My Twitter Account Was Hacked

Well, it might have been… but my children, who seem to know a lot more about these things than I do, thought it might have been a virus.

Whatever… the net result was the same.

A variety of direct messages were sent from my account to people who are (or more accurately I suspect, were) following me.  The first message wasn’t particularly nice, saying something like this:

People are saying bad things about you… click here to find out what they are saying!

The second one was slightly funnier:

I laughed my head off when I saw this picture of you…

Anyway, I think I’ve fixed the problem by changing my password, deactivating and reactivating my account and then running round a church five times at the full moon without thinking about a lemon.

But the thing that was intriguing about the whole experience were the different reactions from people.  I had maybe a couple of hundred followers (all, no doubt, hanging on my every word) and I suppose about 30 responded to me either by email or a direct message via Twitter.

Most of them, it’s true, simply said something like: Your Twitter account has been hacked, you muppet, you need to sort it out.

But others seem to trust me to such an extent that they took the rogue tweets at face value.  A mate who I haven’t spoken with for a few years tweeted me to ask what it was all about and, as a result, I called him and we’re back in touch.

Another guy, who was responding to the ‘Laughed my head off’ tweet was simply the victim of timing.  A picture of him had just been put up on Facebook.  He was receiving an award and the camera angle made it look as though he was standing in a hole.

He responded by saying: ‘Yeah, I know… must make a note to make sure I get presented an award by someone my own height!’

Now I’m not sure what all this is saying about me or Twitter or the scumbag hackers, but how about this for a stab at analysis?:

·         There’s was no rancour directed at me for getting hacked – and most people recognised the rogue tweets for what they were… meaning this is a regular occurrence

·         Those who didn’t spot them as rogue tweets took what I was saying at face value which means I need to tweet more to get my message out there

·         I guess about 25% of the people who were following me read the tweets meaning the reach of Twitter is much greater than I thought

What do you think?

Tacit agreements are useless, make it explicit

I was out walking our woofer the other day, in the snow and sleet, obviously, now that we’re in the middle of a drought.

The route, which was a new one, took us along a woodland walk towards a high school.  As we came to the exit of the walk we had to run the gamut of smoking teenagers.

Er… the teenagers weren’t on fire, they were smoking cigarettes.

Now, I’m no evangelist and, although I don’t smoke myself, I’m not going to judge those foul and disgusting youths in any way.  Besides, they were a fair bit bigger than me.  And, as they seemed to be ignoring me I decided that discretion was the better part of valour (in the same way that cowardice is the better part of discretion), put my head down and walked passed.

A couple of hundred yards later (metres, for Europhiles) I entered another part of the woodland walk and guess who I saw?

Nope, you’re quite wrong.

It was a group of teachers, hiding in the woods, just like their students and all of them were smoking a fag.

Quite clearly, there was a tacit agreement between teachers and pupils:

We’ll smoke in this location, you smoke in the other place and we’ll all get on famously.

Unfortunately, in HR, these tacit agreements just don’t work.  You know the sort of thing… you don’t actually say anything, but everyone just sort of understands that the agreement is in place.

All well and good until there’s a problem.  I know of a case where there was a tacit agreement not to stand on a desk to change a light bulb.  But a member of staff did, the inevitable happened and they sued their employer for the injuries they sustained in the fall.

The employer’s defence; that there was a tacit agreement not to stand on the desk like a muppet, held no water.  The tribunal said the instruction should have explicit, i.e. the employer should have physically said (and preferably written down and got the employee to sign to say they’d read it) ‘Don’t climb on the desks to change the light bulb…’

Unfair?

Maybe and we might see some changes to this sort of ruling in the future, but don’t hold your breath…

There you are: you can’t sue me now for holding your breath too long.  I’ve explicitly told you not to.

I need three bitches

Well, to be strictly honest, it’s Barney, my wife’s office dog who needs them… not me.

She thinks she’s hit on the perfect marketing campaign for her business. I’m slightly more wary of her plans, so I thought I’d run them past EB before seriously pitching the idea to her franchisor.

My wife runs a franchise, based from shop front style premises in Edinburgh. We have a Labradoodle (for those of you not in the doggy know, that’s a cross between a Poodle and a Labrador.)

I know I’m off script a bit here, but here’s a little quiz… what is a:

• Cockerpoo?

• Puggle?

• Poolly?

Answers below.

Anyway, Barney has been our office dog since May last year and has proved to be a great hit with the clients.

So much so that we now get people going passed on the bus and ringing the Franchise Support Centre to ask what breed he is.

Brilliantly, everyone in the FSC knows Barney and can give intimate details of his pedigree (or lack of it, given he’s a cross.)

