Tony skinner
Hi, and welcome to the business podcast show, podcast my business. And today we have Peter from pair planning. Hi, Peter.
Peter
Good afternoon, Tony. It’s really a pleasure to be with you today. 
Tony skinner
Good thank you very much for being here and hows things
Peter
yeah, it’s good. The sun shining today which is always a good way to start being in lockdown for six weeks now and not a lot has changed in my life. I guess being a seller consultant working from a home office. I’m doing many of the things I did before so yeah, incomes down a little but working harder than ever.
Tony skinner
Well, that’s the thing and I keep telling everyone don’t panic, keep marketing because this is an opportune time to do that. And it’s especially frustrating for you because you are right near 10 seconds walk from Manly Beach. How’s that working out for you
Peter
Well, very, very good. I’m an avid Walker, I walk on average two hours every day. I’ve got a my phone, which tracks it. So that’s not just guessing. We’re not able to sit on the beach at the moment, but we still able to swim and walk on the beach. So yeah, I’m enjoying the beach and my location as much as ever to be honest, Tony. 
Tony skinner
Great stuff good on you. Okay, so, tell us a little bit more about pair planning. That’s pair,
Peter
so pair is an acronym for the words planning, which is creating your plan in the first place. Usually, I work with clients to create a strategical business plan. I guess those are interchangeable terms and in some people’s minds. The second letter in the Empire is accountability. For a lot of business owners that don’t have a superior slash boss, so they don’t have anyone necessarily keeping them on track. So that accountability piece is something that I do with my clients by meeting regularly and following up on the actions we’ve agreed at the last meeting. You know, that’s an important part of businesses moving forward. I guess having done a plan, the third letter in the acronym is implementation. And without having a plan to implement your strategy strategic plan. Often it’s really just words on a page, many companies prepare a business plan or strategic plan up front, and I never do the implementation and then never do another strategic plan because they’ve never got a benefit from it. So the implementation is so important. And I have a tool that I use with my clients called a 90 day plan, and it’s, as the name implies, a plan for the actual things you do to embed what you’ve got in your studio. Plan across your business. So who’s doing the work, what they’re doing and the due dates for each of the tasks to achieve that quarter’s plan or the 90 day. And then the final initial of the acronym is review. So it’s very important. Having a look at what you’ve achieved over the last period via week, a month or a year, and recalibrating, seeing what your performance is like having a look at your numbers. So that whole process of review, at the end of the plan accountability implementation is really wrapping up the process, and then the cycle starts again. So that’s where the acronym came from. It’s a holistic approach to working on your business. 
Tony skinner
That’s fantastic. Because I know one of the biggest challenges you’re right, if you’re working on your own, is to be held accountable. Do you think that you’re achieving but if you look back into God, still doing this thing still stuck in the same place? And it’s funny. So when people are stuck in a rut what are they generally not doing?
Peter
They’re not doing the hard things, they default to what comes easiest.
Tony skinner
Which is doing nothing,
Peter
or doing nothing or doing tasks which they could outsource for probably a fraction of what their true worth to businesses. So, you know, many business owners I work with still do they the zero accounts, you can get someone to do that for you for $20 an hour. That’s not you know, downplaying the value of bookkeepers. But you know, there’s a lot of outsource solutions in other countries. Those business owners should be doing the work that adds value to the business and doing a routine function like bookkeeping is not adding value to the typical business unless you’ve got a book bookkeeping business.
Tony skinner
Yeah, it’s funny, you should mention that I come across lots of businesses that I say, you know, you’re mostly important role and what you should focus on is on the sales and marketing. Rather than doing the action actually doing the things in the business you should be out there selling and being the front face of the business.
Peter
Yeah, being the Rainmaker for the business. I agree with that. There’s a fellow called Michael mccalla Wits who wrote a very interesting book quite recently called clockwork. And he talks about what you’ve just touched on, and he talks about the four DS and the ones that are of most relevance, I believe, is the first one which is doing and he’s saying, if you’re a business owner, you should only be doing you know, the hands on technician piece, a very small amount of your top 10 or 20%, the man on the tools that you should be and he describes the you know, the marketing out I think of that, as you know, the strategic work working on your big picture. You know, making sure that you’ve got a good plan for your business. He thinks that you should be devoting 40% of your time to those more valuable Adding activities. And that equates to in a typical five day week devoting a full two days a week of that, to those design activities that, you know, he describes the 40% of your time. So I think that’s really critical for business owners to really create the diary or build there diary around, putting in time slots every day. So that 40% of the week is devoted to those value adding activities. Because if you just keep doing the simple things, the easy things, you’re going to be the technician for, you know, the rest of your time in your business and your business ain’t going anywhere. 
