You’ll see earlier posts about “Sell them in bunches like bananas” and “The Power of Google Adwords”. Both are very relevant to your marketing approach, but the best I can do for you is an old quote that came in its original form from Albert Einstein – “It is a fool who keeps on doing the same thing expecting different results” This has been paraphrased into “If you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep on getting what you’ve always got!” I guess Einstein was good on ideas and a bit weak on words. I’ve taken this same…
Author: zombie
I remember distinctly, when I was a kid, I read or heard the expression “He always had a smile on his face”, so I tried walking around smiling all the time. All that happened was my face muscles started aching and I looked pretty stupid! But now I know what the expression means. The guards at Waterford estate, where I live, always wave and smile at the residents as they drive in and out. When we bought an office building in Woodmead Office park, I noticed the difference immediately. It took me about two years of waving, smiling and greeting…
Once you have read, and learned from, your long line of self development books – “Your Eroneous Zones”, “Think and Grow Rich”, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, “The man who sold his Ferrari” , “Follow your heart”. Steiner, Yogi Ramacharaka, Andrew Mathews, Paulo Coelho, Carl Jung all excellent books and authors, you may be looking for the ultimate read. Well here it is. “Light on the Path” . In its printed form it is only 1/4 the size A4 and 39 pages of normal print. In pdf it is only 14 pages long. But it is so profound that Yogi Ramacharaka…
We all need to reward our staff for great work done. I can think of five ways to do this – 1) Genuine and sincere praise 2) Give them an increase 3) Give them an annual bonus 4) Pay them a commission 5) Give them a surprise Let’s take a look at these options. 1) Genuine and sincere praise. Who doesn’t like to be told they’re doing a great job? This is undoubtedly one of the greatest motivators, but it must be sincere. The “Worker of the month” approach falls outside this category, because it is (a) not sincere and…
I owe this one to Sedley Burger (here’s Mark, his son, carrying on the business). He taught us Relaxaction and it has remained with me for 40 years. It is a method of relaxation including a subconscious call to action that follows similar steps to hypnosis, except that you do it with yourself (self hypnosis, I guess). Amongst it is the expression “Love yourself, love others and love life”. Why in that order? Because you cannot love others if you do not love yourself. So what do we mean by loving yourself? Well, take a step back and have a…
I’m afraid I can’t recall where I first read that expression. I was trying to learn about selling back in my engineering days and the words of wisdom popped up in an otherwise forgettable book (only forgettable because I was not ready to become any kind of a salesman until much later in life). Now take a look at our on-line store. You’ll see how I did eventually learn from that book. At the time of writing this we sell a company for R1 980, but look at the Additional Services. Those are the other bananas. They usually turn a…
Or to give it its full name “Springett’s Rule of the Duality of Feelings” In the simplest of terms it means “If I feel this way about you, then you feel this way about me” The feeling that I’m referring to is not an artificially induced facade, it is not animal attraction, it is that one-on-one connection or lack of it that appears spontaneously when you first meet someone and developes either way during those first few minutes. So, if you think “OMG, he’s such an idiot!” Guess what? He’s put you in the same category. If you think “Wow,…
I could almost say none! But that is a gross over simplification. However, there are some serious misperceptions out there, so let’s take a look at them – Companies have to be audited, CCs don’t. Wrong. A company (and a CC) has to be audited if its Public Interest Score (PIS) is 350 or more. That translates to a turnover of say, R300m and a staff compliment of say, 50 people. Companies have to have their Financial Statements reviewed, CCs don’t. Right, if their PIS is less than 350 (I’m simplifying a bit). But CCs need to have their Annual…
If your turnover is no more than R50m and If your company/CC is 51% black owned or more and does not fall under a sector charter, then you can immediately get a Level 2 certificate. If it is 100% black owned and does not fall under a sector charter, then you can immediately get a Level 1 certificate. Give us a call and we’ll talk you through it (and issue the certificate). If your company is less than 51% black owned and annual turnover is less than R10m, then you can immediately get a Level 4 certificate. Should you wish…
So you are married in Community of Property. Damn! That means that if one of you gets sequestrated (bankrupt) you both go down together. Very romantic, but totally unnecessary. Antenuptial Contracts – An expensive safety net The good news is that you can convert to an Antenuptial Contract (I suppose it is called a Post-Nuptial contract, but the effect is the same). Convert your wealth to separate estates We can’t help you, but my attorney client and friend, Dino Tserkezis of KG Tserkezis Inc (dino@kgt.co.za) advises me that if you are married in Community of Property, you can apply to…
