Are you hurting your reputation by wasting other peoples time, and find out why the Swiss laugh at

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and on this episode I'm going to talk about why we'd like to run our businesses like the Swiss railway system. It's because time matters. Being on time, being there on time, and delivering on time is important for our business. It's important for our business, but it's also important for the businesses of all those people that we deal with. So today we're going to look at scheduling and how you can use group scheduling and individual scheduling software to make sure that your business runs on time, but also that organizing that time doesn't take very much of your time. Because yes, you've guessed it, we can automate time scheduling. Welcome to the Speak PR Podcast. This is a show for entrepreneurs that want to learn how to get the most out of their businesses by using free and effective public relations. Now I'm prompted to talk about time because this morning we had a little bit of a calamity in the household where the 2 parents hadn't really communicated properly. The daughters had arranged times to meet with friends and they'd told their friends, and the belief was that they'd told the parents and that the parents would talk to each other. And so as a result We ended up being late for an appointment. Not a great way to start a Saturday. The children were upset and disappointed because they they like to be on time, and so of course it got me to thinking about how being late or rearranging schedules can impact our reputation at work as well. Now, when we're late or disorganized in scheduling, it It first of all weakens our position. It just makes us look as though we're not in control, makes us look as though we're not in control of our own time. And obviously, when we're managing other people, staff, suppliers, or customers, not being in control of our own time creates just a huge amount of stress. There's one view, of course, that when you're not on time, you're kind of stealing from the other person who was there on time. They made the effort to be there, and you didn't. So that's not fair. Now, being late wastes time because, of course, you normally find that you've got to try and catch up and do what you were supposed to do in the full hour in maybe 40 or 50 minutes. So what we do actually then is to create a rushed job. Now, for those of us in the time-based businesses, being late. Or being not there at all wastes money. You know, if you look at why people go to visit the doctor or the lawyer, it's because the doctors and the lawyers don't waste their time by traveling for free. So people come to our house and they don't charge for the trip; they've given away money. So there's a reason why we all go to visit the lawyer, visit the accountant, visit. Visit the doctor and why those are some of the best-paid professions because actually they're logging their time in very efficiently. Being late or being in the wrong place just makes us also look scatterbrained. Just makes us look not focused like this morning. So that's important because we get judged on our ability to manage ourselves and that translates into how people think we're going to manage the work that we're going to do for them. So if we're late and we're saying that we're an efficient and careful surgeon, or that we are a skilled and careful architect, but we're late, it looks as though we're not even in control of our own faculties, let alone in charge of the faculties that we're going to bring to bear for our clients. So overall, being late ultimately also tends to annoy the other party. I certainly will wait 15 minutes for somebody and then I leave, and I think that's probably a pretty good guide. And if they're going to be late 15 minutes, then I would like them to tell me that, and I would tell people if we're going to be late as well. So it's about respect, I suppose, as much as anything else, being on time. So I've been spending quite a bit of time myself, especially as I have a distributed team. And for those of us that are now working with teams that are remote, we can no longer just shout out and ask people, you know, if they're free on a Thursday at 2 o'clock. It needs to be more organized than that. The challenge, of course, is that we're all using technology, and we're often using more than one operating system that is a combination probably of personal systems, mobile phones running on Android or iOS, and professional systems perhaps working on Microsoft, for example, on the Microsoft Outlook or Teams, or on the Google platform, for example, or for myself on iCloud. And then plus the huge number and growing number of softwares that we have for things like project management like Asana. So we've got this issue as we try and schedule our time, and I've been working on this myself in the last couple of months. How do I schedule my professional time across time zones, and how do I schedule that within myself, my own schedule, but also that of my teams and my clients? But also then, how do I differentiate between what is my time, you know, for example, getting people to school or my time to go for a run or listen to a podcast versus professional time. And