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Hard copy printout fee: $10 to G.F.Byrne PO Box 74, Mawson, ACT 2607, Australia

"Customer's Lament" - in preparation. Contributions welcome!

c Gavin Byrne and Keith Sutton 1990

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without the written permission of the authors. Inquiries should be directed to Gavin Byrne at 15A Faunce Crescent, O'Connor, ACT 2602, Australia.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Byrne, Gavin, 1928-

Dedication

This book is dedicated to those selfless small business operators in various countries who have (unwittingly, one imagines) contributed so much to the book's contents. More seriously, this book is dedicated to all those small businesspeople who try to serve the community -- to the profit of all of us.

Authors' note

Opportunities and difficulties for small business, and constraints on small business, are almost totally ignored by our media. With this book they are ignored no longer. The authors welcome suggestions for future editions. If you encounter something creative in small business activities, please share it with us. Write to:

Gavin Byrne 15A Faunce Crescent, O'Connor, ACT 2602, Australia.

Such contributions will be gratefully acknowledged.

This is the expurgated edition. The unexpurgated edition, the one with the firms' names in it, involves a more than slight surcharge to cover legal expenses.

The male gender is sometimes used for simplicity. If the reader is left with the impression that the ploys outlined reflect a typical male approach, the authors (male) deny this with great feeling. It's all in the mind. You're probably imagining it.

Preface

This book is a lighthearted attempt to record some of the devious schemes that we can dream up to frustrate our best efforts to run a small business. Our subconscious can shoot down our efforts (not necessarily in flames but sometimes nearly as spectacularly).

The mind is remarkably powerful. It provides us with solutions to emotional problems that otherwise would be intolerable.* However, we need to be alert to what it is doing to us. If we aren't careful, our subconscious can frustrate schemes into which we are putting enormous conscious effort.

We can learn also from the venerable tradition of the large bureaucracies, private or public, which tend to acquire practices

that develop into hard and fast rules. These rules can be, and usually are, readily applied, sometimes long after the need for them has vanished. Even the smallest business can develop its own methods of operation which eventually solidify into `universal truths'.

The authors have brought to bear on these problems their god-like objectivity and insight. The fact that they are dealing with problems to which they do not have to find immediate solutions possibly contributes in some small way. They have, more often than not, been the hapless victims.

All the ploys outlined in the following chapters have happened at least once. Could they occur in a business with which you are involved? Lucky you bought this book!

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*Strangely enough, illness can work in the same way. See, for example, the illuminating book Love your disease: it's keeping you healthy by Dr John Harrison, Angus and Robertson, 1987.

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1. So, you've decided to start a small business! After years of dreaming, plotting and planning, doing the sums over and over, asking crucial questions like `Can we do without a second colour TV until the business gets off the ground?' you have taken, or are about to take, the plunge.

You have a set of expectations about your business -- what it will be like to be a business owner, an employer of people; how much money you will make, your prospective net income; how many holidays in Hawaii you will take each year; how much peace of mind you'll have being in control. And the status! Write in giant letters on your bathroom mirror -- these are your expectations.

What about your customer's expectations? Ah, doesn't matter, she'll be right, mate...after all they're only customers, what would they know?

The main idea behind the techniques outlined in this book is to ensure that anyone who has anything to do with your business gets the minimum of what they need for the maximum cost. Preferably, they should also be made to feel awkward, mean or unreasonable. With a bit of thought you can achieve all of these objectives. You can, for a moment, dispel the customers' child-like faith in the power of reason and leave them free to fulfil your expectations. They may depart with only the suspicion (which, unfortunately, will grow to certainty an hour after they have left your premises) that in fact they had been quite reasonable.

Your aim is to create doubt in the customer's mind on each of the following:

• that your staff are keen to see the customers leave satisfied;
• that your premises stock the goods the customer requires;
• that goods on offer are useful and of good quality;
• that the goods on offer are consistently, let alone reasonably, priced;
• that the customer will be able to discover the price of the goods.

For, clearly, the purpose of your small business is to make it possible for you to live up to your expectations,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

while frustrating the expectations of your customers. Hence, the temptation for you to view customers as anything more than nuisances or even as possible sources of your expected wealth is to be resisted all the way to the bankruptcy* court. This is particularly true in the case of customers who appear to be voicing expectations of their own -- you know, like courteous service and reasonable prices. Keep in mind that your initiative in acquiring the business entitles you to privileges, not obligations or additional responsibility.

Remember the motto: `If anyone leaves this shop satisfied, they must have swindled you and the staff probably played some part in it'.

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2. A central part of any business venture these days is called, amusingly enough, financial planning. Remember that your business needs to have access to annoyingly large amounts of money to cover the bureaucratic requirements such as workers' compensation and public risk insurance.

The best solution might be for you to go into partnership with someone who has lots of assets and you can concentrate on managing. That way:

• You can avoid using your hard-won capital from a previous venture.
• You can use your partner's financial status as a lever to get the bank to lend you some working funds (including the cost of this book).

Be warned. Too much financial planning might lead to early profits and the urge to sell out prematurely. Too little financial planning, however, will almost certainly ensure that your Herculean disaster does occur.

Once you have had your `grand opening sale' you might even stave off disaster long enough in your first year that you actually have to keep records.

A practical way to keep records is to stuff them into a large plastic garbage bag. Additional sophistication can be achieved by keeping a separate garbage bag for each year, with bags changing at Christmas or 30 June. To achieve the maximum in sophistication you should write the year on the outside of each bag. The contents of the garbage bags will be read

with great interest in the event of bankruptcy, sale of the business or other unexpected changes. Make sure they do not get confused with the garbage though; these days the Taxation Office tends to get a little cross.

Sufficient for the week are the problems of the week. For example worry about next week's rent next week, even if this week's rent has been paid with a customer's advance deposit on an item which you do not yet have in stock.

Despite your best efforts, an accountant -- your own or someone else's -- will probably appear on the scene sooner or later. Accountants are, like medical specialists, all knowing and have unlimited authority (responsibility is another matter, of course). They must be kept happy at all times; their decisions are final and must not be challenged. Their bills should be paid promptly and without question. You may allow the accountant to run your business for you, if you wish. At least, then he will be able to explain to you and to the bankruptcy court what went wrong without worrying about the views of the customers.

Life experience teaches us that professional competence is inversely related to professional pretensions. So look for an accountant with a patronising manner, illegible handwriting, sloppiness with appointment times and the like. In some quarters, these are regarded as the prerogative of the true `professional'.

Occasionally you may come across technology-mad customers who suggest that you could program your computer to handle their small orders. You can deal with these individuals by explaining that you haven't time to learn programming and that the large centralised firms are grabbing all the available computer expertise anyway. (How else would banks and credit card organisations be able to send out those wonderful invoices for 3 cents!)