We decided to take this a step further and had some professional photographs taken of him doing the things dogs do and turned them into posters, which form our internal marketing (all approved, of course). Barney also writes a DogBlog with his insights into business and is available for weddings, birthdays and Bar Mitzvahs.

So successful has this marketing been that Barney is truly famous and we think that every office should have one… and therein lies the sales opportunity.

If we can find Barney 3 bitches, he can produce enough little Barneys to provide one to each new franchisee as part of their franchise package.

Think about it for a second…

What a way to enhance the package: a free Labradoodle, 3 months dog food, pet insurance included for 3 months, marketing support to help you make the most of your new dog?

Okay, maybe not. We are being tongue in cheek about this.

However, Barney has worked for us. He has provided a focus for our marketing and creates a talking point around the local community. Children stop on the way home from school to see him and people come in to help him. For his part, Barney knows just what to do, he sucks up to clients royally and makes them feel welcome in the shop.

You don’t really need a Barney, but you do need a focus to help you keep you marketing tight and effective.

Cockerpoo: Cocker Spaniel and a Poodle

Puggle: Pug and a Poodle

Poolly: Poodle and a Colly (although we’ve never heard of this before and made it up!)

Induction is just as important as recruitment

If you are recruiting correctly you will be giving it the time it deserves.

Unlike my mate who runs a restaurant in Edinburgh. Well, I say restaurant; café is a more accurate description.

He’s always hiring because people keep leaving – it’s a real issue to him.

His problem is that he doesn’t make it hard enough for people to get the job. He advertises in the window of his restaurant/café and people walk in off the street. He gives them a trial and as long as they don’t screw up too badly, they get the job.

Then, when the new employee arrives, my mate has invariably forgotten they’re coming and so he’s in a bit of panic ‘cos he’s got nothing prepared.

Lo and behold, a week later, the new member of staff becomes his latest ex-member of staff.

Now, there are a couple of reasons for this, firstly it’s because it’s easy come, easy go but secondly it’s because his employees don’t feel welcome when they arrive.

Let’s assume, just a for a minute, that you do give recruitment the time it deserves and you’re using something like the Chainlink Recruitment System, which requires candidates to jump through a series of (metaphorical) hoops before they get the job. In other words, it’s tough to get a position with you, which means you are left with the people who really want to work for you and the job is valuable to them.

Of course, if you give recruitment the time it deserves, this means there’s a significant investment, not least in your time.

And you can blow that investment out of the water if you fail to follow it up with a proper induction process.

Think about it for a minute. All through the recruitment process you’re saying ‘come and work for us, we’re great’ and the first time you get to demonstrate this to your new staff member, you ain’t. Great, that is.

So what does a great induction look like?

Well, to a certain degree it depends on the business, but the one common denominator is time. Your time as boss of the business, dedicated to your new member of staff will say to them ‘You’re important to me and I want you to be comfortable.’

Then you really need to consider Herzberg.

Yes you do and you know you want to.

Herzberg says that you have to make sure all the basics are in place before you can start to motivate anyone with things like nights out. The basics, probably, means things like getting the contract sorted, pay details, where the loos are, being introduced to the team and making sure there is a work station, email address and personal space available if it’s needed in your business, of course.

Letting go is so very hard to do

I seem to be writing quite a lot at the moment about new franchise operations that we’re working with… and this week is no exception.

I have to say, in today’s story we’re not the lead consultant. Someone else is putting the franchise together and they’ve asked us to become involved with the training. Of course, this means that we have to understand the franchise and so we’re pretty close to the whole set up.

The thing is every time we think we’ve nailed everything down the franchisor comes up with something else – some worry or objection. For example, the franchisor is a long established business and he is very particular about the way they do things.

Okay, fair enough. But he’s swithering… as we say here in Scotland.

You see, he’s worried about the quality of the work that franchisees will do, so he wants them to go out and sell the product, which will then be delivered in house. It’s possible, but in this case it would make it very difficult for the franchisor to make any money.

My colleague, the lead consultant in all this, was starting to get a bit frustrated with the franchisor until he recognised that it’s only a natural process.

You see, when you look at the business there’s the Main Man (MM) sitting at the top of the tree. There are quite a few employees, but in the management positions you’ll find the MM’s two sons and daughter. I’ve met these people and they’re all good, solid managers, so there’s no issue with quality.

But why are they there?

Of course, part of it is to do with the franchisor being a family business but it’s also to do with control. The family members are a form of control mechanism for the MM.

