4 ways to win business from the Olympics

Apparently 72% of business contracts for the Olympics have gone to SMEs;  22% to micro-businesses with fewer than 10 employees.  No, me neither.  So I was intrigued by this week’s ELSBC event to talk about how local businesses can get some of the action.  The opportunities are astounding, though they need a bit of creative thinking if you’re not in one of the obvious sectors like construction or accommodation.  From memory here are some key things to think about – of which easily the most important is the first:

• Register for free with Compete For- Olympic-related contracts are posted here, as  are opportunities with Crossrail, Transport for London and the Met Police.  The big Tier One contractors with the huge building and supply contracts post sub-contracts here and they’re required to offer a proportion of them to SMEs.  From the end of June the Met will be posting all contracts worth between £500 and £50,000 here too.
• Find out who’s won contracts in your field.  Could your competitors need a bit of extra capacity from you?  Are they going to be dropping smaller contracts that you could pick up while they concentrate on the Olympics?
• Look out for other Olympic-related opportunities.   There will be a number of National Houses set up by different countries to showcase themselves (I like the sound of Jamaica’s nine-day party in Finsbury Park).  As well as the Olympic village itself, there will be training camps and support camps all over the place (the American team will run its operations from a base at University of East London, for example).  There will be big events at the O2 (renamed the North Greenwich arena for the Olympics). They’ll all need supplying with stuff from transport to security, catering to printing, couriers to cleaning services.  More information about new procurement opportunities on the London 2012 site and the London Business Network
• Think about after the Games – the athletes’ village will be turned into homes for east Londoners and a new school is being built in the park, so there’s plenty more work in construction, and other opportunities too.  Keep an eye on Compete For and the Olympic Park Legacy Company

There are ony 58 weeks to go.  What are you waiting for?

Making money out of the old and sick

I ran a workshop for the management team of a chain of private care homes a few years ago.  They were concerned about their internal communications. They had a number of homes scattered across a wide area of the North East with a staff of workers technically described as unskilled, though Lord knows I couldn’t do the job.  The staff worked irregular shifts, many had English as their second language, almost none had access to a computer.  The standard internal techniques were obviously not going to work so we spent some time looking at  creative alternatives.

I was struck by the huge pride the staff took in the quality of the care they offered and by how beleaguered they felt as an industry.  They believed they were demonised as heartless profit-seekers,  maximising income by grabbing  granny’s life savings and offering her workhouse conditions cared for by untrained staff on minimum wage.

My workshoppers evidently didn’t fit that pattern.  They cared enough about their staff to spend time and money thinking about how to communicate with and train them.  They were proud of the  standard of care in their homes.  I went away chastened that I had bought into the stereotype too.

I’ve  thought of them again recently: when the debate started about whether the public sector should bail out the failing private provider Southern Cross; when the row over the private Castlebeck  home blew up; and when I read an interview with the magnificent Diana Athill in today’s Guardian under the heading “You can’t make money out of old people“.

Athill has lived in a care home she describes as “a dream” for more than a year and it does sound idyllic.  Crucially, in her opinion, her home is run as a not for profit Trust rather than a business required to clear a profit for shareholders.

You can believe as I do, and as my workshop showed, that not all private care homes are Castlebecks, that not everyone who works in the private sector  is a rapacious monster, and not everyone who works in the public sector is a selfless angel.  You can argue that the cost of providing high quality care for a rapidly aging population is  too high to be met out of general taxation alone.  But if your prime concern is to ensure that older people have a dignified, safe, comfortable home in which to see out their final years it’s hard to argue with Athill when she says:

You don’t set up an old people’s home as a private company unless you think you’re going to make a profit.  You can’t make a profit out of old people … Where need is serviced by the third sector it is civilised.  When it’s serviced by people trying to turn a profit, it’s not … If life is miserable in the main tranche of care homes, it is because the private sector is unsuited to this work.

