[00:00:00.00] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:09.08] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:09.26] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:11.23] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:13.26] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast, where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And thank you so much for joining us.

[00:00:24.09] - Taylor
We're a person down this week.

[00:00:25.24] - Gordon
Well, we are from last week. Yes. Yes. Last week we had our Zoom interview with Jake Woods, which was very good. And we had a few issues with tech and Zoom and other bits and pieces, so we hope that it didn't affect your viewing pleasure. But yeah, it sounded all right. I think we did all right. We're going to look into how we're going to do those in the future to make them better than they were this time round. In fact, we have someone else who actually wants to on our podcast that we met at WordCamp. So we'll need to try and figure everything out so we're ready for that person. It's been a very busy week for me. I'll come to that in a moment. Any news from you?

[00:01:15.09] - Taylor
Not from me.

[00:01:16.05] - Gordon
Shall we get on to our topics? Would you like to start or shall I?

[00:01:20.15] - Taylor
You can go first this week.

[00:01:21.23] - Gordon
So this week, I want to talk about planting seeds in your customers' mind. This past week, past week and a half, in fact, nearly two weeks, I've been pretty much out every day doing shows. Now, the reason for this is that as Gordon's Magic, my children's performing persona. I've been doing an awful lot of nurseries and schools. A lot of nurseries these days are doing graduations where they dress the kids in like a cloak and they give them the pointy cornered hat, and they have a big thing. It's very American, in fact, but it's a really nice event for parents to see their children leaving nursery and going on to big school. And so, I've been doing a lot of those over the last two weeks, week and a half, because it's the end of our school year here. I used to have a lot of work in December doing Christmas parties at these venues, but it seems like the trend has moved to the summer now. So end of the school year, a treat for the children and goodbye to those that are going to be leaving. Instead of a Christmas show where they've got normally loads of things happening.

[00:02:50.07] - Gordon
Maybe they've got a nativity they're doing, or they've got a visiting pantomime, or they've got a carol service. There's so much going on at the Christmas time in schools that I think they just moved them over to the summer, which is really unusual because it's happened over a few years. My busy month used to be December, my really busy month was December. That's got a lot quieter. My summer, people were starting to slow down, get into the holiday mode, go away on holiday. That's started to get a lot busier. It's quite a busy period for some of my friends who live in Devon and somewhere where there's a lot of people coming to visit, holiday destinations, that sort of thing. But it's a lot quieter in the August month for me, which is great because it means I get to go on holiday and not worry about losing out on turning down shows. But one thing I have noticed is I've been doing some birthday parties in this period of time as well. And sowing that seed of at the end of a show, a nursery show, let's say, going, "Wasn't that great? That was really good. Got some great feedback. The children were giggling and laughing the whole time. The parents really enjoyed it. The magic really makes it a special event for them. It's something they'll remember." And all I'm doing is I'm planting that seed in their mind that this was a really good decision for them to have me there as an entertainer. Because by doing so and making it a really positive, pointing out the positives, it gives them that seed of thought that, "yes, this was a really good thing and we have to do this again and replicate it next year." And therefore they'll have myself, hopefully, or if not another entertainer. I would prefer it to be me. But if it's another entertainer, it's keeping us in the business coming in, which is a good thing. And quite often these days I do actually have bookers or nurseries say to me at the end, "That was really good. Can we give you the date for next year and get you booked in right now?" And what's good about that is they're basically locking in this year's price, effectively, for next year. I don't expect them to pay until next year, which is fine. It just gets it in the diary, and I know it's there.

[00:05:31.03] - Gordon
For children's parties, I've been giving them an idea of what we could do next year that's different. So I had a party just in the last week, last weekend in fact, which was the fourth time I've been to this birthday girl. I've done her sixth, seventh, eighth, and this last weekend was her ninth birthday party.

[00:05:56.23] - Taylor
Wow.

