KER-ching! Truth About Banks
Just as Aussie Home Loans and Wizard changed the way we borrowed money to buy houses (and kept the banks slightly more honest than they used to be) now the world of foreign exchange is a target. Jon works with Atlas Currency Exchange in Byron Bay. They can help you save money on international money transfers - check out their bold claim and enjoy the passion in Kylie's writing. She studied journalism at uni and you can tell. Might ask her to write more stuff for us.
So banks are going it alone, increasing interest rates regardless of the RBA ? They’re, *cough, ‘hurting financially’. Those $24b annual profits musn’t be in term deposit. It highlights their confidence in an economic climate where no-one else is.
How far can they ‘push’? Our love-hate relationship with banks means not many of us are impressed by their gall yet the majority, clearly, still walk through their doors for our financial product. When will we seek the alternatives ? Are there alternatives ?
As far as foreign currency product and services go there are. Operators with the same licences, but not the advertising budget or the captive account holders.
If you’re purchasing your fx cash, travel card product or performing your international money transfers (into Australia or out of) through your bank you are, without a doubt .. that’s right, without a doubt .. not getting the best deal.
Cash : banks rarely have cash in stock, you will have to order it and wait. Then the rate, whilst better than the airports (not hard when airports have 10c spreads on majors), won’t be negotiated regardless of whether you’re buying US$100 or US$10000. If you bought 20 cars you’d get fleet rate right?
Global Travel Cards : Careful. You may think you’re doing the smart thing buying a travel card, but wait .. Purchase fee, load fee, reload fee, unload fee, monthly account keeping ‘activity’ fee, expires after ‘x’ months and, wait for it, any funds still on the card at expiry are RETAINED by the provider. That’s like withdrawing money from your account, going home and putting it under your mattress and then 18 months later your bank manager knocks on your door and says ‘Have you still got that money under your mattress? We’re going to have to get that back because you didn’t spend it in the time allocated.’
Multi-currency cards are deceiving. Sounds like a great idea, one card/multiple currencies. Is the card pulling funds out of another currency if your first currency runs out? Are you aware of when this occurs? Do you have to pay for a sms to let you know when it is ? So you’re in the UK and you think those Pounds coming out of the ATM are coming from your Pound account but they’re really coming from the Euro fund portion. What’s the cross-currency conversion being applied (can be up to 8.45%)? If lost or stolen will they be replaced or are you going to get slugged $60 to replace a card that’s going to expire ? Phew, might as well have copped the 4 lots of fees on your Aussie funds out of your keycard.
IMTs/TTs : Oh my .. here we go. Examples speak best. To purchase and transfer US$50,000 to the US (or increasingly China) today, at time of writing you would pay AU$47,959.04 at the best of the major banks, AU$48,199.19 at the worst and AU$46,974.82 across the road at a local FX provider. Simple as that, AU$984 to $1224 more in your hand/wallet/mortgage/shoe fund for EXACTLY the same product.
If your money doesn’t matter enough to check it out then really, stop complaining about ‘The Banks’.
Guest Writer: Kylie Ryan-Miloy
Atlas Currency Exchange
Jon Dale (Kylie's Business Coach)
Small Fish Business Coaching Byron Bay
www.smallfish.com.au
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Australia's $15m e-commerce king says "get a Business Coach"
Our friends at Reid-McGill sent us this article. It's good advice, we reckon (well, we would wouldn't we?)
Eddie Machaalani, of BigCommerce gives one great piece of advice of how his start-up rose to success. He lists many more, but of course we found this one the most important.
Quoted from Smh.com.au:
"3. Call a coach
Behind every successful athlete lies a good coach. A business owner can benefit equally from a coach, who need not be incredibly successful running a business or have the skills you do.
Instead, the coach should have good systems and processes to teach and help keep your emotional rollercoaster under control.
A good business coach is worth their weight in gold.
"
You can read the rest of the article here.
So, maybe it is time you really do think about picking up the phone?