If you are unfortunate enough for your business to have grown to the point where you have to employ a programmer, remember that a computer programmer in full and unfettered creative ecstasy can program a computer in such a way that it will produce beautiful graphs, block diagrams etc. for a possible annual report. But he can also program it to take an interminable time to grind out the invoice needed by a waiting customer. This is particularly effective if you are the owner of a small business which sells computers.

It is probably best to avoid admitting that computers have programmers -- always treat any inconvenience or disadvantage to the customer as an act of God: quite beyond the reach of human solutions, and certainly not your responsibility.

Buy stationery etc. from a source convenient to you, such as the rep down at the local bar. You thereby maximise good will and personal efficiency. You must also not neglect the possibility that the bar patrons at the local club may include a future tycoon; an established business relationship may be very profitable in the future, even if you do end up a 150 kilo alcoholic.

Purchases can be paid for with cash from the till, thus minimising paperwork and taxation

complications. Your fellow workers may enjoy the relaxed approach you have to these functions, especially when they use the same till. By the way, tax agents are expensive. Their knowledge, contacts in the Taxation Office, and late filing privileges are not to be employed lightly, even if their fees are tax deductible.

Your attitude to employees should demonstrate that they are one of your business problems, the title `assistant' not being taken seriously: `assistants' are only slightly less dangerous than the customers.

There are a number of ways of staying `one-up' on your employees -- and this, of course must be your primary aim in dealing with employees. Don't be available for discussion: be decisive -- you can find out what's really going on later. Keep them guessing as to what their role is: on no account make responsibilities clear.

Overlapping or non-relating roles tend to keep the place full of life. Use a series of verbose and contradictory memoranda pinned on the wall to outline your expectations and employees' changing duties. Create a high tech and systematised atmosphere so that if staff can see a role for themselves at all, it is clearly a marginal one and of little significance. All this is necessary for morale.

Creative people in your business can be subdued by tantrums (you may need to work privately with a drama coach or the local amateur theatrical society to achieve tantrum mastery). Those creative people must never be allowed to imagine that you are

satisfied with their efforts; they might regard this as encouragement to use their initiative again.

You will know that you really are the boss when you have closed off all staff options for independent thought and the staff are raising hell on a permanent basis. As an added bonus customers' problems will fairly quickly become a secondary consideration.

Staff should be expected to provide cars, petrol, appropriate clothing etc. Pressure them to resign if they have difficulty with this arrangement; there are bound to be more where they came from. Isn't that what the Commonwealth Employment Service offices are for? A little stress stops employees from thinking too much and after all, you're The Boss. You can't expect intelligent cooperation from a ` '*. You always have to be wary of allowing employees to feel too much at home.

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*Insert a term indicating nationality, sex, age, style of dress or all four if you can think of one.

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Remember that under-age staff are always more malleable. With a little effort some of them can be prevented from learning bad habits that would be too helpful to customers or too threatening to the perspective of businesspeople. Their vitality and enthusiasm will go away eventually. Counter assistants should be constantly reminded that they have to work for the whole day and that it will take hours for the clock to get around to knock-off time. Therefore, the tasks of the day should be undertaken

with dignity; available enthusiasm can be spread evenly over the whole day. The trivial and fussy concerns of the customers (who are there of course to be educated) will then appear in their true light.

Older, experienced staff with a quite different work background may have a real interest in the work of your business. Hence they may wish, and can quite often afford, to work for as little as the under twenties, because of superannuation and taxation considerations. There is, however, a danger that they might have some insight into your business methods and into the customer's needs. Avoid these specimens at all costs.

Staff should make good use of the phrase `Are you right?'. This can be interpreted as anything from an inquiry about a person's health to an immoral proposition. The phrase is particularly useful after the customer has explained his needs in detail to someone else. Also, by inserting the words `for you' at frequent intervals into the conversation,

shop assistants, even very well paid ones, can convey the impression that they are doing the customer a special, personal, favour. They leave no doubt that the customer was fortunate to engage the attention of any of the staff with their trivial concerns.

Staff can also use the opportunity to convey the impression that they are motivated by a very high moral purpose; it would be a shame if a customer were allowed to persist with the idea that he was there merely for a simple and straightforward business transaction. The message should be clear -- you could run a superb establishment if only you could get a better class of clientele.

Under no circumstances should employees admit to understanding /misunderstanding a question unless the customer's pronunciation is idiomatic. (This technique has been developed to its ultimate degree by officials of a major European government in their dealings with people who have the audacity to drift in across the frontier, the boundary of the civilised world.) Your staff would unwittingly encourage the customer to think of them as charming people if they admitted to understanding the question. Before you know it, the customer would be occupying even more of your employees' time.

You might also convey subtly to your employees that to be behind a counter or to wear a dustcoat or overalls confers all authority, and hence all knowledge of what a customer imagines to be his problem. It is thus unlikely that staff will need to listen to, or even worse make any effort to understand, the customer's simple requirements.

Employees can be reminded that silent, cool inspection also helps to keep customers in their place. Several staff members can look at the customer as if he were a shoplifter. Another, more elegant version of this approach involves two staff members

pretending that each thinks the other is going to attend to a customer. This trick is best worked with the staff members out of sight of each other, but in sight of the customer. A quite small re-arrangement of shop displays can achieve the necessary stage setting for this act. Clearly, it is infinitely preferable to have the two staff members resting rather than have both falling over each other trying to attend to customers. A perfunctory flick of a duster over a counter is adequate exertion for assistants.

Make sure that none of the staff know the running costs of your business; in their innocence they will be able to avoid the need to consider such irrelevancies as profits, an area which clearly is of concern only to you.

Be flexible about any promises made by your staff on behalf of the business. That way you can keep staff as well as customers on their toes.

Many otherwise dull hours can be passed by leaving the business in charge of a low-paid uninterested assistant or of an even more unenthusiastic relative, while you retreat to a club or golf course (as befits your status). In the meantime, decisions made by an uninterested assistant may not be to the customer's liking, but what does that matter as long as he is courteous and helpful to you, particularly around pay day.

If you have employees who are preoccupied with their appearance, keep a large mirror in the toilet so that, for example, a switchboard operator can spend spare time in a productive and satisfying way. Of course some of your main customers may start

noticing that the switchboard operator seems to have been missing for some days, but you mustn't be swayed by that into changing the fixtures in your premises. Perhaps you could move the switchboard into the toilet.

If you insist on worrying about staff morale (although this is clearly irrelevant to your longer term interests), encourage friends and relatives of staff to visit often even though they may not be in the shop on business.

Allow employees to help themselves to stock as the need arises -- don't worry about troublesome paperwork; you can think about that at taxation return time.

A final word of warning about employees. When they start earning, by overtime etc., as much money as you would like to earn, it is probably time to give them a grandiose title and a desk and start referring to them as `staff' rather than `assistants'. Staff don't get overtime, of course, and they must expect to work long hours. 

