Want to destroy a good business? Fire a 90 year-old legend.

The lady on the left is called Elena Salvoni. She is London’s most famous Maitre – or rather Maitresse - d’Hote. On the walls are hundreds of photographs of her with her customers.

For 40 years I have followed her from one restaurant to another - Bianchi’s, L’Escargot, L’Etoile. So have people like Robert De Niro, Peter O’Toole - everyone from Princess Diana to Sean Connery. We didn’t go for the food, which was good, but not outstanding. Just her. She is charm itself.

She has been in the trade for 70 years, and recently celebrated her 90th birthday, which got a big feature in the Evening Standard. So they’ve just fired her. There is now absolutely no reason whatsoever to go there. They should shut up shop now and save themselves some money.

For years I bought clothes at Reiss. Then a suit got rumpled in a shower and stayed wrinkled when dry cleaned. It was clearly a bad lining. They refused to give me a refund – and lost thousands of pounds’ worth of future business. I still like their clothes – but I’m damned if I’ll spend a penny with them.

Three days ago I bought some fish at Tesco in Soho which was off. When an hour later I took it with the receipt to my local branch in Chelsea for a refund they refused. I wrote an email about my “shopping experience” as they suggested on the receipt. They never replied. Why ask if you don't care?

Screw them. We've been buying snacks at lunch and stuff for the office from them for 5 years now. I’ll go elsewhere, probably to Sainsbury, because one of my staff had a similar problem with them – but they paid up.

They say organisations have no soul. They certainly have no commonsense. The people who run them sit in their fancy offices, have pointless meetings and don’t meet the customers – or try being a customer. Nor do they understand that one sale is not what it’s about.

I relish a quote from Jeff Bezos of Amazon who replied to a questioner: “Are my customers loyal? Absolutely. 100%. Right till the moment someone comes along with a better service.”

How three little tweaks that took a few minutes increased profit 973%. Hard to believe, but true

Not long ago I did lots of short videos featuring wonderful, fabulous M-E-E-E-E-E ... and one very long one of my partner Al, who's put up with my quibbles, tantrums and peskiness for 8 years.

The one featuring him was the best. It's here . If you can bear to watch about 10 minutes (most people now have the attention span of goldfish) they could be the most profitable 10 minutes you spend this year.

The graph and figures I've illustrated show you one of his little conjuring tricks. You can see how three very small changes lowered the cost of conversions for one client - a world-famous name - from £225.16 to £2.73.

It took Al less than an hour's study to spot this, and just a few minutes to carry it out. Their Google "experts" hadn't suggested it. Nor had their well-paid in-house guy.

This was not a one-off. Another client who sold loans off-loaded their business to a big fat bank for tens of millions partly because of my copy but also because of one tiny change to their application form that Al suggested which increased applications from 2.2% to 4.7% without adding a word or a syllable.

Unfortunately God created only one Al, and only 24 hours in the day, so I don't promote his skills much. However, today I hired someone to take some of the grunt work away from him (like spending a day on the phone to some people in a mysterious land about our bloody affiliate links) so he can do stuff that really matters.

His magic is mostly but not entirely to do with AdWords, though he is an uncannily good judge of copy. But he does for thousands what agencies with fancy glass offices charge big fat stupid corporates tens of thousands for.

With a little help and the odd nudge from me, he does three things.

1. He gets you a whole lot more enquiries.
2. He shows you how to convert more of them into sales.
3. He usually saves you a ton of money as well. And of course anybody who can put up with my nagging for 8 years is an angel.

So if you want to get markedly better results on line, just email me, Drayton@draytonbird.com, with one word "Al".

If I were you I'd do it now, the minute you finish reading this. Al and I can only take on 3 new clients at the moment.

NEXT WRITING WEBINAR: in one week, next Friday at 2 p.m.

It includes a check list for evaluating your work, plus a free copy of my General Briefing Template, which doesn't write the copy for you - but gives you all the right ammunition.

A conspiracy of jumped-up arseholes

Not so long ago my partner wanted to contact someone at Google to ask them how to get incentives like AdWords packages. It was utterly impossible to do so.

