Bahrain turns extreme!

Bahrain has always been the most moderate of the GCC countries. Not extreme in being liberal, not extreme in being conservative -- they have always held the middle ground. This image has all shattered when they proposed a Six year cap to expatriates in the Gulf. Have they lost their minds?

While I highly doubt that this would be approved by all GCC countries, it is an interesting trend that makes expatriates consider making alternative plans to countries that are more appreciative of the contributions they make. GCC countries do not have a history of banding together in policies, and this one is not going to be an exception.

It is, however, worth noting this:

“In some areas of the Gulf, you can’t tell whether you are in an Arab Muslim country or in an Asian district. We can’t call this diversity and no nation on earth could accept the erosion of its culture on its own land,” he added.

Makes you wonder.

Flexibility is high priced

You always want to be flexible. You always want to do what's best for your client. The problem with this, is that the more flexible you are, the more the client will treat you badly. This is especially true to those in the services industry. You agree to provide certain services, the paperwork is stuck somewhere, the client implores you to go ahead and get started.. you do, because you care for your client.

Wrong!

Never, ever, deliver a service without all the formalities being done. You will get complaints and you will be called names. That's okay. Resist the temptation. It is easy to say: they are X Inc., of course they will honor their agreement, verbal as it may be. Absolutely not. The bigger the organization, the less likely you would get paid for your work if the formalities are not taken care of first.

So, my fellow entrepreneurs, get them to sign the dotted line. Make it very clear that if they don't sign, you don't deliver. Period. It has been my (bitter) experience, that clients simply ignore all the emails and telephone conversations and maintain that they have not entered into a contractual agreement and as such are not willing to honor their financial responsibilities to you.

Once they are a client, be flexible. Until then, stick to your guns.

Managing for Efficiency -- Part II

Frustration would be the best way to describe it. I have just spent the past 2 hours going through sheets upon sheets of non-sensical numbers. Only one person managed to enter all the relevant information in the corresponding column. Everyone else seems to think it's an essay format!

It has been a very frustrating summer period. I did my spring cleaning and fired two people I found to be incompetent. So there goes my 'Spring Cleaning' (done in the summer!). Now I need to help the survivors reach their potential.

Motivation seems to be a problem, since I do a very poor job at it. So, I will have a couple announcements to make:

1. You screw-up in a way that costs us time to fix a problem, you will have to fix it yourself, on your own time. Small mistakes are understandable, but we are not going to waste 3 hours to fix a mistake that shouldn't of have happened. You come in during your weekend and fix it yourself.

2. A cash-prize will be given every month for the 'employee of the month'.

Hopefully this will provide some motivational juice.

As for the efficiency evaluation, I am still working on it. Hopefully by the end of this week, I will have a clear picture of how many hours are being wasted. I can aready see quite a few wasted man hours. I'll be back with the results soon!

eCommerce adoption: What's the hold up?

Security worries are the primary reason for low adoption rates of e-commerce, say the professors of Wollongong University. Of course this study does not cover SME's in the
region. The article simply goes to say that the study should help us figure out what to do and what not to do.

Here's a tip: currently, this is not why e-commerce is not even adopted in the region. The reason is quite simply that it is prohibitively expensive for a business to set it up. Oh yes, I have gone through the motions. It is terrible!

First, you start asking the guys at etisalat how to go about doing it. They tell you that you need to talk to a list of banks. You talk to the banks to find that they don't all offer these services. There are only 3 that do. Only 2 of them can actually help. National Bank of Dubai is naturally the useless one. They only offer their services to government and semi-government organizations. How about that? There is Emirates Bank and National Bank of Abu Dhabi. Emirates Bank are clueless. They had no idea what to do with us and I simply gave up trying to talk to someone who had anything between their ears. NBAD was to the rescue.

AED 50,000/- deposit (refundable) + AED 5,000/- annual fee. This goes to the bank. Then you have to pay the eCommerce folks at etisalat some of your money too. The bank also charges you a commission (a pretty heavy one if I can remember).

I asked one of the bankers in the department why it was so expensive. His answer was: the POS credit card machines they use at retailers are a lot cheaper and their commission is much lower. So they make up for the cost this way. My next question was, how many clients do you have for this service? 14. FOURTEEN! Granted, this was last year, but come on!

So, instead of making any money, they decided that it should cost so much that it would put any young entrepreneur off completely.

Give us the tools and we'll deal with the security issues.

Drop it like it's hot!