4. You can treat the supply of customers as unlimited. For example, if you apply effectively the techniques we suggest you will soon realise that all your customers are either new customers or are unfortunates who are totally dependent on you for a particular item. The old ones, other than those with very thick skins, will have disappeared, no doubt looking forward to more developments in life's rich pageant.

Thus advertising will be essential to keep up a supply of `fresh' customers.

Try increasing your prices 20 per cent and then spending an enormous amount on an advertising campaign telling people how low your prices are. Some people won't notice. Just you see.

Listing the business or its activities in a trade directory (such as the yellow pages of the telephone book) probably amounts to sheer ego tripping. Try using a trading name different from the company name, with only the company name listed in the directory. This might provide the innocent stranger trying to find the business using a phone book with quite a fascinating puzzle.

A large portable sign by the roadside (with an arrow) a kilometre away from your premises, saying `We are open' will demonstrate your advertising flair; leaving it there when you are closed will dismiss the possibility of customers taking it too seriously (more than once, anyway).

People should know where you are in the same way that they know where the post office is. Don't display the street number on the outside of your premises. Moreover it is unnecessary that the name of the building or the business be readable from the street. Don't check this, in fact. It might generate a lot of work, putting up a sign.

Place your advertisements in the newspaper column that takes your fancy; variety is the spice of life. Your ustomers may enjoy their efforts to find them. Splendid examples

include advertising bassinets in the lonely hearts column and dishwashers under `machinery' (with the tractors and trench diggers). In that way you will avoid having to deal with those people who are only half interested.

When you use an advertisement in the `For Sale' column, you can use it to direct attention to another advertisement in the `Public Notices' column. Maybe the newspaper office staff will even put both advertisements in on the same day. But if they appear on different days, your business will achieve a wonderful air of mystery.

Large advertisements in the paper sometimes attract an excessive number of phone calls on the day they are published. You can reduce this tedium by ignoring the phone. Advertising someone else's phone number is another possibility. Alternatively, leave the phone off the hook or tie up the line with your own or your assistant's social arrangements. (See further suggestions under `The team'.)

Use the word `instant' without inhibitions -- everyone knows that `instant service' means `three weeks if you're lucky'.

One occasionally sees advertisements quoting dates (or even in the case of television advertisements, times) already passed. Presumably this practice is a subtle ploy of modern advertising especially for the `One day only' sale. Why not try it?

And don't ignore the possibilities presented by mailing lists. A customer's name appearing on a mailing list more than once makes the customer feel `wanted'. You can achieve this by spelling the customer's name differently each time and it is an opportunity to show your dedication to `getting it right'. Customers are aware that all you know about them at that stage is their names. By mispelling their names you get maximum impact and this helps to dispel any illusions customers may have as to their importance to you. It also adds to their junk mail.

Junk mail is a wonderful means by which small business can attract the ire of the community. Of course, potential customers may also get into the habit of not reading junk mail, but you can't win 'em all. Indirectly, they will pay for such added `attention' but few of them will

realise it. With a little persistence, you can cover the shrubs and gutters of the neighbourhood, thereby attracting the attention of the `blue rinse set', and also increase the number of trees reduced to pulp, thereby attracting the attention of the greenies as well. It is no small achievement to antagonise simultaneously the blue rinse set and the greenies.

The ordinary mail provides much scope for maximising your efforts with minimum effect. Try to think up as successful a scheme as the major bank which posted to all its customers an envelope full of paper. The stuff took some minutes to read and the message was `We will now pay interest on credit balances in bankcard accounts'. The bank did not divulge how much interest it was planning to pay. It apparently decided to protect its customers from such trivialities, on the assumption that interest rates are of concern only to itself. The key to the success of such a scheme is the time spent in a fruitless search of that pile of paper for the missing figure. Once a customer has waded through several pages of verbiage, he's hooked -- he's made an investment of his time and doesn't want to waste it.

Think big in your advertising. You can advertise a truly grand sale even if some popular items are out of stock. After all one can't carry everything. Some customers will return in due course anyway.

When prices go up, leaving an old price ticket in the window may fool a customer into coming into the shop. Play it cool if the customer threatens action under the Trade Practices Act. Make it clear that you do not concede any error, although an offer of a bribe such as a plastic torch (without batteries, of course) might be worthwhile. This is also one of many subtle ways of advertising that you are uncompetitive; that is, that you have other problems beside that of getting people in to your shop.

Feminist, sexist or religious symbols in your business advertising will keep away those annoying

ratbags, unless, of course they are the trouble-making type who have the courage of their convictions. They probably don't have much money, either.

A carefully thought-out sign on a wall will let people know where they stand right from the start. Here is one example:

One should avoid marring advertising with minor details such as `unavailable at...' or `unavailable after ...'; skip the trivialities or use asterisks and small-print footnotes. Those potential customers who have failing sight are probably all pensioners who can't afford your prices anyway.

Spelling errors can make an advertisement interesting. If you are not fluent in the language, don't seek advice; do it your own way. With a little effort on their part, customers should be able to work out what you mean.

Use all the available advertising space you pay for, even if it means using seven different type faces. Pharmaceutical packaging and supermarket advertising set excellent precedents. Both groups don't want you to read the fine print, you know.

Take advantage of the total conviction that some people have that if the product you are advertising is made far away or the brand name is new and exotic it must be desirable. Quality is irrelevant. Alternatively, you can take the opposite tack; make it clear in your advertising that people should buy the product because it bears a label with the word `Australia' on it. Nationalism first, quality -- who cares!

5. Accept the fact that it is inevitable that you will be out of stock of at least one popular item at any one time. Customers who appear disturbed by this are, after all, being quite unreasonable, particularly since the price mark-up on those high volume items tends to be so small.

It is some consolation to realise that if you are frequently out of stock of something, people will eventually stop asking for it.

You will then be able to produce concrete evidence for the fact that `there is no demand for it' and another problem will have been solved. Trade meetings can then be used to convince other retailers of the fact. Eventually the wholesalers and manufacturers will reach the same conclusion and customers will be able to do their shopping interstate, Hong Kong or Rome. Perhaps a previous owner of your business has already done this for you?

Deal only with economical wholesalers. It may be that those same wholesalers have a limited range of items and poor delivery schedules and are unreliable in their supply or billing, but no matter -- at least they're cheap. The wholesalers will also provide you someone to blame them if you unwittingly find yourself entertaining customer complaints. Be loyal to your wholesaler, even if he is slowly reducing his range of goods in his search for maximum profit and minimum effort.

Tell small manufacturers or retailers not to bother you with their small orders but to wait and come back when they are bigger. They will remember this if and when they do get bigger. Note that you can achieve the same result by pricing small quantities at prohibitive levels.

`Use by' dates create some new options in stock handling. If all else fails you can smudge the `use by' date and offload the stuff on either the customer or the wholesaler.

