Your part in the tragedy (XI) - When the bullets don't bounce off anymore...

One of the problems we face as advisers is the subject of immortality. I may have already mentioned the fact that I was born in 1956, which makes me 28 of course, and in my busy life I was forced to confront immortality reasonably early on into proceedings. Primarily it was other folk's lack of immortality that drew my attention but more recently my own came in for an enforced review, triggered by the untimely departure of a close friend who was 2 years younger than me.

When you take the time to look at the things around you that could go wrong, you could be forgiven for being stunned into prevarication by the sheer size of the list. When you prune out some of the less reasonable items, say space debris impact or tropical diseases it starts to look a little less daunting.

Every now and then - you will hear something life changing for you. Such as "Will you marry me"; "the job is yours"; "It's a girl" (or in my case, congratulations, it's a girl and two boys. you're having triplets).

I was looking through the death notices from the "hatched, matched and dispatched" section of the newspaper the other day and was encouraged by seeing that I was not "mentioned in dispatches".

There is an emerging trend in our profession for firms with as few as 8 team members to appoint a full time Business Manager. (Some firms refer to this person as the CEO)

One option is to understand the value of your time and organise your day to be more productive  in generating business. Here are six concepts to help you do just that.

This time the phone call was neither good news nor truly bad, sad for sure but inevitable. Just a phone call from an accountant to let me know that someone we both knew had finally died after a protracted battle with a degenerative medical condition.

No doubt accountants will have read this week's Sunday Star Times article on the possible overhaul of trust regulations.

Are you with one of the seven out of ten businesses missing out on the cheapest, easiest way to generate sales?

I can quote this statistic as a fact because over the past seven years, thousands of businesses have told me so. For many of my speaking engagements I email a pre-conference survey to attendees. The tallied responses all sing the same sad song. Either no database; one kept but with minimal information; all universally not used apart from the rare exception.

My 6^th form Physics teacher was a memorable chap who I can still picture clearly today. He was straight to the point, direct in his meaning, immeasurably patient and it was he who provided the definition above.