In my former life as a regional manager, I had both ‘corporate office’ experience and I was also active in the field, working with the same stores and employees that I had come up through. This ‘front line’ experience helped me to appreciate the silly and often ridiculous ways that those at corporate, you might say, the Ivory Tower, would interfere with the company’s real mission which is to grow the business by meeting and exceeding customer expectations. Twenty five years in retail has ingrained in me an ability to spot stupidity a mile away, as I did last week.

I was on a tight schedule as usual and one of my stops was at my personal bank to deposit a check. I pulled in to the drive through and after waiting almost 10 minutes the attendant returned to tell me that they couldn’t deposit my check because it looked altered. What?

It was my own company check, written by me to myself, to be deposited (not cashed!) into the personal checking account I had with this bank. It seems that the bank has a policy of not accepting checks that may appear to be altered. At first glance this seems like a worthwhile safety policy for all concerned, but what were they objecting to?

The clerk explained that the date looked altered. They said that they couldn’t tell if the date was February 12 or 13! It was not altered, perhaps my messy handwriting, but in either case, what difference could this possible make, it was February 13? At this point I wasn’t mad, I was stunned in disbelief.

I realized that the clerk was just following orders and not the one to be upset with so I asked if the manager was inside. He said that she was but that she already OK’d this! “Tell her I’ll be right in.”

I drove around, parked and went inside where the manager was waiting for me. She re-explained the banks policy and showed me that the date on my check was not clear! Since it was already February 13 I asked what possible difference it could make and she just repeated the banks ‘no alterations’ policy. Now I was getting streamed.

Here are the facts as I explained them to the branch manager.
• You know me by sight as one of your customers
• You personally opened up our checking and savings accounts
• You processed our home equity loan six months ago
• You know that I own my own business, that this is my company check, written by me
• And finally, I’m not looking to withdraw money; I’m depositing this money into your bank!

No dice. I had to drive home, write another check and come back. Despite my growing red face I still recognized that even the branch manager was not the policy maker so I asked who was and if we could get them on the phone. Surprisingly she obliged and she got the banks controller on the phone to clarify their ‘no alterations’ policy. Having told the controller the facts as I just outlined above, the branch manager then said to the ‘Ivory Tower’ controller that even though I know Jim, if I accept this check I will be written up, right? She was told, “Yes you will.”

And there you have it. The branch manager was afraid for her job and the result was one of major inconvenience for a good customer. By the way, this bank has also been courting me to move my business banking to their bank. Not going to happen.

This is yet another example of a policy created in the Ivory Tower, combined with zero tolerance for any common sense to be applied by the folks entrusted to actually interact with and serve their customers. It’s no wonder so many businesses are in serious trouble.

Many times policies are created in the ivory tower in the heat of the moment, when something bad or unfortunate happens at the store level. Typically, the policies created are an over reaction to something that rarely happens and in fact create impediments to customers trying to do business. A couple questions for you as I close this rant.

• Do you have any of these policies in your business?
• Do you trust your front line staff to do what’s necessary to serve and please your customers?

Remember, customers have many options. Make it easy for your customers to do business with you. By the way, when I left the bank I drive to another location less than 2 miles away and they immediately deposited my check!

The secret to successful newsletter publishing is writing your newsletter correctly. When I speak live I often refer to this as ‘clean writing.’

Clean writing is writing that doesn’t call attention to itself. Clean writing is free of grammatical and spelling errors. Here are some tips on how to write clean copy. If you produce a customer or company newsletter I suggest following these five tips.

1. Write more than one draft. Professional writers almost always write more than one draft. Next, sleep on it, then when you come back to a piece, it’s easier to spot errors and rough phrases. It’s easier to see how to improve your work.

2. Use your spell check, but don’t make this your only spelling and grammar check. Spell-check programs are great, and you can even use them to improve your writing over time. But they can miss important things. Spell checking programs are excellent at finding words that are spelled incorrectly. But they can’t tell if a correctly spelled word is the word you meant or if it’s the right word for the situation.

3. Here’s a tip for Microsoft Word users. There’s a feature built into the grammar checking function that can help you improve your writing. Select the option that gives you readability statistics when you check spelling and grammar. Then every spell-check will give you two helpful statistics. 1) The Flesch Reading Ease Score gives you a measure of how easy your piece is to read. You want to make this number as high as possible. 2) The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level measures readability in a different way. It computes the lowest grade level that can read your piece and easily understand it. You want to get this below 10 and usually above 6 for newsletter copy. Fortunately, one of the best ways to judge the quality and readability of your writing is also one of the easiest.

4. Read your writing out loud. This is a critically important strategy. Don’t read your newsletter articles on your monitor. Instead, print them out and then read it. Even better, have someone else read your piece out loud to you. Reading aloud calls attention to every rough spot and unnatural phrasing. You’ll instantly discover that the way you talk out loud is not necessarily how you write, and your copy will swiftly improve. I suggest doing this for everything you write.

5. Get someone else to edit and proofread your articles. When we look at our own writing, we usually see what we intended to write. We’re likely to skip over phrasing problems and not spot errors in word usage, spelling, and typos. There’s an expression in the information marketing world: “Good is good enough, get it out there.” I believe that. I don’t necessarily strive for perfection. I strive for doing the best job I can.

To be honest with you, I use an outside proofing company. I can send them anything. I can send them PDFs, Word documents, whatever. For a very, very reasonable fee, two English majors read over it then send it back with their comments and suggestions. It’s very cheap. I think it’s either $9 or $11 for a page, which is 500 words, very cheap. One of the hardest things in the world is to proofread your own stuff.

Again, the secret to successful newsletter publishing is writing your newsletter correctly. The reason for this is fairly simple; the newsletters that get read are the ones that produce results.

People today are bombarded with messages and information all competing for attention. Think about how you open your mail. The odds are pretty good that you do it near a wastebasket. You zip through the pile of mail, flipping most of the envelopes into the wastebasket unopened.

Then you look at what’s left and you decide, “What am I going to read now?” If you’re like most people you’ll answer that question by figuring out how long it will take to read each piece. The magic threshold that I preach for customer newsletters is ten minutes or less. You read things that you think will take less than ten minutes or less and give you value. Everything else gets set aside to possibly read later, and for many of us, “later” never comes. Is your current newsletter in the ‘later’ pile?

That’s how your customers work. They cull out what they think will be interesting and helpful from the mounds of incoming information. No individual article should take more than three or four minutes to read and ideally each article should fit on part of a single page. On occasion it is okay to have an article continue to a different page, but don’t make it continue a third time as this is too much work for your reader (translation = not fun!), and most readers will quickly lose interest.

So relax, breath a sign of relief, and simply put out a high quality 2- or 4-page newsletter every month. For most customer newsletters (not subscription based), less is more and will do more for your business simply because they’ll get read! If you’re interested in having your newsletter ‘done-for-you’ every month check out www.NoHassleNewsletters.com – you’ll love it!

Get more newsletter tips as well as other marketing and entrepreneurial success strategies on video at http://www.NewsletterGuru.TV.