Thanks

The Clown Doctors

One of my very favourite things at the moment is my pro bono client "clown doctors."

If you've seen the movie "Patch Adams" you'll have some idea of what a clown doctor is, and how they bring joy and laughter to those who are ill in hospital. This is a new organization here in NZ but huge in Europe and beyond.

Christchurch's own clown doctors have been visiting the Christchurch Public hospital children's wards, oncology, acute medical assessment unit and also Princess Margaret hospital since September.

Here I am playing the rubber chicken after being captured by the clowns outside the oncology ward.

To see the way they cheer up patients, staff, parents of sick babies and anyone else they stumble across in the hospitals is incredible. I'm doing all I can to help the clown doctors raise money (which all goes to paying the clowns). We hope to have clowns spreading joy and laughter in Auckland's Starship hospital this year.

One way in which we have been raising money is by releasing a clown doctor's range of wine in conjunction with the very good Fiddler's Green winery of Waipara.

This range is cheaper, at only $16 a bottle, (but not of lesser quality) than the standard Fiddler's Green range and the good folk at the winery are donating $2 for every bottle sold. If you can help out by buying wine just email me or the winery at fiddler@xtra.co.nz.

The Training Manual

When the opportunity of a big project comes along it's easy to be seduced by the potential short term gain but often not much thought is given to loss of stable long term growth.

In fact often the big project or mega sale can be the worst possible thing to happen to your business.

The graph above shows a real life example that Tradestaff experienced years ago. The blue line represents our expected growth path based on a real first 3 months, then historic growth for the rest of the year. The pink line represents actual trading when we won a very large contract which was the building of a stadium.

The initial boost made us feel fantastic and we increased our staff (adding costs) and were flat out busy. Of course that created some short term cash flow issues, but we were profitable so that could be managed.

But then the contract finished and business dropped back very quickly. To our surprise the business was now lower than it had been 9 months previously.

While we had been busy our service levels and contact with our old regular clients had dropped and some of them had been seduced away to our competitors.

Not only that but we hadn't been chasing the new business that was fundamental to our long term growth. Overall the graph shows quite dramatically that all the gain from the one off project was more than lost in overall longer term.

This doesn't mean you should turn away big projects; it just means that if you do take something big on that you have to carefully consider how it affects your longer term goals.

If the opportunity of a big deal does come along, ensure you keep doing what you were doing before, so that the big project is an extra on top of your existing business.

Many businesses fall over after their own versions of a stadium syndrome; don't be one of them.

Kevin's World

Every month I blog about where I've been, what I've been doing and what has impressed me or annoyed me to the point where I need to tell the world about it. November, December and January are recorded here , but really the last few months have all been about Isabella. On Monday 21st December we had a lovely early Christmas present when little Isabella Eder was born weighing in at a healthy 8lb15ozs she measured 56cm long at birth. Here she is already standing at aged 3 weeks.

Mum and Bubs are very well while I'm gradually recovering!

I have noted down some personal goals for the year in January's blog which I am sure some of you will find interesting.

Articles

I regularly write articles for various organisations and publications about recruitment, business or simply something that has got under my skin or simply inspired me. December's article "Are you swimming naked" was the most read article I have ever written, amazing what Google picks up on I guess.

If you're looking for a bit of New Year's perspective the January article "Don't care so much" might be of interest.