We’ve all seen them. Strutting the office like a displaying peacock. Assured of the fact that no one else could do the job they do. It would be impossible. And therefore they are indispensable.

How wonderful. How wonderful that if they got run over by a bus this afternoon the small business’ vertical pipeline would come to a standstill because they were no longer able to carry out their work.

Ah yes you say but you have to think of No 1 first, yourself.  Make yourself indispensable and that small business will need you more.  And they will pay you more and love and nurture you.

Well let me tell you how it is from the small business perspective: They hate “indispensable “. They loathe “indispensable “. If there’s one thing they can’t abide, it’s “indispensable “.

Why? For the very same reasons that you love it.

Indispensable means leaving a hole when you’re not there.

Indispensable means blocking the pathways of progress for anyone try to move through you.

Indispensable means someone focused on themselves and not on the business, motivated by self interest and not by the ability to develop their subordinates. Paranoid and negative, insecure and moody. A small business pain in the arse.

Make yourself indispensable?  No. If you really want to impress the boss, spend your time making yourself totally dispensable. Coach your subordinates to improve their skills. Encourage them to believe that you will look to promote them at every opportunity. Praise others at meetings. Give credit to the person whose idea it really was. Work hard to ensure that your role continues smoothly even if you are not there.

Share the secrets of your success. Have you ever heard a TV chef say “this is my favourite recipe but I’m not going to tell you what it is”?  Of course not.  TV chefs can’t wait to share their favourite recipes.  In fact they are passionate to make sure you try them and get them absolutely right.  And that’s because they know that if the recipes work for you, you will follow them to the end of the earth.

So shed the attitude of a follower and become a leader. Leaders rarely fail.  Small business leaders rarely fail.

Don’t make yourself indispensable. Make yourself invaluable. There’s a big difference.

An attitude prevails even today in UK small business that somehow to have the knowledge is to hold the balance of power. There is a reluctance to share information as to do so may in some way weaken the position of the leader.

In today’s internet world, we are awash with information. We can pinpoint any subject within seconds. But where does that get us? How many of us would be happy to self-diagnose an ailment by researching a health website for anything more serious than dandruff or piles? Chances are we would still refer to our doctor.

The problem is that possession of knowledge itself is of little use.

Back in the ’80s I worked in a marketing department for an international drinks company. They were launching a new product. Huge sums of money had been spent yet early trials weren’t going to plan. The great marketing minds of the business sat around the table with the advertising agency scratching their heads. The excruciating silence was broken when the agency’s account executive piped up “let’s do some more research” to which, to my astonishment, everyone agreed. The relief at not having to make a decision was palpable.

The small business intrapreneur doesn’t have the luxury of time. He senses when he has gathered enough quality information, having filtered the good from the bad and the irrelevant. He assimilates this knowledge with his own experience and nous to ultimately make good business decisions.

The more savvy the Intrapreneur, the better the knowledge base, the better the decision.

Sharing knowledge has an exponential effect. Remember revising for an exam by teaching someone else in the same group everything you knew? Do the same in the business environment and see how quickly your knowledge and understanding of the situation increases. Then add a third and fourth person to this process. The learning curve will soar.

So then, to reach the necessary knowledge base quicker, wouldn’t it make sense to create an environment where everybody readily shares information, safe in the knowledge that they themselves learn quicker, feel better about their work, help the company move further forward and generally feel better about themselves?

To do this, the intrapreneur must commit to sharing his knowledge wholeheartedly. To get everyone to open up, he must walk the walk, not just talk the talk. Undoubtedly it is easier to achieve this in a start-up company than to reverse a previous culture.

The intrapreneur’s role is not compromised. His expertise will convert this greater knowledge bank into greater decisions.

So come on, shake off the shackles of secrecy and paranoia and enter a brave new world.

Knowledge is power?

Sharing knowledge, now that’s where the real power lies.

“The customer is always right.” Right?

Wrong!

Customers are just people like you and me, none of us are always right (with the possible exception of my wife) so clearly this isn’t the sense in which Harry Selfridge, founder of the prestigious Selfridges department store in London in the early 1900′s, intended to focus his staff on customer service. A noble sentiment but unwittingly misguided and demotivating for staff.