I am truly fascinated by the 1% client base we have that is costing us 20% of our income to maintain. Yes, I am talking about the excessively demanding clients. I didn't even finish writing the sentence and I already can see an email coming in from one of them. A day doesn't go by without something to be done for them. Sometimes they are right, often they are not. Mostly they are not. And it takes a lot of time to figure out what the problem is, to later realize that they are just wasting our time chasing after things we shouldn't be chasing after.

Then I read about Sprint Nextel and how they were axing their clients, because of their complaints.

"While we have worked to resolve your issues and questions to the best of our ability, the number of inquiries you have made to us during this time had led us to determine that we are unable to meet your current wireless needs," the letters said

.

How about that! My favorite is this:

Singleton said the review also found that the subscribers often were calling about the same problems over and over after Sprint officials felt they had resolved the issue. She said some callers were repeatedly asking for information from other customers' accounts, which customer service workers aren't allowed to divulge.

I feel the same way about our 1%. There is a difference in philosophy though. I think of the time we spend dealing with the difficult clients as part of improving the service. Consider it practice for the next customer. It is an investment in fine-tuning how you do things to avoid some of the issues that arise. Perhaps clarify some things before you start with a customer. Manage expectations better. Because, at the end of the day, the complaining customer is one whose expectations were not met. Dropping them is like passing on an opportunity to learn.

I would never pass on such an opportunity.

Emirates NBD -- the merger

When news of the merger between NBD and Emirates Bank first surfaced, I was baffled by it. Having never dealt with Emirates Bank, I only know that they are aggressive with their loans/facilities/etc. I also have dealt with NBD and know how conservative they are. It seems like a merger between the most aggressive and the most conservative. What could possibly be the outcome?

My company account has been with NBD (still is). They have provided us with absolutely no facilities. We have requested them at some point and were denied. The impression I was left with was simple: If you are not a UAE national, we are not going to give you any money. We further inquired to find that you have to have been established and profitable for a minimum of three years, etc. Quite simply not the bank for a start-up.

An NBD staffer told me point blank that national banks generally will not give you money and I am better off talking to one of the international banks (Standard Chartered, Citibank, etc.) I left with that plan in my mind.

Luckily I am not in need for loans or facilities today. I was only contemplating buying out one of the competitors and thought that a bank could assist. That plan was shelved. I have recently opened an account with an international bank. However, I am keeping the NBD account to see what would come out with Emirates NBD's merger. Maybe they will be more of a bank than a chest of money under the bed.

Managing for efficiency

I have always liked to give people freedom to move, freedom to create... but then I realized that this would only work when the work culture has an appreciation for this freedom. In this region, it appears that this is not the case. Freedom means you can sit around as the walls around you come down and do nothing.

Slight change. I have just instituted the most rigorous procedure for accountability. No, I am not trying to catch people screwing up. We have an operation that is very time critical. Everybody's output matters. Every second makes a difference (literally). The problem has been that something would go wrong and nobody would care to do anything about it. They do the minimum effort. Not good enough for me. The minimum effort may be minimum at my competitor's, but to me that is below acceptable.

So, in comes the task sheet. Everyone is instructed to write down every single task they start. This is done of course with the start time and end time, etc. Naturally this is not the kind of thing you give to every member of your staff. However, if you have a very time critical type of operation, you might want to consider giving this a go (to the department involved in this process only of course). I would never advocate giving such a task to a receptionist for instance.. there are better ways of dealing with that.

This has resulted in the following:

• Grumbling. Everyone's unhappy with having to 'waste' precious time in writing down pointless figures (all of a sudden people are aware of time!)
• Behind my back cussing (everyone thinks I've either gone mad or have just begun to show just how mad I am) -- they certainly think they can do my job better by now

Of course, I am expecting this. What I am expecting to follow is this:

• Everyone will be intimately aware of how much time they spend performing any given task
• Everyone will be able to determine if they are doing a good job, better job, worse job, etc. without having to have someone else tell them
• I will be able to identify areas where productivity can be improved

I actually expect to have an improvement of 70% of productivity from my own calculations. Currently, our productivity is sitting at about 350% compared to our competition. This is great for us of course, but I think we can do sooooo much better.

These numbers may be fine today, but as we grow, scalability must come to mind. In any operation such as ours (or any service-based firm), being able to scale your services is extremely important in a growing market. Remember, most of your expense goes in compensation packages to your staff. So that's probably a good place to make as efficient as possible.

In a month, I will be reporting back if what I have done brought back the results I am expecting or not.