March 23, 2010

Those elusive payday loan details

76Truth is a rather elusive and subjective topic.What is true from one’s perspective may not be true from another’s perspective. I do not hold truth as absolute, but I do know when someone is not being straightforward with me. I would rather have people tell me the hard truth than undermine my trust by making indirect or misleading halftruths.

Having an accurate assessment of a person’s knowledge of a situation is a stepping-stone toward building trust. Partnerships work when people have the confidence that what the other is saying is direct, truthful, and above board. While the truth may be subjective, a person’s sincerity in what they believe to be true is not. Jack, for example, runs a very large service company.His building management services are in demand.However, his customers cannot trust him because he avoids direct conversation about issues or problems. In short, he has a problem with candidness. He evades, stumbles, and misrepresents issues, and while he may not out-andout lie, many people doubt his honesty, destroying trust in the relationship.

February 24, 2010

How payday loan collaboration works

139Collaboration is the ability to create an environment of inclusion through sharing information and working together to achieve a goal with a mutual sense of duty.When we collaborate with each other, we share a responsibility to watch out for each other.When I talk about collaboration, I use a much broader definition than just getting work done, though that is an important component. Collaboration includes the ability to make joint decisions, effective two-way communication, listening, and helping each other get their needs met. It also means helping each other achieve relationship goals such as working on building trust or reaching a win-win outcome.When one party tries to collaborate and another party does not, frustration and mistrust often occur.

Being committed to the partnership is an important relationship element of trust. If I feel committed to helping us achieve our goals and objectives and feel that you are not, then I will not trust your motives or objectives. If I see that you have a high commitment to the partnership, I will have a sense that you are working to achieve our mutual objectives and a high sense of trust in you. When I feel you are committed to the partnership, I trust that you are going to work as hard as I am to ensure that the alliance will succeed. This builds trust in our commitment to the partnership.

November 21, 2009

Credit worthiness is a stable concept

18In order to arrive at a rating, one crucial assumption is made: credit worthiness is a stable concept. This means that historical data may be used to transform the information obtained from a company into estimates for default probability and loss severity. Since fundamentals change gradually over time, multinotch rating changes are unlikely. Rating agencies therefore use Outlooks and Watch Lists as leading indicators for potential rating changes. They signal in which direction the next rating step will probably occur. If, for example, a negative outlook is assigned, the rating agency usually defines certain criteria that have to be met by the issuer over a certain period of time, otherwise a rating downgrade can be expected. An example would be that a company must achieve positive free cash flows within a predetermined time-horizon. The failure to do so will result in the loss of the current rating.

October 25, 2009

Deciding where to position a credit

Positioning depends first on finding a niche or part of the market where there is space to establish a profitable position. To discover whether one exists requires an understanding of the trends and factors influencing the market.

How best to focus on the customer is another important decision. How will potential customers react to the message or offer? Or, to put it another way, what message will have the greatest impact on the customer? With positioning decisions, timing is important. First movers have a head start and can get to know the market in detail and build a strong customer-base, ideally establishing a rapport with customers. Brands that are not the first mover should endeavour to launch when the market leader is weak or quiet, or both.

October 23, 2009

Avoiding blood on the carpet: credit repositioning

When Dupont, an industrial conglomerate, realised that it was not selling enough fibres for use in the carpeting industry, it decided to look at the whole value chain: carpet manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors (retailers) and customers. It found that many customers preferred tiles or wooden floors for ease of maintenance and durability, but also because of unsatisfactory experiences with carpet retailers.

Reasons for their dissatisfaction included inconvenient locations, unimpressive ranges, lack of samples, unreliable delivery and poor fitting. Dupont changed its division from carpet fibre to flooring systems and started to think more of the decorative and fashion features of carpets, rather than just the functional ones (robustness, stain resistance, durability, noise and heat insulation). Consequently, it developed information for the whole value chain, including new information and advertising for customers on how to buy and maintain carpeting, and the Dupont hotline for retailers, providing answers for consumer questions.

Dupont’s expertise on products, selling and understanding consumers was also available to retailers on video, and the company provided information on market trends for carpet manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers.