Catalogue Sales Door-to-Door Done Wrong

Posted in money on 09.07.06@749 by pjh

Man just rang my doorbell, said “I left a catalogue a couple of days ago.”

If I hadn’t seen him deliver it then, I’d be as bewildered as you are now. There was no punchline, no sales pitch. Makes me want to shake him. But he’s gone now, so I’ll rant in your direction instead.

It’s a pyramid scheme of some sort, where someone drops off a catalogue and then collects it a few days later. They get paid by commission on your order, or doubtless by recruiting someone else to ‘run their own business’. The recruitment pitch is probably that the products sell themselves, and although you pay for the catalogues, they’re effectively zero-cost because of the collection and re-use. If you get them back, that is.

So this fellow, more enterprising that most, is coming around ringing doorbells on a Sunday to try to get his catalogues back. That’s his focus. Get the catalogue back.

There’s no money in getting it back, just cost savings. I think he’s lost sight of the purpose of the catalogue — product sales and commission. Surely he should be trying to sell me something — anything!

So this man who has taken the brave step of talking to me completely wasted the opp. He rang several doorbells at once, to deal with whoever whereever answered as efficiently as possible. No greeting, no “did you want anything then?”, no “did you need longer to look at it?”, no “is there anything in the same line that’s missing that I could source for you?”, no nothing. No warmth, no sales patter, no sale.

He was so wrapped up in the desperate hope and promise that the catalogue would do all of the selling for him, and that the catalogues wouldn’t set him back a penny — if only he can re-use them. You’ll have noticed already that he didn’t even properly ask for his catalogue back.

So much wasted energy focussed on the wrong aspect of what could be the right thing. Don’t you do that. Make the opportunity, and use it.

The catalogue itself was in my SO’s bedroom where she’d been looking at it, so I couldn’t give it back to him at the time. I left the catalogue outside as he requested, along with a copy of Geoff Burch’s Resistance is Useless. It hasn’t been collected yet…

A Failure of Joined-Up Marketing

Posted in money on 27.05.06@851 by pjh

I got a flyer through the door today
from a venerable nation-wide high-street shop.

I always look at these
to see what they’re selling and how
although I rarely buy anything.

Today I saw an offer for something
that I’ve wondered about getting for a long time now, and
at half price I just might bite.

So I went to my local branch to look for the product.
And couldn’t find it.

Sales staff were friendly
but knew nothing of the product being promoted
in the company flyer.

“Maybe its only in our larger shops.”
And which are those?
No one could say.
Neither could the company website.
(Although it could sell me the product at full price.)

That’s a sale lost. My
impulse to purchase abandoned in the face of
barriers to purchase.

So if you run a promo
Tell the sales staff about it.
And if the item is only in some locations
Make sure the customer can find it.

It’s not hard to get right
But it’s easy to get wrong.

Win more on the lottery with lotto-stats

Posted in money on 14.05.06@279 by pjh

I’ve recently gathered together lots of raw data from lotto draws around the world, and have started the process of analysing them. For example, I know the best and worst numbers to have played in the UK National Lottery (now Lotto) since it began. To keep up with my progress on putting the numbers together into meaningful and useful information, register for updates at lotto-stats.com.

By understanding how people choose numbers, and you can play smarter, and win more when your numbers come up. I don’t advocate playing the lottery as part of your retirement plan, but if you’re going to play, play smarter.

Jim Slater’s Company REFS Reviewed

Posted in money on 22.03.06@815 by pjh

I received my free sample copy of Jim Slater’s Company REFS this week. Eagerly awaited, I’ve tried a few times before to get a copy. This is the first time that their online form seems to have successfully connected with the back end. It took a week or so to arrive, but arrive it did, in a lovely padded envelope surrounded by a sheaf of order forms and brief instructions.

My first hint of hesitation came when I opened the CD case and saw, on the back side of the booklet facing the CD, the ominous words “Installation instructions for Windows“. At home I use a Mac, so it was hopeful at least that the operating system is mentioned. Into the CD slot it goes, but no joy. It’s a Windows-only beast, with a README file dating from last century.