Never remainder anything. If you bought forty copies of the street directory in 1980, stick with them even if you still have thirty-eight of them in 1990. Pay for storage instead. There is another possibility: if 5 per cent of the stock disappears each week via staff or light-fingered customers, there will not be much stock left after six months. This is called `exponential decay' and may be the answer to the problem of slow moving stock. Try it on an insurance company and see what happens.

Keep the range of stock lines simple; other people may be making a fortune out of a line that you haven't got around to ordering, but you have to be strong minded about this sort of thing. You will have enough problems with the lines you are carrying, particularly if these include buggy whips etc.

You can also make a customer's attempt to buy something from you exciting and interesting by keeping a different range of goods at different outlets. Don't make any commitments to the public as to what is held where in case some unreasonable person gets cross.

Postpone the time at which the customer has to realise that your business is unable to help him at the moment; you might feel lonely and neglected after he goes. You might consider, reluctantly, suggesting that `Joe probably has some'. (Joe is on the other side of town -- if the customer discovers that Joe doesn't have the item he will remember you for some time.)

Customers expressing an interest in a particular type or colour of large ticket items will obviously have to be content with what you happen to have in stock. You mustn't pander to them. All customers need assistance in making up their minds. There are three possible outcomes:

• You sell what you have in stock and make the profit you so clearly have earned.
• You keep what you have in stock, obtain what the customer says he wants, sell it to him and keep the profit on that. Then you still have to find a customer for your stock items.
• You insist on the customer accepting the stock item, with the very good possibility that you sell nothing and make no profit, but score another victory in the customer war.

The way to go is obvious and irresistible!

Customers need education as to when they should make their purchases. For example, it is absurd to expect to buy calendars or diaries other than in December or January. Well...it's only reasonable, isn't it?

The idea of making arrangements for overnight supplies of spares or stock must be approached with caution. It may involve you in some negotiation with interstate suppliers, manufacturers or even, heaven forbid, banks.*

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They are probably in the top floor of a large and costly building in the middle of a big city.

Some readers who are in the habit of keeping their money in old socks may feel that we are being a bit rough on banks. On the contrary, we have accumulated enough material to write another book on that subject alone. We're being bribed to shut up.

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6. On display shelves, it is often convenient to mix similar-looking items, such as metric and US threads on bolts and screws. This will draw customers into the shop more often -- they will have unusable items they need to return. You can resist requests to refund the cash and, with a belligerent but businesslike air, insist on an alternative purchase or even a credit slip. Cash would allow the customer to fill his needs elsewhere.

Interest can be added to the shopper's day by making it as difficult as possible to discover the price of an article. Use stickers of different shapes and colours and put them in different places. Another suggestion is to use a single sticker on twin packs; if the packet is split, prices can then appear to increase by 100%. Exciting, isn't it?

Don't forget to omit prices occasionally; a considerable amount of work can be saved in this way. This technique is popular with stores which use bar code readers as the staff then have no need for price information and are hence in a permanent state of ignorance.

Omitting prices also allows you to provide two assistants with slightly different price lists so that they charge slightly different prices for the same item. This gives you the opportunity to study buying habits such as whether the item sells better at the higher or the lower price. You may not have to organise this; it seems to be standard practice in a lot of businesses, such as hotel and club bars, anyway. If the price difference is significant, you could try suggesting to a complaining customer that the higher priced article is of superior quality, a later model or fresher. Don't rush into the latter ploy without thought: it may be necessary at some stage in the proceedings to prove your claim. Fortunately there are people in this world who will go away happier having paid the higher price. Try marking ostensibly identical goods at two different prices and always charge the higher of the two. This is particularly useful in supermarkets and will drive customers crazy. It is also a way of making those customers who insist on their right to buy at the lowest marked price seem particularly mean. You can always try telling them that you may be selling the item at the lower price at some other,

unspecified, time, like the flashing red light specials in department stores.

Tracking down missing prices can also become a big part of the hardworking businessperson's day. It is an excellent opportunity to develop one's strength of character by keeping a queue of customers waiting for this ritual to be brought to its triumphant conclusion. When customers start discussing their delay problems and look like forming a union of some sort to negotiate with you it is probably time to get a move on. Enough is enough.

Customers who ask to purchase a particular weight of a product because of a tight budget or the need to follow a recipe accurately, are probably quibbling about correct weight just to annoy you. The time for you to argue about 10 cents worth is when your best customer or your most temperamental customer is waiting.

Make sure there is always plenty of waste material around the place. It gives the impression that all the stock is offcuts and will make the customer feel he is paying full price for waste material.

Cram all the stock on to the shop floor; never use supplementary storage such as your garage. If customers have to climb over things, it will sort out the people who really want to buy from you.

Waste material, packing cartons, coffee mugs with a solidified residue and half-eaten sandwiches lying around add atmosphere and are essential for the image of the establishment.

7. Changing business names and shop layouts provides endless opportunities for self-expression and creativity. If you cannot do it yourself you can employ consultants. Such places as supermarkets and hardware stores, particularly, can keep people

continuously impressed and bewildered by the freshness and vigour of their administration. Eventually the public will spend as much time trying to work out the changes as they will looking for the item they want to buy. It is all part of the process of educating the public to understand that the world is now, as sociologists have it, `turbulent'.

A lot of money can be paid for computerised stock-holding and re-ordering systems but they are susceptible to damage by lightning, earthquakes, falling satellites etc. and thus probably not a good idea. A really practical arrangement is to rely on customers to highlight the fact that you are out of stock of something simply by their coming in and asking for it. You don't have to worry about it till then. Preferably that inquiry should be made to an assistant

with whom you seldom communicate. Never offer to tell the customer when the required stock does arrive, no matter how big the potential order. Eventually the point will be established that you do not stock the item and there will be no further problem. You must keep your mind clear for bigger decisions more appropriate to your status as a business owner.

Under no circumstances respond to a stock request by committing yourself to re-ordering the missing item. Clearly, education of customers is a major part of your undertaking. It's a pity that those blighters down the road -- your competitors -- can't see this.

When small computers, stock recording systems and so on loom very large on the horizon -- your competitors may have been using something of the sort for several years -- it may be time to either call in a $100-an-hour consultant with several university degrees or buy a personal computer and some public domain software and consult the nearest small boy. The latter approach has its hazards such as interruptions involving space invaders, simulations of races between Ferrari sports cars and raids on the fridge. There is a very real possibility that you will find all this so much fun that you will give up entirely the idea of running a small business, which might save you a lot of problems.

Have you ever noticed how well planned some supermarkets are? The predicament of someone who wants to leave a supermarket through the row of cash registers without buying something has a lot in common with that of a lobster trying to leave a lobster pot. If the customer's plan was merely to check prices and to leave without buying anything then, of course, he deserves everything he gets. Moreover, by changing the place at which empty trolleys are kept, on Saturdays and Sundays, say, the supermarket proprietor can embarass many customers quite simply. The customer passes into the display area only to find that trolleys are not where he expected them to be. A lot of harmless amusement can be had watching him trying to fetch a trolley from the street.

