Peter Hickey is the Managing Director and founder of MAUS.
Over his career, Mr Hickey has conducted training with companies such as BHP and TNT as well as organizations such as the Australian government. He has successfully performed consulting assignments for Optus, Pechiney and the NRMA and has run sales conferences for Baxter Health Care and Hertz. He has conducted numerous business seminars in Australia, Asia and South Africa and is often invited as a guest speaker on television and radio programs.
Author of the best selling book “The Timesaving Guide to Business and Marketing Planning” the following are some of Peter’s tips and tricks to succeeding in business…
1. Spend Mondays planning with your staff:
Spend 15-20 minutes with each of your key staff on Mondays, planning their week. Although this is time consuming for you personally, if it helps each of your 10 key personnel to achieve one extra goal that week, that is 10 extra goals that your organization has achieved.
2. Take Wednesday off:
One day a week I work from home and focus only on the planning, budgeting, organizational and legal requirements of my role as MD. This has probably been one of the most effective practices I have ever instituted and very much one of the major factors in our ability to be able to grow.
3. Dress casually on Friday:
Not only do the staff love this, but the variety of the week acts as a stress relief.
4. Understand your staff:
Your staff are the key to your success. They are people not robots. Treat them with respect and understanding and your investment will be rewarded tenfold.
5. Provide commission to employees:
Commission is a great motivator and a great disciplinary tool. Good employees become great employees when properly motivated.
6. Exude passion:
There is nothing that people respect more in life than someone that speaks passionately on a subject. Be passionate on your products, services and corporate identity. If you can’t get passionate then get out of what you are doing.
7. Focus on time blocks:
I plan in time blocks. Instead of saying a proposal will take me one afternoon, I plan that it will take me from 1 – 3:30. I then plan at 3:30 that I will complete another task. If I have important tasks scheduled, I shut the door for an hour to make sure that I can get them done.
8. Maintain a sense of urgency:
I see too many people spending days writing something when they should train themselves to write the same thing in 2 hours, or they hold meeting after meeting and delay projects. I hold the philosophy that you roll up your sleeves and get stuck straight into the task at hand. Have a “can do” attitude.
9. Benchmark and systemize:
Try to benchmark and systemize your organization. When you ask people for reports, get them to think in terms of numbers and averages i.e. how many customer service issues were there last week? Most managers accept an answer of not many or a few. In my book, this is next to useless. I want to hear the number of issues. I want to know how this compares to average. Having clear targets is the best way of improving.
10. Promote positivity:
Our organization is successful for a lot of reasons but one of the outstanding characteristics is the positive attitude. We only employ people with a positive attitude and endeavor to nurture that positivity from warehousing to top management. We have regular MAUS social events, and in general we try to adopt a flexible, caring attitude that builds loyalty.
