Did you read my post on “Sunk Costs and Elephant Spray”? I postulated the possibility that we might cancel our trip to New York. Guess what? We cancelled our trip to New York! Not because of the weather over there as it turned out. Rather that I had an emergency operation on 10 February and only came out of hospital on the 16th. We were due to fly on the19th. Amazingly, the hotel – The Wellington are giving us a full refund despite my having elected for the non-refundable option. And KLM are giving us a full credit valid for…
Author: zombie
This story comes in various versions. I’ll tell you the version relating to Wakkerstroom, a small, picturesque village 70km outside Volksrust. A travelling salesman, who was passing through arrived at the hotel one day and asked for a room for that night. The charge was R450 and the hotelier asked for full payment up front, which the salesman accepted. Having secured his room for the night, the salesman took the rest of the day off to relax and enjoy the scenery and birdlife for which Wakkerstroom is renowned. The hotelier took the R450 to the baker. “Here’s the R450 that…
I promised you a post on JIT, a truly fascinating product of the Japanese mind! The over-riding objectives are zero inventory, zero queues ( a queue is merely inventory in the form of work in progress) and zero defect (right first time). They took these objectives and put them into a production environment with some very interesting results. I can only whet your appetite. If I succeed, read a book on JIT, it is truly fascinating and thought provoking. And by the way, most of the principles can be applied to all forms of endeavour, not just to factories (including…
I’ve just replaced all of our downlighter globes with LEDs. There are about 50 of them, so at 4W each, that’s power consumption equivalent to two 100W globes. But there are a couple of catches that you should be aware of. Let’s look at the other plusses first. 1) They don’t get hot so the downlighter fittings will last much longer. 2) The transformers don’t get hot because the power is so low, so they’ll last much longer. 3) The fire risk drops dramatically for the same reason. Now the downsides. 1) You need to make a call – Cool…
I guess you know that if you don’t submit your CIPC Annual Return for your company or CC for two years running, they’ll automatically de-register it. But did you know that from 1 November 2012, the re-instatement requirements became almost impossible to satisfy? Here they are – 1) Certified copy ID of director/member 2) Certified copy ID of person making the application 3) Deed search (reflecting ownership of immovable property or not) 4) Letters from National Treasury and the Department of Public Works, indicating that such departments have no objection to the re-instatement, if it has immovable property. (My emphasis)…
How often we hear on the radio “Crime in the last year cost the country X billion rands” or “Nkandla cost the country R210 million rands” or “Something else cost the country Rxxxxx” Really? What do we mean when we say “Cost the country”? Money circulates through the economy of South Africa. I buy an ice cream, the ice cream business buys whatever goes into an ice cream, pays for electricity, factory premises, salaries etc. One of the ice cream maker’s employees spends part of her salary on a new dress, the dressmaker makes a profit, a criminal steals the…
I was planning to write a post on “What is money, after all?”, the point being that we don’t actually deal with cash any more, just numbers and yet many of us still let these numbers rule our lives. Then it occured to me that despite what I was about to write, I do carry a few thousand rands in cash most of the time. I need it for parking (maybe R20 would be enough for that) and topping up the petty cash at the office because we don’t want our driver to have to go and draw cash from…
A few years back, in those dark days of power cuts, we bought a generator for the office. Everybody was buying them at that time so we had to wait for it to be imported. By the time it arrived and was installed the power cuts had pretty much come to an end. We’ve had about two short ones since then, so the genny simply switches itself on every Tuesday and runs for 15 minutes to recharge its battery and that’s all it does. Does this bother us? All that money just for that? Not at all, it’s like the…
So you’re thinking of starting your own business. Why may I ask? Freedom? Ha! Wealth? Ha! Ha! Passion? Now you’re talking! But if it is a passion for sewing or carving or designing or whatever it is that you do well, then sorry for you. You have to be passionate about being a business person, because it doesn’t matter what the underlying product is, you won’t succeed unless you run the business properly and that means you won’t be doing much of what the business does – you won’t have time. The beginning is all too easy. You don’t have…
Well, not stolen exactly. Borrowed? Some of them are my own, so you can have them in exchange. All of them have become so much a part of my everyday life (well, except one, number 10) that I’ve almost forgotten what a jump forward it was when I discovered them. 1) You can share an Excel workbook, but the problem is, every so often it updates itself with the changes made by the users and then you all have to wait while it is doing so. Also there are conflicts that build up between updates and they have to be…
Well? Why do we go to work? After all, we’ve got Teamviewer, so we can connect remotely to the entire office intranet and use all the specialised applications that are on our computers at the office. We’ve got Skype, so we can meet with people (staff, clients, suppliers, prospecttive employees) all face to face. We’ve got emails, instant messaging, SMS, MMS, Dropbox, Google Drive, and all sorts of other ways to share and communicate (I’ve just mentioned the ones that I use). I worked every day through the Christmas holidays using my computer at home simply as a vehicle to…
We wanted to do something special with this odd space by our front door at home We asked Chris Bowden of Green Solutions Landscaping http://www.gsolutions.co.za/ if he could come up with any ideas for a distinctive water feature. This is what he built for us Now, not only did he read our needs perfectly, the entire job was performed with care, skill and passion. Well done Chris. . Should you wish to make an appointment, please feel free to visit Derek’s diary and book a time that suits you.