In a supermarket, kitchen utensils can be hung at various locations in the aisles. Don't even think about grouping the items. Knives and forks, for instance, should be placed at a minimum of two aisles apart. Spoons must be placed at the check out, forcing the customer to barge through queues of waiting customers.

Of course practically all the people in your store are regular and totally loyal customers who know the place intimately and who would not dream of shopping anywhere else.

Encouraging impulse purchases is trendy marketing these days

and supermarkets are just the place to try it out on unsuspecting customers. Although it is not clear yet what the long-term effects of this will be, some people have a garage full of the stuff before they have a garage sale or donate it to a church fete. *

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*Perceptive readers will note that the stuff can be then `impulse bought' again by someone else.

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8. Telephone numbers quoted in circulars or newsletters tend to get out of date; it is true that your failure to rectify the problem will run up a customer's phone bill and annoy miscellaneous people who aren't involved with you or your customer. Then again, you can't check everything.

When a customer does catch you on the phone and you can't respond to an inquiry immediately, make sure you keep him waiting until you have finished your coffee and biscuit (great with STD or ISD calls). This will ensure maximum irritation to the caller and a reasonable assumption that he will not deal with your business again. As background entertainment while he is waiting, you could encourage staff members to discuss rather intimate details of their last weekend's activities. Too much of this sort of activity may, of course, eventually attract the interest of the vice squad. Telephone queuing systems, background music or recorded messages can also be used to obscure inattention.

If you have many telephone extensions or would like to convey that impression to the caller, try to transfer the call to another carefully selected extension. It is particularly important to select one which you know to be unattended.

When someone rings to inquire about a lack of response from a staff member on another number, just tell the caller `he's at a meeting'. Don't reveal that his room and telephone number have changed. Make sure that whoever calls is never given a direct dial number; it helps to keep customers' phone bills high. Try to be difficult to contact by varying your telephone habits, because if you are easy to reach customers may come to believe that you are there to help them.

Answering machines can be ignored occasionally and you can wave your arms in the air when explaining any resultant difficulty experienced by the customer. What about: `I'm just hopeless with that sort of thing'.

Customers should be contacted when the mood takes you, even if it happens to be children's meal time. Convey the idea initially that you represent a charity -- some people have blacklists of people who make unsolicited phone calls.

Never use courtesy titles such as Mr, Mrs or Miss when you are talking to strangers, particularly the more senior ones. You might consider addressing females as `dear', `darling' or `love'; judicious use of `comrade' and frequent use of `mate' are preferred options.

Assume that local phone calls, particularly those made using other people's telephones, whether by you or by the customer, don't cost anything. Arrange events so that repeat calls have to be made by the customer. Always pick up a ringing phone even when the caller is likely to ask for someone else; picking up the phone costs the caller a meter registration.

Keep the phone line tied up; keep customers `cued'. Only when the position becomes totally unmanageable should the small business owner get more outside lines.

Make sure that your 008 number is tied up for the maximum time possible; it does wonders for the phone bill and reduces the flood of inquiries to a manageable trickle.

Try to avoid using telephone economy rates, Surface Lifted Airmail, Priority Paid, etc. This will almost certainly ensure that administrative costs stay high, negotiations stretch over the longest possible time and maximum customer `impact' is achieved.

In your letters and phone calls, try to use as many buzz words and phrases as possible. Here are some `golden oldies':

9. Operating rules are essential components of any operating system. Since customers generally don't understand the rules, this lack of knowledge will help to keep them in their place. Any request by a customer that requires expedition or even an element of basic planning should be characterised as a `rush job'. It implies that you don't accept responsibility for any shortcomings in the result.

Ask for a phone number and, perhaps, address and references, in response to any inquiry or purchase, however trivial. There is an outside chance that they may be useful to you. People just love having their personal details on various unspecified lists, for unspecified use by unspecified third parties. If you do have a good reason for asking for this information, for goodness sake don't explain why.

Avoid telling a customer how long he should expect to wait. If you are going to delay someone it adds drama, for instance, if he has a car parked on short-term parking or on an expired meter. You may even get an opportunity to make it clear that the customer is being unreasonable if he suggests that you hurry.

Make sure your delivery vehicle is noisy. This is especially important if you are delivering milk or newspapers. As with local garbage trucks, it also helps if night deliveries are made in vehicles with noisy brakes. Throw newspapers into garden beds, hedges or swimming pools and place milk bottles or cartons in the sun (on the curb, of course). Make deliveries at times convenient to you -- especially if these are outside the times requested.

When you visit unoccupied premises, leave a calling card showing an illegible phone number or the pencilled name of a staff member who is about to retire or to go on three weeks' holiday.

You can either ignore people who walk in and out of your shop or premises without speaking to anyone or you can make it very clear that visitors had better have a very good reason before they enter the premises. Probably the best solution is to treat them like joggers or other people gripped by strange, irrational compulsions; it may be that they do not feel free to make their requirements known but what do you care?

Never smile. A sinister grin, however, can divert a customer from his purpose and leave him or her pondering on your reaction for the rest of the day.

Make sure you employ an absent-minded switchboard operator, one who would never connect a caller who asks for `Bob' to a person called `Robert'. Never ring your office anonymously; that is a sneaky way to find out how strangers are treated when they try to make their needs known. When things get too difficult on the phone:

• pretend to be cut off -- hit an oil drum with a brick and put the phone down;
• pretend to be a recorded message

• pretend to have a crossed line;

Restaurants are marvellous places for fun and games. When attending to someone in a restaurant smile excessively and touch frequently. If the customer wants to argue, well then, argue. Insist that everyone at the table eats at your convenience, not theirs. Parties which can be arranged into a group must be induced to sit together even if it does involve a table for forty-five. Naturally, the customers must be content with a common bill. Resist all requests for separate bills.

Technological change is producing some interesting situations. For instance, you need to treat incoming phone callers in your restaurant who ask `what's your service like?' with extreme caution. Mobile telephones are now quite common and the caller may be sitting at a table in your restaurant 3 metres from you.

In a disco, maximise consumption by seeing that staff remove quarter-full glasses when customers are dancing. Amplifiers are primarily for drowning conversation, no matter what customers might assert to the contrary. If they want intimate and/or intelligible conversation they can go to a park.

In a snack bar, keep customers waiting for as long as possible. This gives them the opportunity to work out for themselves whether or not table service is provided and whether they can bring their own wine. Uniformed staff clearing tables can make the situation even more obscure. Perhaps offer a different service on different days of the week in such a way that customers are never quite sure what exactly you are offering. An appropriate notice would ruin the decor, perhaps, and would involve commitment to a particular course of action. Before they can hassle a staff member or the proprietor they have first to find them. If customers start to walk out, don't attract trouble by asking why.