5 ways to become (slightly) happier

I immediately warmed to the title of Oliver Burkeman’s event at the RSA – How to Become Slightly Happier.  There’s something pleasingly modest, reassuringly self-deprecating, politely English about it.  It won’t transform your life, it won’t make you rich, it might just, perhaps, help you deal with grey Monday mornings.  I like his sense of scale.

Having studied a mountain of self-help books, he has come up with some top tips for things which seem to work.  Thankfully they run counter to the mass of advice to transform your life through positive thinking which frankly just sounds exhausting (this in-built sloth might explain why my favourite tip is number 4)

1. Leave your thoughts alone.  Don’t work  hard on trying to think positively, don’t be yanked off course by negative emotions but don’t try to squelch them either.
2. Write your problems down – don’t try to solve them, just externalise them.
3. Cultivate randomness and new experiences rather than trying to control your environment.
4. Have really tiny goals; goals so laughably small that they can pass under the radar of the bit of the brain that predicts failure. Apparently Burkeman carries an egg timer around with him so that he can time  his goal to do two minutes of work at a time on difficult projects;  he knows people who have  got fit by starting with a brisk walk for 30-seconds every day. 
5. If bothered by perfectionism go into work one day and try just to be mediocre.  Try to function at about 60% and see what happens when the constant pressure to make everything perfect has gone.

There are of course related issues to think about here – do we really need other people to tell us how to be happy? Does paying for the advice make it more credible – or more likely to work? What is it about our society that seems to make so many people unhappy?  Is being unhappy (in small doses) a bad thing?   If there was no unhappiness would there be  progress? ( a question from the RSA audience, which prompted me to think – if there is no unhappiness does it matter that there’s no progress?)  But I’ve been writing this for more than 2 minutes already, and today is my day for being mediocre, so I’ll leave other people to wrestle with those.  I’m just going to re-set the timer and do at least, two averagely OK minutes on my new business plan.

Getting Lippy about violence against women

I’ve been putting off blogging about Nazziwa’s story because I have no idea what to say about it.  Watch, but be warned it’s not a comfortable few minutes.  Nazziwa’s husband routinely beat and threatened her and has cut off both her hands – for which he has been sentenced to a mere 10 years in prison.

What can you possibly say that isn’t a platitude, apart perhaps from just howling with rage?

Nazziwa’s story is part of Action Aid’s Get Lippy campaign for International Women’s Day.  The campaign site carries many other women’s stories and gives a chance to send  messages of support to them – which will appear like this at their destination.  Please do. It feels important to let them know that they are not alone.

Getting Lippy about forced marriage

All of the short films in Action Aid’s Get Lippy campaign for International Women’s Day are well worth watching.  There are some fantastic and humbling stories about courage in the face of terrible injustice.  One story that really caught my attention, was Mina’s.  She was given away in marriage as the settlement for a family feud when she was 6.  She hasn’t seen her parents for more than a decade. 

It is incomprehensible that any parent could do this to a child (though I’m extending my sympathy to Mina’s mother as well as Mina herself: I’m guessing she didn’t have much of a say in the transaction either). 

Hers is, sadly, not a rare story in Afghanistan.  It’s not unknown here either – though you’d hope not for such very young girls.  I was horrified when I worked on the last government’s strategy for dealing with violence against women, to discover how many instances of forced marriage  take place in this country each year – the UK Foreign Office’s Forced Marriage Unit, dealt with 1,600+ cases in 2009. 

Mina must be incredibly courageous to survive her experience and then have the guts to start campaigning for women’s rights in Afghanistan.  You can send her a message of support through the campaign site .  Spare a thought too for the women and girls from this country who are facing a similar fate.  Definitely something to get lippy about!