What about if he had said “the customer’s not always right, but he’s always the customer”? Well, sorry but that wouldn’t be right either. It would be a bit like the russian diplomat who said “ those are my principles and if you don’t like them….. I have some others”.

Small business has to move away from the notion that every customer is worth having. The 80:20 rule always holds, 20% of your customers will provide 80% of your profit. So many small businesses relentlessly chase the 80% long tail which is clearly unprofitable, just in case they might one day come good. Well I can tell you that they won’t come good, especially if you persist with the idea that they are always right.

The fact is that customers are not always right and sometimes you have to tell them so.

Savvy small businesses understand that their business is a partnership: with suppliers, agencies, banks, staff and, yes, customers. Strive for customer service excellence but expect in return for customers to play their part – paying their bills, getting their orders right first time, not keeping delivery vans waiting, sticking to promotional agreements, presenting your products to their customers in the right manner and so on. To achieve this they may have to undergo some customer education.

A sure sign of a customer worth keeping is one who responds to your efforts to help them integrate your products/ service into their business, ie a willingness to accept your customer education. If you have spent time and effort trying to turn a long tail customer into a profitable one to no avail, then dump them. You owe it to your business and you owe it to your other customers.

Focus your efforts on the good ones and they will reward you with greater profitability.

What a wonderful world it would be if businesses put as much effort into their suppliers as into their customers.  Everyone would win. And those businesses are out there, you just have to look.

So forget platitudes such as ‘the customer is always right’. Raise the bar and ensure that the customer service ethic is coursing through the veins of your small business from the top of the tree down through your entire workforce. If you worry too much about the long tail, then one day that might be all you have left.

I’m sorry to be the first to break this to you but your small business ideas are worth diddlysquat.

I know that comes as a shock because you were relying on at least one of them to provide for your pension.

Everyone at some stage in life has at least one “great idea”.  Now let me see, the current global population is heading north of 6 billion so that’s……….a lot of great ideas.

It’s a bit like saying that your lottery ticket is worth millions.  Well, yes, it might be if all six numbers come up on Saturday night.  What are the chances of that! (1 in 15,890,700 actually.) At least your £1 lottery ticket is in the game. At the moment your idea is just floating around in the ether so we can safely assume that it is currently worth less than £1.

If you don’t believe me, try going to a potential investor now, tell them about your idea and ask them to make you an offer for it.

To elevate your brilliant small business ideas to something of value you will need the following:

1. cash
2. entrepreneurial flare
3. some facts (as opposed to fiction)
4. sweat and toil

Unless you are willing and able to back your idea with hard earned cash you will need to convince someone else to part with theirs.  Trust me, no-one will invest in your idea.  They will only consider investing in something that can demonstrate some level of commercial reality.  In other words, you need to bring to the table an opportunity, not just an idea.  This is where the facts come in.

It isn’t any good telling a potential investor that you only need to sell 2% of the total market for widgets to breakeven.  If the world’s population stood on the Isle of Wight and jumped up at the same time it would sink.  Why aren’t we all quaking in our boots at that prospect?  Probably because we have figured out that the chances of this happening are fairly slim.

You must therefore demonstrate that the chances of your widget selling 2% of the total market are not slim.  And to do this you need to “do the idea”.  In other words you must find a way of creating the product – albeit on a small scale – and run real tests in real outlets on real customers.

“I have to rely on market research, it would be too difficult and too expensive to run product trials at this stage”.

Rubbish.  I’ll bet you my shirt that you can.  In 1999 three university mates spent a few hundred pounds on some fruit, converted them into a range of smoothies and sold them at a jazz festival in a London park.  Today, Innocent Drinks turnover is in excess of £80m.

The bottom line is this: An idea is just an idea.  Small business ideas are two a penny. The value lies in risking time, cash, sweat and toil to produce real products supplied into real outlets and bought by real consumers.

Oh and by the way, when you have achieved all that, the chances are that the guy with the money will have the lion’s share of the profits………..but that’s another story.