[00:05:57.03] - Gordon
And every year, we do something different. We do something to make it more special for them. Every year, I get this call, and for the last four years, I've been doing their birthday party. And it's quite unusual to get a birthday, a private party, four years running. I think that's my record. But to just give them a seed of thought and that inkling as to what we could do next year, I said, when she's 10, I said it to the birthday girl and the mum when they were both together, I said, "You know what? If you decide to have a party with me next year, what we could do is we could float you." And just give them that little thought and they go, "Oh, that sounds great.

[00:06:50.17] - Gordon
Wow! Okay." And then all of a sudden, it's not a matter of, "Well, we've had him for four years now. Maybe we should do something different." It's, "Well, I want to float." And mum's going, "Well, if that's what she wants, that's what we need to do. We need to book him again for next year." And it just gives that little seed of thought as to what we could do. One of the nurseries that I go to in the past week was a nursery I've now been to for 23 years. I started off going once a year at Christmas, and they have their sports day, which is the last day of their school year. One year, I was being told about it at Christmas time where they couldn't have sports day because it rained nonstop all day. And I said to them, "Well, you should have had a magic show. We could have done something inside." They went, "Do you know what? That would have been great because at least we would have had something special for their last day." And so every year now, I get booked for for the sports day and also for Christmas. So for at least the sports day, if it is bad weather, I mean, it's the UK.

[00:08:09.15] - Gordon
So the chances of there being bad weather is actually quite high, even in July. Pardon me. Even in July. So they book me so that if the weather is really bad, they've got something special for the children to watch. And if it's really nice, well, then they do sports day, they come back, they've got an extra little treat by having me doing the magic show. And I really enjoy going to this nursery. It's one of my favourites. And they are always lovely. A little bit of a difference this year. I did the show on the Tuesday and on the previous Sunday, so what, two days before, I actually did one of the children's birthday parties very, very nearby to where their nursery is, and it's nowhere near me. It's about 45 minutes away. So I saw about two-thirds of the children at that birthday party that I then saw again on the Tuesday. But I knew that was happening. I knew that was coming, so I could plan ahead and the teacher said to me, because she knew I'd been to the party, she said, "So I'll hand over to Gordon." And she looked at me and went, "Good luck."

[00:09:25.00] - Gordon
As if to say, They've all seen what you're going to do. And so we did different things. And we had a different bunny rabbit, and we had a different way of producing the bunny rabbit, and we had different feature tricks. The warm-up was the same, but I explained that at the beginning. And we had all the children, plus the parents, because it's Sports Day, and grandparents and all the other family members just sitting there listening to every word that I said in one particular trick. It was a point when you bring them all in. The teacher said afterwards, "I couldn't believe it, you saw them two days ago, and yet you had them listening to every single word that you were saying. It was just amazing. And this is why we book you every year." And it was really lovely to hear that. And in fact, it was quite fun because as the children were coming in from their sports day, they were going, "Hi, Gordon!" Because they remember me from two days before and they remember how excited they were to see the Magic Show and the games in that case, because we did the whole party.

[00:10:29.08] - Gordon
And they were all instantly they saw me and it's like, "we're going to have fun. I know we are, because I know how much fun we had two days ago." And that was just a lovely, lovely experience. So my thought for today is just plant the seed in your customers' mind about what you could do for them and just let it percolate in their mind. So you're not actually selling them something. You're not saying, "right, now we've done this, now we should do this. And I highly recommend we do that. Would you like to go ahead and book it in?" Because that's a little bit too hard selling. Just that seed of thought is a really good way to have people mull it over in the back of their mind. And at some point, if it's right for them, they'll come to you and they'll say, "You know you mentioned about the floating. Can we do that for my daughter's birthday next year?" You go, "Yeah, of course we can." And you book it in. So you let them do the selling for you. Is there anything in your business that you think would allow you to do that?

[00:11:37.24] - Gordon
I mean, you have your care packages, don't you? Is that something that people have to have if they host with you? Or is it an optional extra?

