1. Tipping is different. (Look it up on line before you go). In France, for example, waiters make a decent wage. You leave a Euro or two after a meal – not a percentage of the bill. This changes the dining experience, since waiters get paid the same no matter how much you eat and drink or how quickly they turn the tables. They don’t rush to get your drink order, or try to force feed you desert. I don’t know if this is the chicken or the egg to dining being a much more leisurely affair.

2. There are a lot more small shops and they don’t all have the same things. So shopping is more of a gathering experience and less of a hunt (for those of you who’ve seen Rob Becker’s Defending the Caveman) I don’t know if this is related, but French law forbids stores to have sales except for twice a year – January and July.

3. If you’re paying by credit card. Check with your card issuer to see if they charge for the currency conversion. Citbank charges 3%!! So before we went, we got Capital One cards which don’t charge anything. We’ll probably dump them after we pay off the bill because their commercials are so annoying.

Also most credit cards in Europe are smart cards with a chip imbedded. This limits the need to dial in each time you make a transaction. So they don’t take your card out of sight to scan it – they just bring a wireless gizmo to the table where they input your card and have you type your PIN. Then you don’t need to sign anything. But they also take American dumb cards and do make you sign the reciept.

4. Everything was really expensive. What cost a buck here cost a pound in London (that’s almost $2) and a euro ($1.35) in France. Gas was close to $8 a gallon. I don’t know how normal folks deal with it 52 weeks a year (as opposed to tourists who are there for 2). But I just learned that England has the 2nd best economy in Europe AND their minimum wage is close to $10 an hour. Maybe there’s a connection.

Most business people don’t like a high minimum wage because they see it as a cost. But there’s another side to it. No matter how low your costs, you can’t make money without a market. A higher minimum wage increases the amount your market has to spend on your goods. Henry Ford found this out when he doubled the prevailing pay rate to $5 a day. He had lower turn over costs and more people could afford to buy his cars.

5. Stereotypes put to death. Toilet paper in both cities was much better than I was led to believe. And the French were not rude to tourists. Many spoke English and most tried to. Menus in the tourist sections (which was almost everywhere) often had English subtitles.

The trip was wonderful. We went to London for history and Paris for food. London was fantastic and Paris more so. Partly because my wife’s cousin and her boyfriend are both architects in Paris (he’s a native) and they showed us around places that were (to use Matt’s words) really Frenchy. Places we would have never seen otherwise.

This is a business blog, not a travel blog, but in the next few posts I’ll share some of my impressions of both here.

The Starbucks incident. Dee drinks a lot of tea and the best in the US is at Starbucks. Why? they make the water hot enough – how hard is that? Surprisingly she found better tea in Paris (and many more high end tea houses) than in London. Mariage Freres has the most amazing selection of teas I’ve ever seen. Literally hundreds. I knew of black tea, green tea and even white tea. They also had red teas and blue teas. For a tea-totaler (get it?) like me they offered tea ice cream – 3 scoops, each one a different tea flavored ice cream. You don’t see that a Baskin Robbins.

Mariage Freres is obviously not Starbucks. Ignoring the milkshakes being marketed as coffee (which I won’t get into) Starbucks is the McDonalds of tea. I mean that only in a good way – you can find it almost everywhere and the product is consistent. So we stopped into a few when she wanted a dependable, cheap (what costs $1.50 in the US cost $3 – $4 in Paris but it was cheaper than the others) drink of tea.

In one Starbucks we ran into a trio of Americans. The first commented as we walked in, “That woman” referring to Dee, “is American but I don’t know why I know that”. Her friend replied, “It’s her bag”. Thus giving Dee a chance to discuss her theory that Amercians abroad can be indentified by their Vera Bradley hand bags. Apparently no one has snapped up the international Vera Bradley franchise. But the man in the trio asked “Aren’t you thrilled to find a Starbucks?”

Thrilled by a Starbucks? In Paris? What’s wrong with this picture? I was thrilled to eat sausage and cheese on a baguette so crusty it cut the roof of my mouth. Thrilled to drink wine in a place with casks lining the wall where you could bring an empty wine bottle and have them fill it for you, and where even the waitress smoked in the no smoking section. I was thrilled even to pay 25 euros ($32 -yipes!) for scallops that were sautéed and seasoned to a perfection I’d only imagined. Thrilled to see an open air market with chickens in a butcher case with their heads and feet still attached right next to animal organs I could barely identify – hearts, kidneys (or was that liver?) and would never buy. I was even more thrilled to see that the rotisserie next to that case contained a small pig on a spit (take that Boston Market!) some of which I did buy. It was superb. If I could be thrilled by finding a Starbucks in Paris, I would have stayed home.

Isn’t the point of travel to broaden yourself? To see things you don’t see at the mall? And I don’t mean in the sense of going abroad to “see the freaks”, and comment on how unusual these foreign places are. What if instead, you traveled to see how freaky we can be? To understand why someone would think it strange to buy a chicken without a head and feet attached? To try to figure out how people who create and appreciate the most exquisite perfumes in the world would reject an air conditioned restaurant and prefer to eat outdoors at café tables just inches away from smelly traffic on a sidewalk that smells like piss?

Takeaways:

• Go to Paris to eat. Really. (And drink tea if that’s your thing)
• Don’t make the business mistake of thinking all your customers are like you. Or that the ones who aren’t are weird. Your job is to get into their heads and figure out what they want – even before they know that’s what they want.

The sign of a growing business is no cash. That’s also the sign of a dying business. Here’s how to make sure you have the first, not the second.

I hesitate to say that money is what’s most important in your business, but it’s what’s most critical. Financial repercussions connect everything that happens in your business to every other thing that happens. The weird thing about money is it’s fungible – unlike almost anything else we value. Since every dollar is like every other dollar, we often don’t realize how big an impact managinge each one can have.

But when cash is tight, your company is like a person in precarious health. Normal things that most people do without thinking must be planned and monitored so they don’t have devastating consequences.

Do it when you need to squeeze every penny. Often for these reasons:

• You’ve got a lot of debt you need to pay off
• You’re growing really fast and need every penny
• You’re in start-up mode or launching a new product and don’t know when the market will respond

Companies should also do it, when they want to maximize profit. Otherwise, you can spend 20 years of your life working at something, make a living (not much more) and have a gnawing sensation that the business should have done better financially but they don’t know where the money went.

Why don’t small companies do it more better?

• They don’t know how
• It can be tedious and not as much fun as other parts of the business (thought it’s not rocket surgery).
• They think that it won’t really affect their decisions because cash is so tight. If that’s true you aren’t doing it right.

I’m working with a client who’s paid off a lot of debt and needs to start maximizing his profit. He’s just beginning to realize how critical every cash decision is. I’ll be posting how we develop the system for him to manage it.

Takeaways:

• Stay tuned for future posts on HOW to manage cash.
• In the meantime, you can see an overview of the concept here.

[tags] cashflow, business tool, manage cash, cash, profit, accounting [/tags]