Jon Dale
Small Fish Business Coaching Byron Bay
www.smallfish.com.au
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Using Social Media In Your Business (A Business Coach Tries To Make Sense Of It)
It’s OK, I know I’m a business coach and not a social media expert but we’ve been learning a little lately and I thought you might find it interesting. I’ll defer to the experts and I acknowledge the input of a few experts in this field. Mark Barrett from CI Marketing (our Internet marketing adviser and website custodian), Natalie Alaimo, coaching client of Melanie Miller and Social Media specialist, Seth Godin (who I’ve never met but who writes and speaks with considerable authority), that guy who wrote “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” and Michael Stovin-Bradford of Tactical Resources.
No-one knows all the answers, everything is changing so quickly that there are no answers in the way we used to think of them – that there’s a right way to do things that will give you guaranteed results. There’s not and it’s likely that that old certainty is gone forever, at least where the Internet is concerned.
This article tries to share what we’re doing when it comes to social media and how it meshes with our online strategies. I’ve been thinking about why people use social media (it’s not because they want to hear how good you are or why they should buy your stuff); the social (media) contract; relationships and the mesh (thanks
Lisa Gansky).
The Social (Media) Contract
Why do we use social media and the Internet (I’ve lumped them together here). As I said, it’s not so that we can be advertised to, we use it when we want to find things out or when we want to find out about things (including where we can buy them and how much they cost; we use it to be entertained, interested, informed – in a sort of lazy, passive way.
I’m not sure where this assertion came from but it rings true – we use the web (Google mostly) to look for things. We expect to find them quickly and, if we don’t, we’re back to the search results looking for a more useful site before you can say “click here to find out more”.
We use social media like
Facebook and Google+ (watch for this one – it promises to be huge) to be mindlessly entertained, to see what our friends ate for lunch and to see what they’ve shared – because we’ll probably be interested in some of the stuff they’re interested in.
I know from my own habits that overt sales messages or someone talking about themselves too much gets boring. I’ll read posts or articles or click through tweets or subscribe for emails if I think they’ll be interesting.
And our tolerance is low, too. I only read about 10% of the regular emails that come my way (and I know that only about 20% of the people who receive our Fish Tales open it to read it). We scan the heading and make a very quick decision about whether we read on or not – there’s so much stuff out there, we’re not interested in checking to make sure we don’t miss something interesting. If it’s really god, someone will share it again, anyway.
So, the social media contract – be interesting, useful, entertaining. Reveal something of yourself, share what you’ve learnt recently, pass on interesting and useful titbits (but not too many, that’s boring, too). It’s ephemeral – what you share or write is soon lost.
If people like what you say or share, when they go looking to buy what you’re selling, they will (probably) go and look for you – via whatever social media or web channel they’ve been.
Jon Dale
Small Fish Business Coaching Byron Bay
www.smallfish.com.au
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Word Play Fun
The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.
Here are the winners:
1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.
2. Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.
3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
5. Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high
8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)
11. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
13. Glibido: All talk and no action.
14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
17. Caterpallor ( n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.
The Washington Post has also published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.
And the winners are:
1. Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.
3. Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4. Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.
5. Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.
6. Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.
7. Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.
9. Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.
10. Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.
11. Testicle, n. A humorous question on an exam.
12. Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13. Pokemon, n. A Rastafarian proctologist.
14. Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15. Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16. Circumvent, n. An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men
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The Forever Recession
I posted this to Facebook so if you've read it already I'm sorry but I liked it so much I wanted everyone to read it. Seth Godin speaks wisely - the revolution is here and we need to think about how we respond to it and how we participate in it.
Marketing is important, originality is important. If you do something irreplaceable, good for you. If you do something that can be outsourced to somewhere cheaper, watch out. And start thinking about how to be irreplaceable.
The forever recession (and the coming revolution)
"There are actually two recessions:
The first is the cyclical one, the one that inevitably comes and then inevitably goes. There's plenty of evidence that intervention can shorten it, and also indications that overdoing a response to it is a waste or even harmful.
The other recession, though, the one with the loss of "good factory jobs" and systemic unemployment--I fear that this recession is here forever.
Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created.
There's a race to the bottom, one where communities fight to suspend labor and environmental rules in order to become the world's cheapest supplier. The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win...
Factories were at the center of the industrial age. Buildings where workers came together to efficiently craft cars, pottery, insurance policies and organ transplants--these are job-centric activities, places where local inefficiences are trumped by the gains from mass production and interchangeable parts. If local labor costs the industrialist more, he has to pay it, because what choice does he have?
No longer. If it can be systemized, it will be. If the pressured middleman can find a cheaper source, she will. If the unaffiliated consumer can save a nickel by clicking over here or over there, then that's what's going to happen.
It was the inefficiency caused by geography that permitted local workers to earn a better wage, and it was the inefficiency of imperfect communication that allowed companies to charge higher prices.
The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.
This represents a significant discontinuity, a life-changing disappointment for hard-working people who are hoping for stability but are unlikely to get it. It's a recession, the recession of a hundred years of the growth of the industrial complex.
I'm not a pessimist, though, because the new revolution, the revolution of connection, creates all sorts of new productivity and new opportunities. Not for repetitive factory work, though, not for the sort of thing ADP measures. Most of the wealth created by this revolution doesn't look like a job, not a full time one anyway.
When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.
Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a 'real' job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level playing field in which owning a factory isn't a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.
Gears are going to be shifted regardless. In one direction is lowered expectations and plenty of burger flipping. In the other is a race to the top, in which individuals who are awaiting instructions begin to give them instead.
The future feels a lot more like marketing--it's impromptu, it's based on innovation and inspiration, and it involves connections between and among people--and a lot less like factory work, in which you do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.
This means we may need to change our expecations, change our training and change how we engage with the future. Still, it's better than fighting for a status quo that is no longer. The good news is clear: every forever recession is followed by a lifetime of growth from the next thing...
Job creation is a false idol. The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects. It will change the fabric of our society along the way. No one is demanding that we like the change, but the sooner we see it and set out to become an irreplaceable linchpin, the faster the pain will fade, as we get down to the work that needs to be (and now can be) done.
This revolution is at least as big as the last one, and the last one changed everything."
Jon Dale
Small Fish Business Coaching Byron Bay
www.smallfish.com.au
Call to Bangladesh 29-Oct-2011 06:27 PM
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Anonymous 20-Jan-2012 03:55 AM
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Decision Fatigue
My friend Patrick Halliday showed me this article on decision fatigue. I hope I'm not being too much of a geek showing it to you but it's really interesting if you can get through it.
For the attention-poor, here's a summary:
Making decisions is tiring. We get sick of it and less good at it the more of it we do. By the end of a long day of decision-making, we are making poor decisions - reckless and short term focused or deciding not to do anything. Our brains get depleted of the ability to make decisions. There's hope, though - food helps - if we take a break and we eat, we pick up (and it explains why we get cravings, too).
People with the best self control which is related to decision-making) structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don't schedule endless back-to-back meetings (oops), they avoid temptations like all you can eat buffets and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making decisions all the time.
Here's the learn for business owners:
Plan your days and your weeks ahead, using your diary or a tool like Groundhog Week (Conserve your decision-making energy).
Eat properly, feed your brain.
Make important decisions early in the day, before you are tired.
Jon Dale
Small Fish Business Coaching Northern Rivers
www.smallfish.com.au
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Spruiking BNI (Which Has Nothing To Do With Small Fish)
It feels a bit strange to write a story about another business, one which has many flaws and frustrations (bureaucracy, anyone?) and to be telling you all how helpful it's been for our business.
It has, though and this despite its flaws.
BNI is a global franchise, thousands of chapters and millions of dollars of referrals passed. I sound like a brochure, already, don't I. Anyway, if you get business because people decide to trust you (who doesn't?) then networking with other businesses might be a good idea. BNI is not the only way to network by any means but it does work and it's working for Small Fish. So consider this a personal testimonial from me, for business networking generally and for BNI in particular.