often we use one system for personal time and one for professional time, and that creates another group of conflicts. So it's going to just look at some of the tools that we can use and also some of the considerations that we can use. Now, I've been doing it by looking at a couple of criteria. One is the flexibility. So my business, the PR business East West PR, is relatively simple. So people are booking time, but they're booking time with different values. So the appointment scheduling software that, that I need enables me to have, for example, a 15-minute event that might be a free chat, but also maybe a 60-minute podcast which is free. But if it's a client or a consulting arrangement, a 45-minute paid-for slot which is then linked to a payment gateway. In this particular case, I'm using PayPal, as I guess a lot of us are. So I need a system that enables me to customise the time and the meeting slot and to give it a description and also then to integrate some payment. But also what I need to do is to send people that have booked that time some instructions because all of my work now is spent on reducing the time that I do repeatable tasks. How can I automate? So someone wants to book, for example, a brief the agency session with me for 45 minutes. I send them a list of questions when they book the appointment. A lot of us do this already, but it just saves a task. So flexibility, looking at what kind of appointments I can book, how I can book them, and do those systems then synchronize. So the second is Calendar syncing. I mentioned that most of us have got personal calendars and professional ones, and the systems that we're using, for example, you know, Android and iOS, are different to the systems that are created by the professional services app people like Acuity or Calendly. So what we have to do is to ensure that they synchronise. I've been using Calendly And that's been, been excellent, and that synchronises very nicely with my iCloud account. But the calendar that we choose needs to sync with, for example, your— if it's a Google Calendar, or if it's a Microsoft Outlook calendar, or if it's any other calendaring app that some people are using now that have got these ones that block out certain kind of events. So that's, that's another issue is calendar syncing. Another is this payment processing that I mentioned, for example. So there are different payment methods. Obviously I'm using PayPal, but there's also, for example, Stripe, there's TransferWise. Some allow direct payment to your bank account. Some will allow taking a deposit for an appointment before the appointment has actually taken place. And to enable, for example, refunds to take place. Because so many of us now attach time and money to one another, it's obvious and essential that we can link the appointment booking with the payment processing because it saves us then trying to send an invoice after the event, which then creates extra work for us. The other thing then is multiple points of entry. Access. So I have appointment booking through my website, but also I attach a link in my email for people to make a booking. Some of the booking applications, the more established ones, they allow us to embed a widget into, for example, our Facebook or our WordPress websites or into our Google my business websites. So looking at whether the calendar app that you choose enables you to have appointments set for you on multiple points of access is also really important. One element that I've been looking at is the integration with other calendars, so Outlook, Office 365, Exchange, iCloud, Google Calendar seem to be the main ones. But what we found is that some of these now platforms like Asana, for example, that has got also— or Basecamp— these project management calendars also need to synchronise with our own desktop and mobile phone calendars. Another application that I particularly particularly like and I'm looking at is the SMS integration. So notifications— the more powerful calendaring systems will send notifications to all parties, not just through email, but for example through SMS. You might have heard earlier on in— while I was recording this, the sound of wood pigeons, because I'm living in the countryside and it's very hot here today. So I've got the, the doors open in the TARDIS and The sun is streaming through the doors. You might have heard pigeons cooing in the background. The in the old days, pigeons were used for sending messages. Unfortunately, sometimes they got caught on the way and eaten. But no one is offering pigeon dispatch services. I notice maybe that's a new opportunity. But SMS may be the modern equivalent, I think. And sites like Acuity are using that and. Zoho has an integration with SMSs, and Acuity is used by Wealth Builders, who I'm a member of here in the UK, and, and I get a really nice SMS which I guess is integrated to their content management system, which is replacing the need for them to send me or call me. One other point that is worth considering is if you need to set up appointments offline and have them synchronized. It used to be that a Of course, we had desktop software, and it would go online periodically to synchronize. I remember with Exchange back in the late '90s, we would have a Microsoft Exchange server, but it would only synchronize with everybody once a day. Amazing to think that, isn't it? But now there's a there's a company called Setmore that has an appointment booking app which allows itself. Be set and allows it with a desktop app for people to set an appointment. Now this may be good, for example, if you're in the field and you don't have mobile connectivity. That's the only reason I can think of why you wouldn't want to have real-time synchronization, but it also operates and allows for integrations with business software like Mailchimp. And QuickBooks and Salesforce and Zendesk and Zoho. So integration is such a key part now of scheduling because we're all using multiple platforms and multiple apps on multiple devices. Now where I went with this was I started with Calendly, but then we started to use the Zoho CRM. And Zoho One, which is the kind of the, the platform with over 50 apps in it for $40 a month, has Zoho Bookings. So I wanted to integrate my Zoho CRM with my Zoho Bookings and my team because we've got Zoho Projects, and I wanted to just have one platform for managing all, all environments. The problem we found was that they Calendly and Zoho and my iCloud to create a 3-way synchronization was creating too many duplicate events. We had to take the decision to remove Calendly from the group. So now we just have the synchronization between Zoho and iCloud, which works nicely. But the one rub with Zoho is it doesn't currently integrate with Zoom. Now, for all of us that are using Zoom, Zoom or Microsoft Teams. The integration, for example, with Calendly and Zoom was very nice. It would enable someone to make a booking and for that to automatically connect and issue an appointment generated by Zoom along with the, you know, the domain and the passcode. So it really was an all-in-one solution. But of course, if you need to integrate Microsoft Teams, then you have extra work to do. So what we're currently doing as a workaround is Zoho offers integration with GoToMeeting, and they have their own Zoho Meetings application, but they say they're going to be integrating Zoom very shortly. So we know that's on the horizon because they've integrated Zoom with the CRM already. What we'll do then for now is we're having to manually process the, the booking and send out an inquiry to people if they want Zoho Teams or Xero with Zoom. Then we will have to manually create that booking for them. So if we look at the pricing, then I'm doing that with Zoho because Bookings is part of the $40 a month bundle on Zoho One. But Acuity Scheduling, for example, has a free option and then paid plans for $15 a month. Calendly, I believe I paid about $150 a year for the company-wide account, which enables multiple users, so you can book for not just one person but for teams, which is another dimension of course we need to think about. There is also a company called Timeify which claims to have 45,000 businesses in 26 countries using their software. They're free for single users and startup, with £25 a month for small and medium size, and £42 a month for businesses with unique needs. I did a quick look on Capterra. Free trial scheduling software with automated scheduling, which I think is important. There are 68 companies that will offer you free trials with automated scheduling. Zapier has got a blog with the, what they call the top 10 best appointment scheduling software, but they don't include, for example, Calendly. Which seems like a pretty significant omission to me. So I'm not going to rely on that list. Personally, I've liked the Calendly and was very happy with that, but it doesn't suit my bigger needs of integrating the scheduling with my whole team and my whole project management applications. And I think it's bigger as a goal to integrate my business processes than just Zoom, but we all make these different decisions. Now obviously one of the considerations is about our business process, another is about our reputation. In 2018, the Bild in Germany ran an article saying that the, the once pride of the German state was its railways, that it used to be the envy of much of the world, but the national railway network is showing considerable signs of strain and decline. And there were accusations of chronic underinvestment in its infrastructure. And the Bild ran the article, and in it, it said, to the neighboring Swiss who are annoyed by German unpunctuality because it messes up their own train timetable, we're becoming a joke. So the important point here is that our own time and how we manage it isn't important just to us. Much like the German train system impacting the Swiss train system, our own time management impacts all of those around us. So with that, I hope that I've shared why, and I'm sure we all know why time is important, but also how to manage time. Even though we're small in our size of a business and we're using multiple locations and multiple logins and multiple platforms, There are tools out there that enable us to automate and to personalize at scale our time management. So with that, I wish you a good Saturday, the best of health, and a profitable business, and that you get some time to enjoy yourself this weekend.