Taking an interest in your Superannuation

Here is a question that caught me by surprise a couple of days ago: Do you know the exact figure of the return you or your manager earned on your superannuation last year?

In many cases our superanniation is one of the most significant assets we own, ranking up there with our house, but we often don’t pro-actively manage this asset.

Often these funds are “almost invisible” because we rarely have to pay them by cheque and we sometimes have the mindset that we can’t do anything with them until we retire and that is a long way off, that we will worry about them in detail closer  to that time.

The law of compounding interest is SHOUTING at us otherwise. The more you make on your funds now, the more those profits in turn work for you over and over again in the future to compound and earn greater profits.

I am not giving financial advice in this note but I do invite you to look at your fund and investigate the options including management costs and the spread of assets that your fund has.

Consider the total range of investments available including those outside the usual range that super funds typically hold such as cash, equities, managed funds. What about real estate or physical precious metals (The bullion type – not the paper type that say you have the right to the metal).

Also check how the funds manager earns their fees – why would they extensively research and work with investment modes that do not provide them a commission?

A logical place to start is to get a copy of the report on your funds performance over the last 12 months and then discuss this with your professional advisors.

Don’t forget to do the same with the super fund of your spouse.

Sales People can learn with a laugh

The best sales people can ask questions to uncover the needs and wants of their potential customers and then expound the features and benefits of their products or services to meet those needs and wants.

Here are two training methods that will give your team a bit of a laugh but they are very effective at training them to ask searching open questions.

The Shoe-Box

Put an object (like a stapler) into a shoe box and take it in to a sales meeting. Place it on the table and the team must ask you questions until they figure out what is in the box.

They will start by asking closed questions Eg. Can you eat it? No. But they will soon figure out they get much more information by asking open questions: Describe the shape of the object.

When they master simple stuff like a stapler and an apple try some toughies (like a hinge off a door).

The Trading Post

Cut an advertisement from the classified for sale section of the paper. Select a member of the team to do a role play telephone call to you. Show the ad to all the others. The role play person must ask questions to try to figure out what you are selling. Run this like a phone call

Most often the ego of a sales person will lead to a reluctance  to join in these games but very rapidly a person who has played them can run rings around one who hasn’t – then who’s laughing? – especially if they sell for commission.

Two under-utilised labour secrets

There are two ways to get cheap labour into your business. Now when I say cheap, I don’t mean ripping them off type cheap, but really good value for money cheap.

These two segments are :

 Mums and young students

There are so many mums that would love a few hours work each week while the kids are at school. They are easy to train and wonderful to have around and think of the skills they bring. They are usually experienced, they naturally have multitasking skills, they are usually stable and they enjoy work because it is their exit from the usual household (broad generalizations here of course). We always get great response when we advertise in the local paper for these roles and are staggered by the quality of the people out there.

The second category is young students – those who are still in the later years of their school life ( younger than university age) In many businesses you can give a student a job that takes away a large number of tasks from existing staff. These are the lower skill requirement tasks that can be trained. The biggest secret to these students is to create a checklist of all the things they have to do each week, train them thoroughly and repeatedly on the tasks and get them to check off the list each week.

As they get to know your business you will be amazed at how much they can achieve and you will probably find they can work longer hours in the school holidays so store up tasks for them like filing and scanning archive records.

If you are hiring students I see the deal as a two way street. Your obligations are to teach them. Teach them office procedures, business practices, social interaction skills with other staff – get them along to the staff meetings etc.

And finally pay. I have an easy rule of thumb. I ask them how much all their friends ( who are probably working a checkout at a supermarket or similar) are earning per hour and I pay them more – it might only be another dollar per hour but it raises their self esteem and their work ethic and the monetary difference it makes is negligible.

You may have to cycle through a few of these kids before you find a good one but when you do it is like finding a nugget of gold.