I've been in the Byron Bay BNI group since it started, about 18 months ago. I've had four customers from it (I would generally work with a small number of high-value customers) and I am in discussions with another two. This is a significant contributor to my personal revenues. In our group, we have 16 business coaches and 8 BNI members, all of whom have been in their chapters for a shorter time than I. BNI has contributed more than 20% of our total customers in less than 2 years.
This makes it a significant contributor to our group revenues, too. Word of mouth, or referrals business is something you get if you do a good job - people tell their friends about you and, slowly, your business grows. BNI and being active about networking and asking for referrals accelerates the process of people getting to know you and how you operate, so they can decide whether they want to refer people to you. You meet every week with the primary purpose of doing precisely this - thinking about finding referrals for the members of your group who you've decided are good enough to work with your friends.
I don't want to sound like a salesman for BNI, because I'm not one, but I do honestly think that if you're in business and you want to grow it, joining a referrals group like BNI is worth considering.
www.bni.com.au
Other, similar groups exist and some of my colleagues are as enthusiastic about theirs as I am about BNI. They include
Schmooze in Canberra, Business Chicks and Swap.
Why don't you let us know about your business group (only if you are enthusiastic about, of course)
Jon Dale
Small Fish Business Coaching Byron Bay
www.smallfish.com.au
Phillip Jones 18-Aug-2011 10:47 AM
Hello Jon Whilst I can appreciate where you're coming from and your mention of my company Schmooze, I wouldn't call them similar in anyway. Our philosophies, culture and approach to using the tools of networking to create business opportunities are quite
different (to the extent that we don't accept BNI members at our events or as members). Each business person has to make an assessment about which model will work for them, and assess the value accordingly, and we're not for everyone either, and as with all
things, the old warning of caveat emptor applies.
Kim Wight 18-Aug-2011 11:23 AM
Your blog was timely. I have been a member of a BNI group since April and while at first I enjoyed the weekly meeting I am now finding the bureaucracy and reporting really annoying. Don’t get me wrong I am always above the 5 line so it is not as though
I have a problem with my own performance. I don’t like how it is such a structured meeting that no group discussion can ever happen. I also have a problem with the expectation of spending my time cold calling and inviting unknown business to the meetings.
BNI is very cult like in it’s approach. I am a member of other groups who get together to learn about each other’s businesses and while referrals do happen it is not the basis of whether you are allowed to stay in the group. I have got business from the group
but I am very much undecided whether BNI is for me. Maybe if someone reads this within my group the decision for me to stay will be taken out of my hands.
Debra Fraser 19-Aug-2011 08:52 AM
Hi Jon What networking groups you join I think depends on where you are in you business life cycle. When I was first starting out I really benefited from being part of a networking group that had an emphasis on learning 1st & referrals as a natural progression
from there. This was BRG (Business Referral Group) I'd also like to recommend Converge Business networks. They operate on a weekly basis again with a strong emphasis on education & discussing problems you are having in your business
Jon Dale 19-Aug-2011 02:56 PM
Hi guys, thanks for the comments. Phillip, I appreciate that Schmooze and BNI are different and people should choose and Richard loves being in Schmooze. Kim, you sound frustrated and that's a shame. BNI is a bit cult-like (you mean the pledge, I guess,
I don't like it either) but they use the structure for a reason - because it gets referrals passed. Like many things in life, it's a trade-off - you live with the bad to get the good. It reminds me of marriage, no I think about it. Part of the trade off with
BNI is the way you can lock your competitors out - that demands that you are participating and contributing properly. It's not fair on the other members to have a member who isn't bringing referrals when someone else might or who doesn't show up or participate
properly. Maybe you should raise your concerns with someone in your group or try a different group and see if you like it better. I liked my second one better than my first - maybe I fit in better here.
Frederick Marcoux, BNI Australia 21-Aug-2011 07:58 PM
Hi Jon - Great to hear about the success of your group through BNI. Let me know how we can help and thanks for your spruiking. PS Kim if you feel pressure to cold call for visitors, that's just not right. BNI recommends strongly against cold calling.