Password rage

Because I have a secret list of my passwords (written in code, kept under lock and key and guarded by a rabid dog, just incase the bank’s reading this),  I know that I have:

• 13 passwords for different computer/phone-type accounts (Blackberry,Twitter, WordPress, Skype  etc).
• 20 passwords for accounts with professional associations, companies I do business with etc.  Inexplicably this list includes 2 usernames for different bits of the Business Link site, each with its own password, oh, and a 12-digit government gateway ID.
• 9 house-related accounts – utilities companies, banks, insurance company etc, and
• 5 other accounts – which aren’t even mine,  I just keep track of them for the children

The pain of setting them all up has faded with time, but I know some of them have separate usernames attached, some of them don’t, all of them have passwords -  memorable, unguessable, mixing upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols to a dizzyingly complex degree. 

And when they work it’s fine. 

And when they don’t and you spend, as I just have, 15 sodding minutes going round and round the cycle of failing to log in, resetting the password,  re-entering the new password and the screen continuing to do that bloody annoying little sideways judder that’s probably supposed to be cute, but that  tells you that you’re going nowhere,  how in the name of all that is holy do you prevent yourself from smashing a shoe through the screen?

Laughter and madness and Grim-all-day

The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi  is a theatrical history containing tyrannical parents, insanity, insolvency,  alcoholism, depression, debtors’ prison,  child stars, singing ducks, performing dogs, and ruinously expensive tours of the provinces.   (I’m enjoying it so much that I’m writing this to put off finishing it.)  More than anything  it’s a study of outrageous artistic excess. 

To cash in on Nelson’s popularity as national hero after the Battle of the Nile, the management of Sadler’s Wells turned the theatre’s cellars into a huge reservoir, tore up the stage and built a huge “wooden bathtub” in its place which could hold 65,000 gallons of water  and in which they re-fought naval battles with miniature ships.  On opening night:

 from downstage the miniature fleet floated to the front, its sails and pennants shifting in the wind, processed before the orchestra and fired a salute to the audience that put them ‘in an extacy’… The ships readied for battle.  Deafening volleys were fired on both sides as custom-built fireworks rained down… puncturing sails, dismasting ships and punching holes in enemy hulls.  shipwrecked children struggled in the waves, mimicking drowning with their feet planted firmly on the bottom of the tank… smoke rolled out  into the auditorium… [and] when it cleared revealed the coup de theatre, a calm sea bobbing with flotsam and the Franco-Spanish fleet smashed and beaten.

I’d have paid to see that – or to have seen Grimaldi go on a balloon ride: through the proscenium and over the heads of the audience. 

Proving that there’s nothing new under the sun, Stott describes a publicity stunt  in which  clown Dicky Usher:

sailed from Southwark Bridge to Cumberland Gardens in a washtub drawn by four geese. Landing two and half hours later he swapped his tub for a carriage lashed to eight tomcats which he then intended to drive to Waterloo Road.

I had no idea about any of this:  that before the Victorians got their hands on it pantomime was both artistically vibrant and politically subversive; that performances could be so volatile  that Sadler’s Wells had spikes fitted to the front of the pit to stop members of the audience rushing the stage; that threats of price rises in 1809 led to months of rioting.

A re-fighting of the Battle of the Nile  is my suggestion for the Olympic opening ceremony – a surefire crowd pleaser (possibly not for the French, but it was a long time ago and hey, we’re all friends now).  I wish I had the money to bid for the film rights.

Never knowingly undersold

In 1970s weepie Kramer vs Kramer,  unemployed ad-space  salesman, Dustin Hoffman, has to find a job on Christmas Eve so that he can keep his son.  His pitch at interview is that he will take a job at a rate far below his normal salary  because he needs the work, thus helping his future employer to bag the employee bargain of a lifetime.  This being Hollywood, Dustin gets the gig and the floppy-haired son gets to stay with Dad who can thus perfect his French toast-making skills. 

I was reminded of this  for the first time in years as I read the increasingly unmissable Redundant Public Servant’s blog. Colleagues of our hero, who’ve been pushed out of work ahead of him, report that at interview, they’ve got the sense that anyone chasing a much lower paid job is an object of some suspicion.  That certainly rings  true to me.

