Meet Madame Guillotine, AKA The Executioner
I was happy to be known simply as ‘The Executioner’ for the purposes of this column, but one of my clients thought it a little harsh. ‘What’s the female of ‘executioner’?’ asked one. ‘It might sound a little less scary.’
I doubt the role is gender-specific but after a bit of pondering ‘Madame Guillotine’ sprang to mind. With its S&M echo, it just felt right and, depending on if you were under the blade or knitting by the side of it, you could argue it’s marginally more comforting than The Executioner.
It does rather sum up what I do now too. I used to be an engineer (civil, thanks for asking). Then a teacher. And a wealth manager (don’t ask). And I have run quite a selection of businesses, either directly or helping people with theirs. However, I loathe words such as ‘consultant’ and ‘coach.’ They always bring me back to a phrase uttered by a cynical tutor when I was teaching physics a billion years ago. He said: ‘Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t teach, teach others to teach. Ouch.
Of course, it’s fundamentally untrue – some wonderful teachers would have made brilliant writers or scientists or whatever but loved the process of passing on knowledge to the next generation more. Unfortunately, the saying is truer in the world of business. For ‘teacher’, read ‘consultant’ or ‘coach’. So I don’t and won’t ‘consult’ for clients. I do it with them. Hence ‘The Executioner’. Sorry, Madame Guillotine.
It pretty much boils down to a few simple things for me and my clients:
• We work out what we want to achieve (not always that straightforward)
• We work out what needs to be done and in what order (usually easier)
• We do it together (sleeves rolled up on my part but with most of the heavy lifting being theirs – I’m not daft)
• We get the job done
• Or we kill the project
Now, working with four or five businesses plus a few individuals at any one time makes the executing business a fast and furious one to be in. There really isn’t the time to have endless meetings, be inflexible, or fail to deliver. And working in this way has proved that most of the time we’re all only about 50% efficient, if that.
Over the next few columns, we’re going to talk about how to get that figure higher, and how to spend the additional time doing things that will dramatically improve business performance and profit margin. I only work with small medium enterprises (SMEs). No big corporates for me. I’d either be eaten alive or die of boredom and I have no intention of finding out which (not at my advanced age).
I like SMEs; they’re nimble and flexible (oh yes you are). If they’re not nimble it’s because they’ve got sluggish, just like I did before I started my fitness campaign last year in preparation for the ‘big 60’.And I can tell you that twelve months of exercising more than at any other point in my life, combined with eating like a sparrow rather than a hog, is all it takes to do the trick.
In fitness, as in business, you’re got to focus on the fundamental sand get into practice. Not unlike the professional pianist who is, as I type, practicing on my neighbour Terry’s grand piano. Holy moly. I know it will sound fab in the Wigmore Hall next week but please just get those eight bars down so we can go to the pub for a whisky. Whoops. Slimline tonic.
