For my first Guest Blog for Thebestof in 2012 I thought I’d lay out my new year’s resolutions, well, the business related ones anyway, so here goes…
1) My first resolution is to spend more time with my young team here at Coleman Bradshaw, ensuring they have the tools, knowledge and confidence to be able to develop into fully fledged accountants and business advisers. Our unique approach at Coleman Bradshaw is to throw our guys in at the deep end from an early age, to give them access to opportunities and responsibilities that they would not typically enjoy for another 5 to 10 years at many firms. I want to accelerate this development by getting right back in the thick of things with them, now that I’m no longer having to spread my time between the two offices
2) This one’s on a similar theme, but has the added advantage of freeing up my time to spend on business development as well as the obvious benefits of developing our people. In my room is a folder called “client tasks” which contains small tasks and assignments that required further thought or resources before they could be dealt with. I usually devote every Wednesday to dealing with each and every one of these, but not in 2012 I won’t! Not when I’ve got guys upstairs thirsty for knowledge and hungry for responsibility. So instead I’ll let them loose on my client tasks, and work with them on the more complicated ones, which will increase their development, get the client task done more quickly, and free up my Wednesday a little bit
The theme so far has been a noble one, of people development, with a crafty side plot of passing on my work to others to save me time! However now I’ll get on to what I’ll do with my freed up time, starting here with resolution number 3….
3) Spend time on Linked In discussing, engaging and generally having a chat, rather than just making and accepting invitations to build my contacts. I’ve started this already by contributing to discussions in the Matlock Business Club Group, which I co-manage, and will roll this out to all the other groups I am a member of over the next few weeks. I think I’ll set myself a weekly timeslot precisely so this happens
4) In 2011 I was lucky enough to gain eligibility to attend a series of workshops organised by the e-business club, all based around utilising technology to develop business, mainly from a digital marketing perspective. While I have made some good progress with this, I still have so much to do from the to-do lists that I came away with. We do not have a marketing department or a marketing person at Coleman Bradshaw, if we did that would be me, and my primary roles are to run the business and also to serve the clients who I deal with personally, as well as oversee the service that our client managers deliver to the clients allocated to them. Not a lot of time for marketing then. SO, I have now added timeslots to my calendar for marketing stuff that I need to attend to daily, weekly, and monthly, so it will happen! And I have also blocked out an entire week to disseminate, get to grips with, and generally make happen, all the cool stuff that I came away with from the excellent e-business club sessions, which I would wholeheartedly recommend for any business with ambition by the way.
5) In 2012 Coleman Bradshaw will finally unveil our long awaited cloud book-keeping solution, which has been a long time in the planning as I’ve changed my mind and direction so many times, due to my need to get everything in the right place at the right time before I can “press go”. My resolution therefore is to just get things done and out there, rather than walking round in circles waiting for the perfect situation.
6) My sixth resolution is to get back into networking. Early mornings and late evenings were a bit difficult during Hayley’s pregnancy and soon after George’s arrival, what with having the other two (Alfie & Mollie) to look after and the business to run, with two offices until recently. Our hectic family schedule is a bit easier to contend with now, so you’ll be seeing plenty of me & Hayley on the East Midlands business networking circuit during 2012. Remember you can check out our events section to see which events the team at Coleman Bradshaw will be attending.
7) 2012 will be the year that we deliver our range of added value business support services to a wider range of clients. Having developed our additional services over the past few years, we have now successfully assisted a number of clients in the areas of HR, financial planning, marketing strategy and business turnaround, as well as the usual accounts and tax and shit. My resolution here is to set monthly planning meetings with our service partners in these areas, giving each service full attention throughout, rather than only getting closely involved when we have a specific assignment on, which I have been guilty of in the past.
8) I will pick up the phone more instead of using email – All this talk of increasing my efficiency and maximising time is pointless if instead of having a 5 minute chat I’m spending my day writing essays!
9) I will ensure that every business client of ours understands the importance of having a business plan and a marketing strategy. Spending as little as half a day setting out your plans will repay itself many times over when you have a clear view of your goals and the steps required to achieve them. To assist in this I will, right now, include business planning options in our agendas for all meetings with clients, both new and existing.
10) Final resolution now. I will write a blog regularly, on time every time, as this is a fundamental part of our marketing strategy and forms the basis of all our social media communications, for which I’ve previously tended to rely on our knowledge base and events schedule content on our website to tweet etc about. I hope my ramblings, if not in any way as helpful or informative as knowledge and events, will at least provide some light amusement and an insight into the working life of a thirty-something man struggling to juggle his many hats of Dad, Lad, Business owner, self-styled amateur marketing guru and, almost forgot to mention, accountant…
[Courtesy: Scott @ Coleman Bradshaw]