[00:11:45.18] - Taylor
Yeah, it's interesting because I know a lot of people that they don't mention a care plan in their proposal. It's always an after-sale, I guess. They give a guide of like, "here's how to look after your website." And they go, "Oh, there's lots of things to worry about and take care of." And they go, "Well, I do offer a care plan. This is what it does." Whereas when I send a proposal, I include a care plan. And I have had every now and again someone basically say, "do I have to host with you?" And I say, "you don't have to. But I then explain, "you'll have to pay for the licence keys, you have to host it somewhere and manage it." Most times they're like, "Okay, then it's just easier for you to do it." Unless they actually say something, then I think people just assume it's part of it. But also people just don't want to worry about that. They know that if they pay, then it's going to get looked after. Things are going to get maintained and taken care of.

[00:12:51.06] - Gordon
It's like a worry taken off their shoulders, isn't it? Yes, they're paying a little bit extra, but they know that if there's any problems with their website, they're covered. It's like an insurance as well.

[00:13:02.05] - Taylor
Yeah, I think one of the biggest things that I did, which I recently, I say recently, about a year or two ago, added was basically two 30-minute tasks a month that are included. The reason I did that was because I got people that would send me request and they'd be a 5, 10 minute job maximum. Changing some wording on a website, adding a new image, copying and pasting a blog post. It's not much. It doesn't take long.

[00:13:30.22] - Gordon
But it's not something you can really charge for because it doesn't take long because it doesn't fill up the minimum time.

[00:13:36.28] - Taylor
It will either be I have to invoice 10 minutes at a time. I have to either then or I have to keep track of how much time I've spent on each client, or I have to invoice a minimum of an hour, and I don't really like that because I just don't feel that's right. But when you have a certain number of clients and everyone has 10 minutes, well, six clients, and that's an hour gone for no time. So what I do is, I just include these two 30-minute tasks that clients can use. Probably about 70% of them, 80% of them don't use it every single month. The ones that do, well, they subsidise the ones that don't for that month. It balances it out, and obviously, if it does get to the point where...

[00:14:15.03] - Gordon
And it's extra value either way.

[00:14:16.17] - Taylor
Yeah, especially when my hourly rate is actually, sorry the care plan is actually less than what my normal hourly rate is. So from there, it's like a no brainer, really, because...

[00:14:27.09] - Gordon
Yeah, it is.

[00:14:27.17] - Taylor
"I'm getting an hour of his time plus it's being maintained, hosted, and-"

[00:14:32.26] - Gordon
Backed up, everything else. Yeah.

[00:14:34.08] - Taylor
And I don't have to worry about paying any extra than what I've already budgeted for," which obviously is a bonus for them.

[00:14:41.06] - Gordon
Very good. Right, what do you want to talk about today?

[00:14:44.22] - Taylor
I wanted to talk about "It's good enough." I was watching a video of someone that was basically talking about how a lot of the time in companies, we have this mindset of 'it's good enough.' And this is more related to coding, but it also can extend to pretty much any industry or any area of a business. And the 30, 40% of the time where it's good enough is fine, works. But it's when you're doing that 70, 80, 90% of the time and you end up causing yourself more issues, had you taken a tiny bit of more time to take care, to plan things out a bit more, to think about how you're going to implement things, you actually save yourself a future issue because you either have to redo the work, you have tech debt, or you have some issue down the line that's not retrospectively easy to fix. It's been something I've been thinking about because I try sometimes to get work done quickly, and sometimes I don't think about... I maybe overthink, and maybe overengineer things and go all these possible use cases that actually are not really going to be a big issue in the long term.

[00:16:09.25] - Taylor
But then there's other times where I'm like, "I'll just do a quick and dirty solution," and that then does cause issues down the line. And it's knowing which ones to not take the shortcut, but to say "it's good enough, it will do, it's not going to have big impacts down the line." But then also knowing, "okay, I need to spend a bit more time and care on this, so that I don't have that issue." And I think it's something you should think about in your business, whether you're choosing a tool, right? Being very much, "I'll just try this tool, I'll try that tool." And then you get six months down the line, you realise, "actually, this isn't the tool I want to use." And you now have all your tasks, you have all your notes, you have all your client data. If you do your accounting in software, and you then got to either move them, which is obviously actually a big pain. You've got to try and migrate them, set up clients with new subscriptions or whatever. And had you actually taken the time to actually look things through, test them before you actually implement them into production, which is obviously why you have things like staging sites, development sites to thoroughly test things that you are going to implement, you could save yourself a really big headache down the line.