Now, all of this has an impact on the franchise. The MM is committed to creating a network but needs help working through his thought processes. To him, right now, it seems as though he relinquishing a fair chunk of control and indeed he is. But he has to balance this with the potential income available to him by putting in sufficient (but not excessive) checks and balances to ensure, as far as possible, quality is maintained.

So, that’s the technical side of what the consultant needs to do to help him. Much more tricky for the consultant, though, is not to impose this process on the new franchisor – that just won’t work. He has to coach the franchisor to help him find his own equilibrium… to make him comfortable with the lessening of control.

It just goes to show that a consultant needs to be so much more than the font of all knowledge.

They need to be coach, mentor, buddy, support mechanism, marriage guidance counsellor and many other things.

Everyone Knows Someone

Everyone knows someone…

…who has a franchise that’s not quite working.

It struck me the other day as a truism that should really be explored – like five degrees of separation!

I got a call from a marketing guy. He was very good and actually asked me some questions before trying to sell me a solution. (Rather than: here’s my solution, now, what’s your problem?)

I told him I worked as a franchise consultant and trainer and immediately struck gold.

The marketing guy mentioned he had a client who had a good business and decided to franchise it a year or so ago. He quickly recruited four franchisees and has been living a nightmare ever since.

You see, he tried to do it on the cheap. He thought it was enough that his business was doing well and that franchising success would follow on easily.

As a result he recruited four franchisees without proper systems and processes in place for marketing and sales, product training, managing and running a business, a proper support function and a hundred other things.

As a (further) result the four franchisees haven’t been as successful as they thought they were going to be, they are working harder than they thought and are thoroughly frustrated. This makes them militant, difficult to manage, demanding and so on.

In turn a lot of management time is spent with the franchisees meaning the pilot operation is now suffering from reduced turnover and lower profits.

An all round horrible position for everyone involved.

And it’s all because the franchisor thought that franchising was an easy way to expand the business.

As I’ve said before in these blogs… it ain’t!

The first thing anyone considering franchising as a route to expand their business must do is make a mental leap… you no longer run whatever business it was you were in. You are now in the business of franchising – profit comes from franchise operations.

This first step is vital because it changes your decision making processes because it forces you to do things like:

Log processes
Carefully consider implementing new products
Think about the support a franchisee needs
Recognise that profit now stems from franchisees not your own efforts
You ring fence your pilot to keep it safe
Etc.

I’m pleased to say that the franchise I’ve talked about here is entirely fixable, but it’s been a far more painful process than it needed to be.

Cobblers

Cobblers!

Sometimes I wonder how sad I am… other times I know exactly and last night was one of those times.

Not only was I listening to Radio 4, but I was enjoying it, too!

The programme was called In Business and the programme was Hell for Leather. You, too, can be as sad as I am by going to the Radio 4 website (www.bbc.co.uk) and looking up the programme. For those of you who don’t want to be that sad, I’ll tell you what it was about.

John Timpson is the Chairman of Timpson’s, the shoe repairers and key cutters that can be seen on high streets all over the country.

Mr Timpson and his son, James, who is the Managing Director, spend as much time as they can on the road, visiting stores up and down the country and have a team of area managers doing the same thing. Not to check up on the store’s performance, but to find out what support they need to do more business.

John Timpson calls this Upside Down Management and has written a couple of books about it. I have to say, as I listened to the programme, the interviews with the store workers were very revealing. Without fail, they knew the numbers behind their business – something that we talk about a lot on our courses… the more they have a handle on the numbers the more successful the business person – and they all said the management style worked.

However, there was a caveat.

Many of the people involved said that, as a management style, it’s tough and takes some getting used to, although they seemed to like it. There’s a very simple reason for this.

It’s quite easy to say to someone ‘You are empowered!’

It’s more difficult to get someone to pick up the reins and act with empowerment.

For example, John Timpson says that it’s very difficult to train ‘customer service’. After all, every situation is different and the store worker has to be able to deal with a variety of situations. At Timpson’s every store worker can sort out a complaint up to £500 without referring to anyone. I wonder how many people actually use their discretion... the programme didn’t say

To get someone to work with such discretion does take some training – parameters have to be set – and there has to be an element of trust that they aren’t going to get a bollo… a telling off if someone at Head Office doesn’t agree with them.

John Timpson has developed his own solutions – he delivers the Leadership programme and he has made sure Head Office knows its place.

Great! I wonder what will happen when he leaves?

Actually this Upside Down Management isn’t new and it isn’t unique. Jan Carlzon did something very similar in 1984. You can read all about it in his book Moments of Truth.

Whether it’s new or not, John Timpson and his Upside Down Management seems to work.