You may be able to arrange for a staff member to appear and present a large bill for a bread roll or yell at the departing diners: `Your meal is ready'. If the customers then return, delay attending to them just long enough to avoid the possibility that the food is overheated. Studies have shown that ten minutes after eating quite a small quantity of food, appetite disappears.

10.   When stuff-ups occur, always leave the customer with the impression that you will gracefully accept his apology for the problem, no matter what it was (or who in your establishment was responsible). Many firms have this technique down to a fine art.

Encourage your assistants to notice when there are long queues of customers so that they can chose those times to shuffle bank notes so that the notes all face the same way; there's a sort of geometric progression to this habit and customers love to watch. The other form of entertainment to be mentioned here is the replacement of cash register tapes, but you don't have to organise this for a particularly busy period -- that seems to happen naturally.

Never worry about having the right change. You should be able to expect the customer to have it; after all, he caused the problem by buying something.

Spend as much time as you can advising the least valuable customer. To any request for information, always reply `what do you want to know about it?' Very few customers have the audacity to reply `everything'. Quite often this is what they do want. However, even though the customer may be quite literate technically, he can still have difficulty in asking a question if he does not know any relevant jargon. Always give any information about a product in jargon; never give definitions of terms in layman's language.

Make sure no customer enters the premises between 4.50 and 5.00 p.m. Similarly, lunch times are for you and your staff and are a small part of the day anyway. They may be the only time that customers can get to your premises but that is the customer's problem, not yours. If several of your staff have pressing engagements at lunch time on the same day, why not just close the shop?

If you want to keep customers in their place, a splendid way is to have someone emerge from the back of the shop eating a sandwich. Another infallible way of disconcerting a customer is to have a staff member say something like `How are you, sport?' and then walk out of the shop.

Astrology can be relied on to frustrate or insult a customer. For example, a particularly hideous colour selection should elicit the comment: `I just know you're a Gemini' When you are demonstrating new equipment, always ignore at least one of the pieces of advice given in large print by the manufacturer. The customer then has to make a choice between believing that you, the manufacturer, or both are working under Divine Inspiration.

If terms of trade change against you -- for example if there is a rise in wholesale prices -- don't tell your customers. Just allow your service to deteriorate.

Never do anything for nothing, particularly for the aged, infirm or pregnant.

Your staff should be taught always to ridicule or patronise children, preferably with their parents in earshot, no matter how courteous or well behaved they are. You can bet they're probably up to something. Do not be mercenary; ignore the fact that children may grow up to be well-heeled customers.

It is clearly preferable to keep the traffic of satisfied, small-transaction customers coming into the shop to a minimum, notwithstanding the profit expectations from a larger number. The additional wear on the floorcoverings is just not worth the risk and more cleaning bills might spoil your whole day.

When a customer asks for a small quantity, reply `How much is a small quantity?' He probably does not know the quantities the particular goods come in and will therefore find the question unanswerable.

Try to sell items in fixed quantities so that the customer has to buy something like 30 per cent more than he needs. If the typical application requires two or four, supply them in threes only. Battery vendors are good at this; learn from them.

Offer to do a special deal for close friends and make sure that they get landed with something they could have bought cheaper from a stranger. Leave them with the suspicion but not the certainty that you know perfectly well what you have done.

If anyone asks the price of anything, always answer with a flat statement of the highest price in the range -- that should make it clear that nothing is simple these days and you are well up with contemporary trends.

Respond to any inquiry with a reference to the price; it conveys the impression that the customer looks as if he can't afford it.

Remember: always sell in wholesale quantities and charge retail prices (at least) -- none of this wrapping or packing small quantities nonsense.

Customer requirements are always similar no matter what they may think to the contrary. Don't express any interest whatsoever in a particular customer's problem; if you do, you may create the most undesirable impression that you care.

You can usually sell something to a customer that was not asked for and was not needed. Your guide in this should be Ronnie Barker (Arkwright of `Open all hours' TV fame). It is amazing how many people think this program is a comedy rather a staff training film.

Always assume that a female needs the advice or permission of a male before she can act. This is a surefire way to upset at least 50 per cent of your potential customers and make it odds-on that your business will not survive the year.

If there is more than one door, greet lost strangers with the bright comment `You came in the wrong door'. That comment is almost always incomprehensible and irrefutable.

If a job (for example dry cleaning) was to be ready at 4.00 p.m. have an assistant say, brightly, at 4.25: `I think you're here too soon'. Customers always have plenty of time -- they won't be concerned when their clothes are ready. The only real constraint is your own convenience.

Maximise the delay between receipt of cash and delivery of the serviceable product.

Finally, as a general principle*, complain about:

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* See also Hints for the exporter

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T here is an outside chance that by whingeing about someone else you might lead the customer, in a moment of confusion, to re-enter your premises one day.

If you feel that after all the above you still are without the level of meaningful interface that you need with the public you should consider becoming a taxi driver. The opportunities open to that profession appear to be limitless. When you are driving a taxi, take a friend along for a ride. It can get quite lonely when you are with strangers all day. With a little thought you can produce all sorts of interesting scenes with which to confront the public. For example, if your friend can produce a sinister grin, customers will feel they might be entering a Mafia staff car. Never explain the presence of the extra person. The passenger is unlikely to summon up the courage to insist on his right to the use of an unencumbered taxi.

You can also pretend to be stoned, drunk or in the last stages of senile decay. This will give your passenger a real thrill. Passengers picked up from the customs and immigration exit of an international airport are likely to be in a very pliable, cooperative state, having had little sleep for several days. They will love to hear how uneconomic it is for a taxi to take people the short distance to the domestic terminal.

Regale them with stories of how the taxi business is being ruined by foreigners. They will have heard the same story in other countries, but it goes down particularly well in Australia where all the white population is within a few generations of being an immigrant anyway.

11. Never be the first retailer to reduce the price on high volume lines. This reprehensible practice can erode consumer confidence, lead to tiresome bulk buying schemes and other complicated involvements with strangers. It can also attract the worst kind of customers. Customers must be very carefully selected and bulk buying is the province of the big chains.

For your own record keeping it is, as a general rule, probably better not to be overheard publicly referring to `orderly marketing'. These two words are a clear signal to many cynical members of the public that they are about to be `screwed' by a cartel or a combine of some sort. And you don't want to give the game away, do you?

Gift wrapping your customer's purchase obviously involves fancy paper, ribbon and all sorts of complications. Don't mention it and probably nobody else will. If your competitors prove that gift wrapping is popular, charge enough to discourage people asking for it a second time. Otherwise you might end up giving your business a reputation for being pushy, or, even worse, a pushover.