Lawyers are now required by law to write contracts and documents in plain language understandable by the persons who are expected to be reading them. So you should no longer be seeing terms like “pro non scripto” (as if never written), “supra” (above), “mutatis muntandis” (substantially the same) and especially “domicilium citandi et executandi” (place for serving legal notices). I remember on University rag day when I nearly had my trousers pulled off (it was called “de-bagging”). I fought like the very devil and eventually the opposing mob backed off!. Now I know how the attorneys must be feeling. They…
So you’re getting married. Congratulations! You’ve (correctly) been advised to enter into an anti-nuptial contract, probably under the accrual system. Remember anti-nuptial means before the nuptials not after, so you must get this done before the wedding. In the contract, you are each required to disclosed the amount of wealth that you are starting off with. What if you don’t want all and sundry to see that figure? Then I suggest that the one with the lower figure discloses their assets as zero and the one with the higher figure discloses their assets as the difference between the two. So…
For my sins, I’m the one who has to allocate debtor payments as we are sticklers for payment and it’s worth running this at partner level. But so often a debtor makes a lump payment against an account with lots of open items and without giving us a remittance advice. So which invoices did they pay? I love a challenge and I tried all sorts of techniques to determine the combination of invoices that fits the total paid, but I fell flat. Then I Googled “How can I find a subset of numbers that add up to a particular total”…
I often I get asked whether to “buy” on a Lease or buy on Instalment Sale and then whether the firm should own the vehicle or the Director. The answer to the first does depend on the answer to the second, so let’s tackle the second one first. (How confusing is that?!) If the object is to minimise the combined tax bill of the company and the director, then it is worth while doing the numbers. But the chances are that, if the vehicle is in the middle to upper bracket and the director does a fair amount of business…
Ever wonder why the moon always faces us? Why doesn’t it spin like just about every other thing up there? My physics teacher at school told us that the moon did spin but at exactly the same rate as it went around the earth and that was why it always faced us. I didn’t believe him. I got it figured eventually. Let’s assume that the moon is perfectly spherical and of uniform matter throughout. Its centre of gravity would be dead centre and it would still be spinning (even if none of that was perfect) because there would be nothing…
I once had an employee who had, next to her desk, an indoor plant that stood about 60cm high. One day, I went to her and said “Did you know your plant is dead?”. She first looked at me then at the plant and guess what? She was horrified. What could she do? Her beloved plant was indeed dead! It had actually been dead for well over 6 months. Every day for 6 months or more she had sat at her desk within touching distance of her dead plant and hadn’t seen it. Why? Because it had “always” been like…
I owe this story to a guy named Sedley Berger. He used to run a progamme called Advanced Self Management back in the mid-seventies and he started me out on a path that I have followed ever since. I have never stopped working on self improvement and I’m delighted to see that his son Mark is carrying on the good work. He told the story of a guy who wanted to borrow his neighbour’s wheelbarrow. He figured it was not the sort of thing that gets used every day so there shouldn’t be a problem. Then he remembered the last…
I never cease to be amazed at the power of the mind. One of the absolutes is that if you can get your subconcious on your side you’re on to a winner. How do you do that? Well, there are plenty of books on the subject. They vary from Affirmation (“I must, I must, develop my bust” or “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better and better”) to Prayer, to Meditation and so on. My personal method (thanks to Sedley Burger – here’s his son, carrying on in his footsteps) relies on a form of self…
I explained in an earlier blog that we need to plan to live forever, because we don’t know when we are going to die. So what can go wrong? Quite simply, no investment is 100% secure, there is always an element of risk. It is a well known fact that the higher the return, the higher the risk, but even investing in a bank isn’t guaranteed to be safe (check what happened in the USA recently). You won’t remember the great depression which was triggered by the Wall Street crash of 1929 (I wasn’t around either). But the whole world…
Let’s stand back a bit and take a look at your life from a financial big picture point of view. I’ve already mentioned active and passive income. Active income is the stuff you have to work for (you know – eat, to live, to work, to sleep, to eat ……..). What should your active income be used for? Three things – to pay your way (food, kids’ schooling, the rent, …..) to enjoy yourself (movies, holidays, sport, ……..) to build your passive income! Why do we need passive income? (that’s the stuff we don’t have to work for, it just…