The next day at work, I installed it. It’s a clunky looking spreadsheet of a program, with a quirky interface that doesn’t always behave as you’d expect. Spreadsheet is too grandiose a word, it’s a table of data that you can filter in simple ways. It seems that you, the user, have three key abilities:

  • create custom column views of whatever data items are available
  • create custom filters, or table views by applying simple conditions like these:
    • if this field’s value is greater than this constant
    • and this other field’s value is less that this constant
  • create portfolios of selected stocks, although I fail to see how this aids in anything. It may be more useful after a few updates of the REFS data.

It’s strictly a filter program, with no ability to calculate or filter on fields compared to other fields. For example, if I wanted to restrict a view to contain companies with a market cap of >= £100 Million at the 52-week low price, REFS just can’t do it.

I’ve also heard that the fundamental data used is from the last annual report, so may be well out of date. The only evidence of the five year data that they advertise is a handful of data columns of five year averages. Showing a company’s full data only reveals current year figures.

Is it worth £304 a year, which was the price for quarterly updates offered to me in return for my direct debit details? I doubt it, unless you’re looking for simple filters against constant values and are investing sums large enough to justify the cost. Even then, I know that Stephen Bland gets his fundies from elsewhere. You’ll be the first to know if my opinion changes.

How to Calculate your Net Worth

Posted in money on 05.03.06@635 by pjh

I’m trying to decide whether to open an ISA, the UK’s tax-shielded retirement investment account. To help me make my decision, I took a look at my current net worth and how it’s changed over the past year. In order to do that, I need to calculate my current and previous net worth figures in a way that makes them easier to compare. If it turns out that I’m spending less than I earn, then I’ll go for it.

To do this, I’ll be using what tax accountants call the cash basis. This means that I only care about transactions that involve cash flow. I don’t worry about accumulating income or debt, and I don’t include changes in valuation.

For example, you might have holdings in the stock market. You bought them for a particular price, yet the value that you could sell them for varies as the market moves. To make life easier in comparing two calculations, I’m not going to look at current market value, or realizable value, for any asset.

That’s actually a small lie. I’ve got some Premium Bonds that I paid a certain amount for, that I can access as cash at a week’s notice. I’ll treat this as a cash equivalent, just as though it were an ordinary bank account.

Step 1: Assets

An asset is something that you own, something that you paid for that has lasting value. List all of your bank accounts, savings bonds, etc., and their current balances. If you’re doing this for comparison purposes, you can omit any asset that hasn’t had more cash go in or out over the year.

From an accounting perspective, if anyone owes you money, that too is an asset known as a receivable. For my purpose, even though my landlord owes me a couple hundred for fixing a gas leak, it isn’t going to materially affect the outcome.

Houses and other major assets

I thought about houses as I wrote this, even though I rent. A house is an asset which has a fluctuating market value, from which I want to exclude the influence of a changing market. It also probably has a mortgage, and I do want to include the shrinking balance in my net worth. I’d do this by including it on both sides of the net worth calculation. Once as an asset, at it’s purchase price, and once as a liability (don’t worry, that’s the next section) for the mortgage. That way, I have a stable asset value, but still see the benefit of any overpayments or the downside of any payment holidays.

You could also choose to exclude the mortgage and house altogether on the grounds that the change to your net worth is negligible. Including it, especially if you’re in the first few years of payments, isn’t going to do much other than increase both sides of the equation, assets and liabilities, by about the same very large amount.

Step 2: Liabilities

A liability is something that you owe, a debt. For most people, this will be things like credit card balances, loans, mortgages, and the like. I want to keep this simple, so I’m going to exclude the credit cards that I pay off every month. Yes, it’s a liability, a debt that I’ll be paying very soon. Unless it’s unusually large it doesn’t matter, because I’ll be comparing net worth figures from one year to the next. I can treat this just as though it’s paying by cash, just deferred by a month.

If you are carrying credit card debt, then include the current balances in your list. I’ve got a credit card that’s in a zero-percent interest period, so it has a balance. I’ve included it in my list because it’s a longer-term debt than just month-to-month.

Step 3: Net Worth

In accountancy, there are three categories on a balance sheet. Know it or not, what you’ve just put together is a personal balance sheet. It’s a list of assets and liabilities. To put the balance into balance sheet, accountants use a third category, called equity or capital. For us this just means taking the total assets and subtracting the total liabilities.

If it’s positive, congratulations!, you’ve got some savings. If it’s negative, then you’re in debt, sorry.

I’ve got a spreadsheet that I use to calculate all of this, and if anyone’s interested I’ll sanitize it and post it.

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