Jeweller - May 2022

BUSINESS
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From little tweaks, big savings grow
Businesses have a habit of avoiding routine maintenance, preferring to perform costly large overhauls every few years.
GRAHAM JONES explains that small but consistent tweaks leads to big savings further down the line.
I recently arranged for some tradesmen
to paint our garden. It hadn’t been done
for several years, so it took them a long
time to remove the grime before they
could paint. The preparation time was the
longest part of the job.
It soon became clear that the excessive
time it took to prepare the fence for
painting could have been saved if we’d
had it painted every year.
While the painters were slapping the
paint on the fence, I was running a oneday
consultancy session for a client in
the Netherlands.
Before the day began, I was concerned
about how I would fill the time they had
booked because, prior to the global
pandemic, I had visited them at their
lovely offices in Amsterdam.
We had spent time discussing their
online options and when I returned to the
UK and checked their internet activity
a few weeks later, it was clear they had
made significant changes following my
consultancy.
They had improved their Twitter
following from around 25,000 to
almost 600,000, showing they were
doing a brilliant job.
The right approach
I approached our new session with
trepidation. I was worried that they
would think they were paying for
nothing. They had done a great deal
of work following my advice, and it
was clearly successful for them. After
analysing everything, I could only find a
few ‘tweaks’ they needed to improve
their current approach.
In the end, I need not have been
concerned.
We spent the day discussing plenty of
elements of their digital operations and
activity. We tweaked something here,
made a minor alteration there, and
before I knew it, our time was up. I asked
if the day had been helpful.
Regular checks and actions avoid a massive task in the future.
They said it was tremendously valuable
and that they would like to book another
session in a year to check they were still
on track.
I made summary notes outlining the
ideas we had produced. There were only
half a dozen key things they needed to
do, plus a handful of smaller items. It
didn’t seem much for a day’s work.
Yet, the client was thrilled with what had
been delivered.
I looked out the office window into the
garden and saw my shiny new fence. I
realised that my client was behaving in
a way that I hadn’t done with my fence.
Rather than waiting several years to see
if their online performance was up to
scratch, they were reviewing every year.
That meant that the time taken to deal
with changes would be a lot less than
if they waited several years to consider
what they were doing.
Unlike my garden fence, which had been
left to get into a sorry state, they were
ensuring that their online presence only
needed a quick ‘touching-up’ every year
or so.
Don’t fall behind
Sometime later I received a request
from a potential client asking if I could
review their website.
When you don’t
reconsider
your social
media strategy
every year,
you also leave
it to wither,
requiring
significant
investment at
a later date.
The company was thinking about a
redesign and wanted to provide some
information to web design companies.
The email told me that they hadn’t done
anything to their website for almost
seven years and they had decided it was
time for a refresh.
I looked at their website and realised it
resembled my neglected fence.
There was a lot of work that needed to
be done to prepare their website for the
designers to do anything fruitful.
When you don’t reconsider your social
media strategy every year, you also
leave it to wither, requiring significant
investment at a later date.
And if you do not look after your digital
footprint on an annual basis, addressing
the necessary changes in one colossal
effort after several years takes more
time and energy than is necessary.
My clients in the Netherlands had the
right idea.
Regular checks and actions mean that
there is never a massive task in the
future.
There is a tendency to go for significant
changes every few years in business,
rather than progressive alterations over
shorter periods. If you are a ‘big change’
business, then you are like my garden
fence.
Leaving it unpainted for so long has
created much more work, at a higher
cost, than if it had been tended to every
year.
Ignoring reviews of your online activity
for long periods also means you make
more work for yourself and raise your
costs.
GRAHAM JONES studies online
behaviour and consumer psychology
to help businesses improve website
success. Visit: grahamjones.co.uk
48 | May 2022