Profit $60,000 to $300,000 In 3 Years!
I'd like to share another article with you that I wrote for our local newspaper, The Echo, a few weeks ago.
"I thought I'd tell a true story about how business coaching can help a real business owner change his business. The subject of the story is Jeff Banks, of Banks Consultancy, in Sydney. I've been coaching him for three and a half years now.
We met in 2007, thinking we'd talk about referring business to each other - Jeff is an accountant and has small business customers; my coaching customers are small business owners. As we sat and ordered coffee, Jeff said "I don't want to talk about that, my wife says I need a business coach." It went from there.
Jeff was frustrated in his business. He had a busy accountancy practice with $350,000 of turnover and more than 300 clients. But, profit was only $60,000 (Jeff's personal income), the business had $300,000 in aged debt and almost $80,000 of the revenue was trade - that is money you can't spend on important stuff like mortgages and petrol. Jeff was feeling the pressure, working very hard and wanted out.
The vision Jeff and Robyn (his wife) came up with for the business was "Sell for $750,000 in Dec '09 - and escape up the coast.
We worked hard on the discipline of chasing debtors (and still do); we increased Jeff's prices (to squeals and protest from Jeff but none from his customers); we started Jeff actively marketing (not something he felt comforahle with, I can tell you); we worked on Jeff - on stopping him from being such a pushover for some people, on his confidence in his (very strong) abilities in accounting (and gutter technology, as he he puts it), on his time management and prioritisation.
Within a year, profit was up to $100,000, Jeff was less stressed. We recieved and they rejected an offer to buy the practice (because they were enjoying it again). As of June 2011, revenue was $860,000, profit $300,000, Jeff is confident, engaged and a business leader in his local community.
Sometimes he likes to credit me with this but I think we know that 90% of it was down to him. The coach is just the catalyst.
Have fun in your business. And call Jon for a free coaching session on 02 6680 8036."
Jon Dale
Small Fish Business Coaching Byron Bay
www.smallfish.com.au
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Why Are You In Business Anyway?
Jon wrote a story in the Byron Shire Echo last month entitled “Why are you in Business Anyway?”
Read the Article Below:
Who’s your business coach? Obviously, as a business coach and a coach and recruiter of business coaches, I think 
everybody should have one. Well… I would, wouldn’t I? It’s good to be writing here. I promise I’ll try to be interesting and maybe even useful. I’ll go for funny, sometimes, too. All in 250 words a month. Today I want to ask ‘Why are you in your business anyway?’ Think about it, it’s important. There are disadvantages to owning a business that you don’t get in a job– stress, cash flow (or not), staff problems. You know them, I’m sure. So you need to be clear on why you’d take all this on. When we’re coaching you, we use a very basic three-step process – Audit, Plan, Action. We work out (with you) what’s going on and what you want to achieve, then we make a plan and write it down. Then we start taking action.
I know it’s simple. What did you expect? Ten secrets to world domination? Sorry, there are no secrets. The closest thing to a secret in business is the observation that the biggest difference between those in business and those with a job is that those in business got off their arses and did something. The rest of it is the usual – what are you trying to achieve, what should you be doing about it? Get on with it then! This brings me back to my question. What do you want? Enough money for biscuits? Autonomy? World domination? (It’s up to you.)
It’s worth being clear and making sure you steer your business in that direction. It’s easy to let your business be in charge, instead of you. So think about it, write it down. Show your partner. Or your mum. Or your business coach.
Jon Dale is a business coach and a director of Small Fish Business Coaching in Marvell Street. If you want to talk to him about your business, he’ll give you a free coaching session, no strings. He says it’s good marketing. Phone 02 6680 8036 or 0402 259 209.
This video by Derek Sivers whose new book, Anything you Want, is out now, illustrates the point really nicely.
Stuff the MBA types – don’t let them ruin everything.
Jon Dale
Small Fish Business Coaching Byron Bay
www.smallfish.com.au
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