My sense, bolstered from conversations with the odd recruitment consultant, is that applying for jobs that involve a significant drop in salary level or job title makes the applicant look desperate (which, admittedly they might be; but it’s never a good look). Even if they get the job, it devalues their CV in the long term.

More importantly, no matter how much employers know that it’s a buyer’s market out there with Dustin Hoffman-esque bargains to be had, they will  also fear that they are just a holding pen for the applicant – a finger in the financial dyke which will do until something better comes along. 

One of the standard job hunters’ bibles, Richard Bolles’ What Color is Your Parachute, lists the fears  interviewers have at the back of their minds during an interview,  which might stop a candidate getting the job.  Number four on the list is the fear that you’ll only stay around for a few weeks, or at most a few months and then quit without advance warning.  It’s a hard one to counter if the job you’re applying for pays significantly less than the one you’ve had to leave.   

Bolles’ suggested answer to the question Doesn’t this job represent a step down for you? by the way, is a chirpy and unarguable  No, it represents  a step up – from Welfare.  This does suggest another issue,  raised by Jenni Russell last week, about how to cushion the financial catastrophe which strikes the middle-class unemployed (for want of a better expression) when they lose their jobs and find a safety net of welfare benefits underneath them which doesn’t come close to meeting their needs.  Another blog post, perhaps…

Christmas time is here, by golly

It was the “‘Tis the season to be shopping” card nestling next to the “Merry Christmas Suckas!” one which bought on my annual bah humbug rant this year.  Brother, here we go again.

PS.  There is a version of this on YouTube which uses Tom Lehrer’s voice with the words written up on screen.  Badly.  Without a single apostrophe or indeed any other punctuation.  I discover it pains me too much to use it.  Does this say more about them or me?

Top tips for staying sane while unemployed

Flickr: Aflcio

Putting together the last post reminded me of the  experience of  unemployment (it may have been him without a job, but there was no doubt that we were  in it together).  It also set me thinking about what got us through. My mantra through the whole thing was “nothing lasts forever” – not plague, pestilence, nor even Tory governments.  Things will get better.  There will be a job, eventually.  The trick is dealing with the period between losing a job and having one again.  I’m not qualified to offer “how to find a job” advice, but here are some tips on keeping the shreds of your sanity together while you do:

1.  Do not under any circumstances define yourself by the state of being unemployed (equally when you get a job do not define yourself by that either.  Experience shows that these things are fleeting.  Look at Ireland.)  You are not a successful human being because you have a six-figure salary, nor are you an unsuccessful human being if you sign on.  The important thing is what kind of human being you are, not what you do (or don’t) for  a living.

2.  Do not take it personally if you have been made redundant.   You are not a bad person, a poor employee, or doomed to fail.  You are just, unfortunately, at the wrong end of a harsh set of circumstance which prove nothing about your skills, intelligence or performance in your job and are no indicator of what might happen in future. 

3. Continue to make plans for the future - not just things you are going to do when you get another job,  but plans for now.  There is nothing worse than living a life with the pause button pressed waiting for a job offer to start things moving again.  We were young and foolish, with no family ties  and fortunate that I had a secure job, so we blithely talked about buying a home together (remember when you could do that in London on one  salary?) and joked about him waving me off to work before he set to with the Hoover.  We did it, too.

4.  Use your time off constructively - start that novel, learn to play the bassoon, take up tap-dancing and go to the gym.  Or do some volunteer work, learn a language,  get politically active.  When the job comes (because as we know, nothing lasts forever) you will kick yourself for spending all that  time gloomily searching for a job and bemoan the fact that you only have 25 days-off a year.  Yes, your priority is to find a job, but there are 24 hours in every day.  Even accounting for sleeping, eating and polishing your CV that still leaves time to…

5.  Do something nice for yourself every day (oh, OK, every week if you’re really Puritan)  You’re having a hard time.  You deserve it.