[00:17:23.05] - Taylor
It's something that I wish I'd done when I first started my business. Hindsight. There's some platforms, some apps that I probably wouldn't use now. But the pain to switch away from it, both the time to either manually do it or to actually get it migrated over is not an easy process. There's no import-export. It's just a big pain. So I just don't move because I can't really, without causing a big headache and investing a lot of time that I don't have currently, both monetary and time-wise, to do that. I know lots and lots of people that are in this situation where they've invested in a tool. You would, look at your database that you built, not necessarily the wrong thing to do, but obviously you're now so far in that moving away from your custom database isn't an easy solution.

[00:18:25.14] - Gordon
It's not, but it does everything I need it to do. That's the important thing for me.

[00:18:30.05] - Taylor
But it's more of one of those things where you don't know. I'm not saying it was a bad choice, but had you set this up, maybe now, for example, and then six months down the line, you realise, actually, the things I want to do now, I have to now build myself, and you were hitting limitations, then it is a pain and you just settle because-

[00:18:51.29] - Gordon
I mean, researching is something I do an awful lot, and I think I'll make a note to talk about this in the future because there's a specific way that I research whatever it is. I've done it just this week with the 3D printer. I needed a solution for something and I researched various options and I've come out with the option I think is the best at the moment. That might change in the future, but for the moment, I've tried my best to look ahead to see what I think I'm going to need. But I'll make a note to talk about that in the future because that's a really interesting topic.

[00:19:29.14] - Taylor
Do you think that there sometimes have been situations where you've actually probably spent longer researching to try and find the best possible solution and you even still didn't come to the best one after trying them, or you realise actually the time I've invested actually has, not wasted time, but "I probably spent too long on this," because I know I've done that before.

[00:19:55.22] - Gordon
Yeah, I find my researching is normally a learning experience. I'll go into it more later, but yeah, it's a really interesting topic. Maybe we should talk about it together because it's something that you also have done as well by the sounds of it. So yeah, maybe that's a topic for the future. We'll come back to that one.

[00:20:16.26] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:20:17.18] - Gordon
Very good. Anything else you want to say?

[00:20:19.14] - Taylor
I don't think so. That was all I thought. It was really interesting the way that they were talking about how good enough, but sometimes good enough causes more-

[00:20:30.00] - Gordon
That's a completely other topic similar to that, that we should talk about in the future as well. I think we have done in the past, but our thoughts on it may have changed, which is not waiting until something's perfect before it's released. We need to talk about that again. I think we've done it in the past, but we need to change it up.

[00:20:49.13] - Taylor
The fine line. Between going the extra mile to do something properly, but also spending the extra 5%.

[00:20:57.15] - Gordon
Yeah. And then sometimes the projects don't ever come off. And you've got a prime solution, a prime example of that with a project you started that never, ever saw the light of day because you were waiting for it to be perfect. But we'll talk about that as well. That's another note for a future episode. And if there's anything that you would like to hear us talk about or something that you'd like to hear our opinions or thoughts on, then please let us know. We can be contacted on our website and you can also leave comments on the YouTube videos. Anything else you want to say?

[00:21:31.06] - Taylor
Don't think so.

[00:21:31.18] - Gordon
As always, you can like, share, and subscribe. We're on YouTube. Please let everyone know if you think this is going to be of interest to someone else.

[00:21:40.10] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes and anything we may have spoken about.

[00:21:47.07] - Gordon
And if you would prefer to listen to us instead of watching us, then we're on all the major podcast platforms. Just do a search for "This Week With Taylor and Gordon" and subscribe. And then whenever we put out a new episode, you will get alerted. We can also be found on all the major smart speakers. Again, just ask to "play This Week With Taylor and Gordon." We'll be back with you 1pm next Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon, and I'm from Drayson Design.

[00:22:16.24] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:22:19.14] - Gordon
Goodbye.

[00:22:19.27] - Taylor
Bye.

This Week's Topics

Show Notes