Quite a while back, we were three partners. We had 23 staff members. Then one partner left and we let him take a chunk of the business with him. Then the other left and we agreed that he would take a chunk of the business as well. Our turnover dropped by 45% over those two years. In the year ended December 2013, our turnover exceeded the figure before the drop. We had 7 full time staff members and 2 half time! Not long ago, I asked the partner of another accounting practice what was his turnover and staff compliment. Turnover…
I checked “Important dates” on the SARS website – no mention of the last date for provisional taxpayers to file their 2015 returns via efiling! I guess SARS doesn’t consider that important? Anyway, the last date is 31 January 2016. Later than that and you will become liable for administrative penalties. Some of them are quite severe for repeat offenders (anything from R250 to R16 000 per month). But here are some more things you really must know about SARS Voluntary Disclosure. There’s a permanent option to voluntarily disclose previously undisclosed income or other naughties. SARS http://www.sars.gov.za/Legal/VDP/Pages/default.aspx makes it look…
This is for those of you who are in some way learning to speak French. There are two tricks. One will enable you to know the gender of a noun without having to remember it (is it le thingy or la thingy?) and the other will get you speaking fluent bad French in no time flat. French was a compulsory subject at my school and they did their best to teach us all. I hated it and yes, I failed it at ‘O’ level. Many years later, when I was in my mid 30’s, I had to spend two weeks…
Over the Christmas break I got extremely annoyed with someone for whom I felt I had just bust a gut. I went around with a face like thunder for long enough for my wife to become very concerned. Now, I work hard at improving myself and part of the challenge is to manage my own emotions. This means that I was going seriously off the rails because I was letting someone else control them for me. Not good. In fact, very not good. Now there are a number of approaches to this kind of problem 1) Vent your feelings on…
We’ve had bit of cash that needed to find a home, so over the Christmas break I had a look at our buying a small residential unit in a secure development. I live in Fourways, so targetted the Douglasdale area for my research. My previous investment properties have largely been bought in crummy areas of Johannesburg at sherrif’s auctions but that is a very messy, high risk, high return game and frankly, I’m getting a bit tired of all the hassles that go with those properties. I based my research on what I guess most of you would be thinking…
I was busy writing a Trust Deed and I got to the bit where I say “if there is less than five trustees then ….” and then I stopped. Should I say “if there are less than five trustees then….” My lovely wife agreed with my first choice – one would say “there are five” but “there is less than five”. I phoned my “linguist” daughter Claire Williams in Durban (she writes copy for Thompsons Travel). She was confident that I should say “there are less than five trustees then ….” so I asked her what should I say if…
Damn! What went wrong? Yes, what did go wrong? Why did the Excel formula produce an ERROR? Why didn’t the Mail Merge pick up the right data? Why didn’t that new staff member do what I asked them to do? You learn most when things go wrong. I’ve recognised this for as long as I can remember, but it took Bruce van Helderen, CEO of Loudfire to put it to me in an entirely different way – If a customer complains, start learning – not his exact words, but definitely his exact meaning. So I took Bruce’s words on board…
I recently spent about R80 000 on tiles at Italtile. Their product and service was excellent. One of the products was made specially for us by a subcontractor of theirs. He had to cut up tiles of three different colours and stick the bits onto a backing fabric so that our tiler could lay them in a decorative line around our pool. I specified the colour arrangement as white, dark, grey. The sales consultant wrote it down wrongly but I spotted that and got him to write it again. Then I made sure that he crossed out his original sequence.…