The UK's Liveliest Small Business Newsletter
Old archive | New site
|
|
Brick No118: The ghost of Matt Weston past
By Matt Weston, Tuesday 7 December 2004 Last Friday - for the second time in as many months - I was accused of not being the real McCoy. (Somebody accused me of employing someone to ghost write business bricks). The previous email was way weirder: "Dear Matt. That I'm nearly sure is not your real name. You cannot expect people to trust you when you can't even give out your real name." It turns out the lady in question had been scammed by someone claiming to be a Matthew Weston Goss. To my horror, and according to the annals of "Smash Hits", my - wholly authentic and chosen by my ma and pa - first name and surname matches exactly the first name and (ahem) middle name of Eighties poster-boy/ Noughties has-been Matt Goss, front man of boy-band Bros. Huh? Why the heck would I make up a pseudonym? I had to direct the lady to check out Business Bricks Ltd at Companies House where I'm listed along with a Mr Owen Emyr Williams as a director. As you probably know you have to provide passport and bank info to set-up a company. But I'm still not sure she really believed me. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything Anyway. Now isn't the time or the place to bore you with the details. At the same time as I was accused of "ghosting" last Friday I spied this quote in "Pick Me Up", a incendiary newsletter that defies better description and is published by a couple of my pals. The quote: "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything." They half-inched it from Mark Twain. (Twain also quipped somewhere that there are over 800 ways to lie, making it a pretty complex business). A by-product of the virtual world is that people demand more and more transparency before they believe. (Transparency simply helps people to get at the truth.) And it - transparency - has become the No1 corporate government/ diplomatic/ bureaucratic buzz-word: Pakistan and India talk of "adding transparency" to their diplomatic exchanges . . . and the "Webster's New World College Dictionary" picked it out as the single word that best defined the spirit of 2003. For big businesses, "adding transparency" is a whole lot of bother. They have to remove layers, rules and spin. But for small businesses, it is easy. It always frustrates me when I see a small business masquerading as a big business. Why mimic the meaningless celebrity endorsements, the "canned" photos of suited models on your homepage, when all your customer really wants is to get at the truth? Why run a small business that feels like it is "ghosted"? And why spend all your energy branding, spinning and positioning your business in the mind of your customer, when the first question she wants answering is "Are you telling the truth?" And after all, to bastardise the Mark Twain quote, "If you tell the truth, you don't have to spin anything." More on this riff on Friday . . . Remember to sign up: back to top |
|
|
Link to us | Privacy Policy | Disclaimer | ©2005 Business Bricks Ltd
Designed by Mint Digital