I've just come home from a couple of weeks in Bali. It was a perfect holiday. No phone, no computer... Lots of beautiful sunrises and sunsets, bungalows on the beach, walks through the rice paddies, old and new friends, and outrageously cheap (we hired a car for AU$12 a day). Lots of time to just be and time to think.

As I was sitting looking over the ocean in our little bungalow on the beach I thought to myself 'I could get used to this'.

Last week I met an inspiring, highly successful business leader who certainly hasn't let it go to his head.

I was on my way to Bali, via Darwin, flying Jetstar. I'd add that I was flying economy, but that's a bit redundant given that's all there is on Jetstar. Not exactly the place to hang out to meet business high flyers.

I had an interesting cup of coffee with Anthony about sales a couple of days ago. Actually, the coffee while good was pretty normal, but the conversation was interesting.

Anthony's background is old school sales - selling all sorts of things in high pressure sales teams. He talked about some of the tricks of the trade which are far from honest. Saying to someone "let me call my supervisor and see if I can get you a discount," then going out for a smoke and coming back pretending you had authorisation for the discount you were going to give all along.

 

If you are like most bosses, you would say number one is good pay and number two is job security. Sounds pretty reasonable. But according to a study at the George Mason University you would be way off the mark. Good pay only comes in at number five, and job security is only slightly ahead of it at number four.

So what are the top three things on the list of what your staff really want?

You may have read my blog last week: the worst customer service ... ever!

Well I'm happy to report this week that customer service fights back! I said in my last blog that a stuff up is actually a great opportunity to have someone love your business - strange as that sounds. Well another business had that opportunity with me this week.

I don't like to harp on negative experiences. I generally would much rather rave about exceptional service. But this was so bad I couldn't help myself.

You may recall from my last blog that I was in Brisbane for a course a couple of weeks ago. I flew in and got there an hour early, so I decided to drop off my stuff and get coffee.

I have to admit I’m a bit of a coffee snob, and coming from Melbourne I was a bit worried about getting a coffee in Brisbane. While the weather might be beautiful one day and perfect the next, that’s not how I remember the coffee.

So I asked the lovely Anna where the best place to get a coffee was. There’s a great little Italian place just round the corner she said.

I was at an internet marketing workshop in Brisbane a couple of weeks ago, and had the opportunity to have our website critiqued by a few internet gurus in front of the whole workshop.

The very first thing we say on our website is "LYB has unique methodology to ...". The response from the workshop facilitator was "so what". His response was eloquent in its simplicity. His point was that people don't care that we have a unique methodology - not yet anyway - they want to know what's in it for them, how will it solve their problems.

Have you noticed that whenever you ask someone "how's business?", the answer is always "great"? Business is always great ... for everyone, all the time.

Like the famous poker game from my uni days when everyone was up at the end of the night, it just doesn't add up.

I had a very interesting experience a few weeks ago. A friend of mine generously offered to do an 'integrity and values' profile for me. (Thanks Lucy!)

I logged onto a website and spent 20 minutes answering some multiple choice questions. Then I was off to meet Lucy and find out if I have any integrity and values.

Integrity is something that is very important to me, and most people in my life would describe me as a person of integrity ... and that's generally what the profile indicated.

However one score surprised me...