Tony skinner
That’s certainly true. I mean, I do I take advantage of people overseas, they do a great job. The key thing for that is make sure you’ve done it yourself. So you know, how easy or how to how long it takes. And yeah, get out there doing the business working. What is it don’t work In the business business work on the business.
Tony skinner
Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, exactly. That’s so much better.
Peter
Yeah. So the things that add value to the organization, that’s what you should be focusing on, not the things that are easiest.
Tony skinner
Okay, so and you do quite a bit of coaching as well. So, and that’s the accountability aspect as well.
Peter
Yeah. So, Tony, the way I work with my clients, I think of my work has been a cross between, I guess, more traditional consulting, where you helping clients with actual solutions, actually helping them implement things in the business, but also holding them accountable. So some of the things I do with my clients are in that coaching space. I think, you know, I describe myself as a business’s advisor as opposed to a coach because I am much more involved in specific initiatives in organizations given my background As a chartered accountant, and having worked as a CFO for you know, some large organizations over my, my career, so I’ve heard the term coachsalt coach and consultant. It’s a bit of a mouthful, and it’s not something that sits well with with me. So I use business advisor. That’s how I describe myself, but I certainly use some of the coaching methodologies. And I think accountability would be up there with them. And you do that through meeting with your clients. I typically meet my client or at least once every two weeks and, you know, that’s, I think, a good timeframe to check in with your clients and for them to, you know, use you as a sounding board and to just report progress.
Tony skinner
Fantastic. Okay. So what are some quick and simple tip or two that we as business owners can focus on for the next couple of weeks or period of time to help improve our business?
Peter
Well, Tony, I will repeat some of the Things I’ve said before, because I’m passionate about these things. And if I’m giving a few tips, I can’t get past these. I really think it’s so important for business owners to have some form of a plan. So I would say in terms of the next few weeks, I would challenge anyone listening to this podcast, to think about a strategic plan. And I use a one page strategic plan. And literally, it can be done in you know, in half a day, you could come up with a fairly good strategic plan. There’s lots of resources out to help with that. I’m very happy to help people get started. And if they want to engage with me beyond an initial session, or too happy to do that, but really, within a few weeks, you could have a good strategic plan, and that then can become the playbook you use to run your business. You know, it’s very much focused on how you can apply this big picture strategy in the day to day of the business. It’s not something you would complete upfront and put in a drawer. So I would say that’s the first day Prepare a one page strategic plan, have a plan. And that would set you apart from 80% of businesses out there. Because B star which is a, a research company, based in Australia, has done a survey of SMEs for every year for a few years. And one of the things I’ve identified is that the number one concern of small businesses is lack of business planning. And they’ve identified through surveys that only 20% of small businesses have a business plan. So if you have a business plan, you better than 80% of other businesses out there. great starting point in my in my book.
Tony skinner
I completely agree. And that old expression, you’re probably aware of will try and time this. Businesses that fail to plan, plan to fail. And to file. We did it
Peter
Yeah. Easy to confuse you know, 
Tony skinner
Ha.
Peter
I know its a cliche But it’s true now as its ever been tony , you know, I’ll use that cliche a bit myself. What I would say as as the second tip, if you like for listeners is, it’s not only developing a plan, it’s the other thing I spoke about earlier, you need to free up time, so that you can devote 40% of your of your week to working on the business. And those are the value adding activities we spoke about earlier in the podcast. So having a plan and having the time to devote to the activities contained in that plan to do the execution and do the things that you’ve not done previously, to take your business to another level. And you can only do that by getting off the tools and working on your business.
Tony skinner
Absolutely true. All right. Thanks so much for your time, Peter. And so pairplanning.com. There is a button there to contact Peter for a discussion. He’s happy to give quick discussion just to see how we can possibly help you guys and the book that was mentioned. We’ll get the details for that as well. So thanks very much for your time, Peter.
Peter
Thank you, Tony. It’s been an absolute pleasure sharing this