Packaging should be adequate for the customer to get the goods home in reasonable condition; thereafter little old ladies with gardening gloves and an electric bread knife should be able to get the packaging undone. (A chainsaw would be overdoing it and, in any case, few little old ladies have chainsaws).

Ignore the growing number of people who live alone and who protest that they end up throwing out a large part of the prepackaged perishibles that they are forced to buy. What nuisances! Only a few will find a retailer who will package in small quantities.

Providing `feedback' postcards for your customers to return to you would be asking for trouble. Who wants to know, anyway? The fact that your competitors check on their customers' opinions is their problem; you only have to see their increasing sales figures to know that.

Newfangled technology is another hazard. For example, facsimile machines might involve you in reading an instruction manual.

If you decide to take the plunge and accept credit cards, make it clear that only the best will do. Accept only the more exotic cards as befits your prestige -- it will help to keep your card fees to a minimum. Under no circumstances accept a card that ordinary people are likely to be carrying, such as Bankcard or Visa.

Personal cheques, even from your brother, your mother-in-law/ father-in-law, the archbishop or Mr Big could be the thin end of the wedge. A `cash only' policy may promote your competitors' business but you will be secure in the conviction that you have adhered to `policy'. (`Policy' is the methodology by which all activity can be stifled. It includes the working rules that have been adopted over the years to meet particular, and perhaps forgotten, situations.

The study of the nature of policy can be conveniently left for the more leisurely retirement years.)

If you cannot control the urge to allow credit, make sure that the credit is for no more than seven days. Remember that it is standard business practice these days to ignore customers' credit records; it is more macho to assume that you will outwit them, no matter what their record is. Send reminders, if not the original bill, to customers each week with a rubber stamp stating in red `PAST DUE' (adding the phrase `you shiftless fly-by-night' might be overdoing it).

Firstly, goods should be shipped to a port of entry convenient to you; smaller ports nearer to the customer will be unable to provide the services you are used to and may even involve you with people who do not speak English. It is the customer who has the time and incentive to arrange customs clearance and transport in his or her local area. (Never use an atlas).

Phone calls during Australian working hours are always appropriate: customers cannot expect to sleep during the night and do business with you. Economy rates can be ignored; overheads are a fact of life and are tax deductible anyway. The Federal Treasury largely pays for this, not you. If you must make international calls, practise the technique of calling your customer, then claim you have an emergency and ask him to ring back in five minutes. That way, the customer pays for the expensive calls, not you.

When your customer rings back, insist on speaking English. If he doesn't understand you, just speak louder. You can relieve your feelings by muttering softly `Speak Australian, you ignorant twit'. Then wait quietly for results.

Australian trade missions, consulates and embassies overseas are infested with bureaucrats. Though they

may claim to have something to offer in the way of international experience, languages and so on, they should either be avoided or made totally responsible for any stuff-ups you have overseas. Your competitors know that cooperation with government departments is just not possible. Austrade and Australian trade missions overseas are a socialist plot, started by previous conservative governments in the course of some extraordinary political aberration.

Don't ship goods until the cash is in your own currency in your local bank; export guarantors such as the Export Finance and Insurance Group, letters of credit etc. are, like the Taxation Office, all part of the conspiracy by competitors to reduce your profits.

Competition, differing voltages for electrical goods, international or national standards or cultural practices are complications that can be dealt with later after those peculiar ethnics in Dubai, Manchester or Rangoon have given some practical proof that they are prepared to pay in advance for what you have to sell; on the second or third order, perhaps.

Always respond to any customer's confusion or complaint with an air of `bored' (sophisticated) calm. Anything else may expose your own shortcomings and provide an opportunity for further demands from the customer. Reports of more helpful attitudes in competitive establishments can be ignored; for the moment, anyway.

Keep a list of people/organisations to blame and appropriate excuses readily available at all times. Some handy, and hardy, ones are:

• Telecom
• the trucking company

• an absent employee
• the Taxation Office (Always complain about taxation; if you devote enough time to minimising tax the business will soon cease to take up much of your time. Only profits generate tax bills.)
• strikes/unions
• government rules and regulations (red tape)
• Australia Post. (Although Australia Post is among the better national mail services of the world, it is still possible to use it to stuff up your business by consistently ignoring Australia Post mail closing times. Used repeatedly, this practice educates customers to accept this excuse readily. After all, it happens every time you post something! Possibly Australia Post did not consult you or your timetable when it set up its mail box clearance times, but this is so typical of government authorities isn't it?)
• If all else fails, take refuge in patriotism (or healthy local chauvinism), a relatively rare experience for the consumer these days).

12. Customers have an annoying habit of ringing you after they have bought a product or service. Make sure that whoever answers the phone gives his name in full no matter how irrelevent this piece of information is -- this practice will probably divert the caller's attention for a moment; he may forget what he is ringing to complain about. If he doesn't the next step is to hear the complaint or enquiry and to respond with a clear and simple expression of what you

can do for him. Then do something different! At least you've heard him out -- what more can he want?

The line `I'll get him to ring back' can be the solution to a number of day-to-day complaints. By allowing several days to elapse, you give the customer an opportunity to cool off and see his difficulties in a clearer light. Maybe he'll discover how to fix the problem. All By Himself.

Rest assured, if the problem is important and urgent enough, the customer will finally make this clear to you, one way or another. It may be a good idea, however, to change your approach if the customer starts screaming. People can be extraordinarily touchy.

Leave out an essential element in all written quotes. You can then blame the customer for any delay, because he has wasted time trying to find out what your quote really is.

Make your initial service fee high -- it discourages people from even talking to you.

Scheduling home service work can be quite difficult and may even involve, in extreme cases, your keeping in touch with the customer by phone. However, this can usually be avoided by prevailing on customers to keep themselves available at home for extended periods thus providing you with a great deal of flexibility as to when it will be convenient for you to fit the job in. You may also accommodate extra and chargeable trips to fetch parts that you don't happen to have with you. It would be unfortunate, too, if customers came to rely on such things as `agreed' times. Here, too, you obviously are entitled to some flexibility even though the customer may have taken time off work to meet you.

If the customer gets difficult about all this suggest that he leave his door unlocked so that you can get in any time you wish. Of course his insurance company may object, and perhaps the police may not approve, but that's not your problem, surely.

Find ways to emulate the gas heater installer who made a big business during his service calls of adjusting gas pressure, burning rate etc. He overlooked the fact that the thermostat fitted was the type effective only in a gas oven (that is, over 300 degrees Centigrade). What panache! It can take a trusting customer years to get to the bottom of that sort of thing.

Don't encourage customers to bring items in for service -- it is much more lucrative to make service calls at exhorbitant rates. You may encounter difficulty if you have lots of service calls to make -- you may even have to contemplate hiring additional service staff! It may be that the answer is to use various subterfuges to keep the business small enough so that you do all the service work yourself. Here this book can help you. Keeping the place small will avoid the need to keep qualified service people available. Proprietors, as apostles of private enterprise, will never be questioned as to their qualifications.

