th November 2012

Hi, it had to happen and it did….someone finally fell in love with our beloved Retro Suzuki on Trademe and had to have it. I had done my best to delay the inevitable by pitching the price far too high but even that in the end wasn’t enough.Big Don from Wellywood is the proud new owner, he was so keen he flew up from the Capital and rode her back. Big D is a big unit alright, lets just say that the tyre pressure we had set for Christine and I riding together was perfectly set for Big D riding on his own. He arrived home safe and well two days after taking ownership after a perfect road trip on his new toy. It was sad to see her go but great to know Don will use her a lot more than us and love the ride!

We had some great trips and fun times and enjoyed remembering those fondly over a couple of quiet ones last week.Thankfully we did 25000 accident/incident free km,the only time she went down was when I was in too much of a hurry to get to a public toilet and didn’t put the stand down properly J.

Retro has been replaced in our family by Fletcher who will be equally as challenging, enjoyable and fun to go places and have adventures together with. There is nothing more important than family and friends and making sure that we all make the most of every minute we can to be together. Sometimes that is not as easy as it sounds and there may be issues or obstacles to overcome in order to achieve it, however , it will always be worth it. We attended a funeral of the Father of one of our friends this weekend, he was 57 !!!, life is too short to not seize every opportunity to celebrate family and friends…..I hope you took some time out this weekend to do just that.

Have a great week, Cheers Jonesey!

Harry and the Hendersons love the cruisy music in the car on the way to their dog walk!!

“Selling the ‘sizzle’ is about saying yes to everything.” Sales

One of our boys ,Matthew installs heat pumps for a living. We were lucky enough to get a ‘family’ deal on a system recently. I was apprenticed to assist the install and whilst a monkey would have been more assistance I was amazed at the workload involved in installing a basic heat pump.

I am sharing this with you because like the quote above says most sales people make the Operations/Installing/delivery departments or teams lives hell in most companies I know by promising the earth and saying yes to everything without applying a lot of thought,fact or logic.

Matthew confirmed this when we were working together by saying their installation team could be at least 25% more productive and profitable if the sales team understood and consulted more before selling their companies products and services.

I thought about this and it occurred to me that the same applied at Green Gorilla where the operations team used to have hair once before they pulled it all out having to deal with some of the situations our sales team commit us to on a daily basis.

Imagine being at least 25% more productive and profitable. Imagine Operations and sales working together instead of on different wave lengths or pages of the book!

We talked a few episodes ago about walking a mile in customers moccasins before you could really understand what they wanted or needed. The same applies inside a company, we need to understand completely what our Operation is capable of delivering before we commit them tpo delivering it!! Sounds basic and easy but there are not many companies I know (ours included) where there isn’t a lot of room for improvement in communicating this information…over to you !!!

 “Always under promise so we can over deliver.”  Operations