Keep the size of the bill for a service call from the customer until the latest possible moment. Some servicemen like to begin writing out the account the moment they arrive but keep in mind the possibility of running up a large bill before the householder realises that you are a serviceman. You might explore the possibilities of encouraging the local technical college to run courses in creative bill writing and plausible overtime charging.

The last thing you want is for customers to start believing that you regard their problems as anything more than an invitation to help yourself to some of their money.

Use the customer's phone to check something (anything) with your office: it adds to their phone bill, not yours. Two-way radios, CBs etc. are obviously adolescents' toys unworthy of even cursory investigation.

If the item that you sold originally has turned out to be, in fact, junk, never admit it. Remember that the abiding need is to make the customers feel that it is all their fault: quite reasonable when you remember that they created the problem by buying the item in the first place. Dismiss out of hand any possibility of there being a guarantee involved with any item you supply or repair.

Attempts by customers to rectify their own problems (particularly likely after several episodes like the gas heater/oven experience) must be nipped

in the bud. Replace anything that looks as if it has been in the shadow of a spanner. Outraged dignity, accompanied by threats of action by unions, management and the local electricity authority (if not the Australian Medical Association) is the only possible response. One tap with a spanner is the way to check equipment; if nothing falls off it's OK. Of course, service manuals should never be in the hands of the consumer; you never know where that would end. Never discuss the problem with the customer, particularly if he or she is the sinister type who shows some signs of understanding what is going on.

If you have a taste for high drama, after-sales `service' provides all sorts of opportunities for interaction with the community. For example:

• Have you ever left people without an operational washing machine for a week, particularly if they have small children? They are sure to tell all their friends about it and about you. (Keeping a spare second hand machine available for people in trouble is much too costly.)
• Have you ever painted a lavatory floor in a house with small children, using a `quick drying' paint that took forty-eight hours to dry?
• Have you ever watched the expression on the face of a householder when a serviceman installing a heater cut a hole in his floor with a chainsaw?
• Have you ever amazed a customer who discovered that the new part in the steering of his car had been made to fit using a piece cut out of a jam tin?

A final word about after-sales service. An after hours phone number, particularly if it's your private number, is a no-no. You never know who might use it, or when. It may even be someone with a real problem which they expect you to fix.

13. When difficulties in stuffing up small business prove to be really insurmountable for the individual or partnership, do not despair -- the bureaucracy is there to help. There is a diversity of government departments and other centralised bureaucracies involved -- financial institutions, administrators of shopping malls etc. -- all with an intense, if not active, interest in small business. It is appropriate now that we address the bureausaurs in the unlikely event that they overlook one or two possibilities and hence fail to play their role in the country's economy.

One of the best and simplest ways to assist small businesspeople to go wrong is to present them with a myriad of forms to fill in. The forms may be both obscure and irrelevant to any apparent purpose, but purport to be necessary to fulfil the myriad regulations pertaining to small business.

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*We must thank Professor Barry Ninham of the Australian National University who found this very useful word.

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One of the joys of bureaucracy is that it can appear to be coming from all directions ; for example reports have it that to open a milk bar in one State requires fourteen different licences. Some possibilities (statistics on all of which might be needed sometime) are: building standards, health regulations, salaries, income tax, leave/ long service leave, flextime, company law, superannuation, operating licences, unions, operating hours...

All forms must be filled in by a certain date, a different date for each one. Each form should ask for information not normally available on the date the form must be filled in by, such as wholesale purchases for the following month.

And of course changing the regulations fairly frequently will ensure that the businesspeople fill in the wrong forms. That way there will be plenty of jobs in your organisation and the small businessperson won't have time for such irrelevancies as customers, stock and sales.

You should start your career with some training in `management science', which provides a view of the world that makes decisions easy. Assume that the world runs on greed and greed only; ignore those red herrings that make life complicated (some say worthwhile). You will quickly develop ideas of authority and diffuse accountability and if you change the rules fairly often, there will be plenty of jobs for everyone. With a little patience you can build up the paperwork into a major factor for small business which will provide you with an occupation and frequent promotion for the rest of your working life. And you always have the response to complainers: `If you are in business, you should know the regulations; it's not our job to teach you or to pay fines for overlooking our requirements.' You effectively have quite a free hand with this sort of creative control.

You know you have been successful when the public institutions with which you've been involved get privatised and the private institutions go bankrupt.

Of course, as the media and politicians have grasped long ago, the only entrepreneurs in the country whom you do need to take seriously are the relatively small group characterised by our national financiers. Experience has shown that if these people experience difficulty with their day-to-day trading operations, then you do have a serious problem. After all this competition business can be overdone and we need the sharks of the business world to buy out the entrepreneurs who keep coming up with new and disturbing ideas or who merely do jobs that need doing. Competition can get very messy for bureausaurs and make regulation a very difficult business requiring lots of hard work, deep thought and some knowledge of what happened before you even learned to read and write. Big is beautiful; big can usually find a way to keep the media quiet, too.

Of course, you and the politicians do not appear to have much to fear from investigative journalism, except for the possibility of small business producing an articulate spokesperson with time to spare. And if you do your job properly that's not likely, is it!

14. Most people who have outmanoeuvred their subconscious and are now running thriving businesses mention persistence as the secret of their success. Solving these problems, or working one's way through them, is the same kind of undertaking as moving mountains. It takes a lot of faith.

Diligent readers will be able to find many books, serious and `not so serious' on the operations of small business. The Managing the small business series, published by the Australian Government Publishing Service and available from Commonwealth Government Bookshops, has many titles to assist the small business entrepreneur.

We are not in the business of making moral judgments; we are trying to describe how it often looks to the customer. Our effort is a constructive one, despite any superficial appearances to the contrary. Solutions to the difficulties presented are usually fairly obvious.

The authors are well aware that there is another book to be written about the ways customers can frustrate their own objectives. The authors are, in fact, writing this book at the moment (and might resist the temptation to use the title `The empire fights back').

If, notwithstanding all the above, your business continues to occupy a disproportionate amount of your time, disconnect the automatic door opener, connect the door handle to the electricity power mains and catch a night flight to the Aegean under an assumed name. Good luck!

Further reading

(reprints and translations cited)

Dickens, Charles. Hard times. Bantam Books, New York, 1981.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and punishment. Bantam Books, New York, 1984.

Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Noontide Press, Costa Mesa, Calif., 1986.

Hugo, Victor. Les miserables. Penguin, New York, 1982.

Loyola, Ignatius. Spiritual exercises. Loyola University Press, 1959.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Luigi Ricci trans. OUP, London, 1935.

Ortega Y Gasset, Jose. The revolt of the masses. Unwin Books, London, 1972.

Sade, Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de. Selected letters. Beekman Pubs, Woodstock, New York, 1965.