When eventually, through a friend nothing to do with Google, she did get through to someone there and asked to be put through to the person whose name she had ferreted out, the reply was, “I am not at liberty to give you their telephone number.”

This is the arrogance of idiots, and it is depressingly commonplace.

We have spent days trying to move a server from Windows to Linux for the benefit of EADIM affiliates, a task that should take little more than pressing a few buttons and the odd key.

Every possible obstacle, no matter how petty, has been painstakingly placed in our path to stop us doing so.

I’ve said it God knows how many times: nothing fails like success.

And nothing in my lifetime has succeeded so fast and so utterly as the internet, or spawned so many inept oafs.

What has happened is that a few smart people got in on the ground floor and made millions or even billions, sometimes deservedly, often not.

Then they lost interest, and employed platoons of underlings – the sort who used to get jobs as counter clerks in post offices, though too often without the ability to read and write – to run things.

Such people are completely unaware that they are supposed to be offering a service – and the people above them are functionaries who have no clue either; they would do just as well in a large insurance firm or bank.

One problem – not just with the Internet, but generally – is that far too many people who succeed don’t realise how much of it was due to luck. Another is that the qualities it takes to build something are often useless when employing or managing large numbers of pretty average people in a big, fat organisation.

It happened with Microsoft. It’s obviously happening with Google. In fact yesterday my partner Al noted that Google are fast becoming as hated as Microsoft. Yahoo clearly lost the plot some years ago. Unless an unusual person with that rare, grounded sense of the real - like Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffet - stays on it always happens.

Mind you, I’m not saying I’d do any better. I’m clueless at pretty much anything beyond deciding where to go to lunch.

P. S. I was just about to stick this up when I saw this piece of emetic tripe from the Firefox welcome page: "Thanks for supporting Mozilla's mission of encouraging openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web!"

I can tell you, as sure as God made little apples, that a group of time-wasting, navel-gazing "executives" sat in a room debating that little piece of corporate hogwash, word by dreary word.

Lets face it, neither I nor any of your customers gives a flying fuck about your "mission" - which we all know is to make as much money as possible as fast as possible. I just want to get stuff done quickly on the web - a mission you totally failed to assist me in fifteen minutes ago when I wanted to edit this.

Your body may live in the cellar; but it’s your own fault if your mind lives there

Three weeks ago in my first webinar on how to write and persuade, I said "good writing starts with good reading".

This 80 year old piece by Bruce Barton - left, one of the best-ever copywriters and advertising men- sent me by a friend makes the point well.

"THE other night my friend Ferrero and I spent a few years with Julius Caesar in ancient Rome.

We went with him on his campaigns in Gaul. Those were wonderful battles — wonderful fighters.

From a hill-top we could watch the whole battle — thousands of men driving at each other with their swords, hurling their javelins at short range. No smoke, no trenches; just primitive, hand-to-hand conflict.

We came back to Rome. The city was in a turmoil. Our great chariots thundered through the streets in triumph; our captives, our spoils, our banners made a magnificent procession. The crowds cheered wildly.

Another evening my friend Green and I had a great time together in ancient Britain.

We went down to Runnymede with a group of English nobles. They were powerful men, each a petty king in his own section; but every one of them took his life in his hand on that expedition.

And there we gathered around King John, and forced him, against his will, to put his name to the Magna Carta, the Great Charter which is the foundation of English liberties — and our own.

I had a fine time with Napoleon a few nights before.

I met him when he landed in France, after the escape from Elba.

Up through the southern provinces he came, gathering a few troops there, winning over by the force of his eloquence the regiments sent to capture him.

We arrived in Paris. Hurriedly, but with supreme confidence that the Little Corporal could never fail; we got together a makeshift army and set out to strike the winning blow at Waterloo.

That battle — I shall never forget it.

Another day I went over to old Concord, and spent the whole afternoon with Emerson.

We talked about Representative Men. Well, well, you say, what foolishness is this? What do you mean by saying you lived with Caesar and Napoleon and Emerson — all centuries apart, all long since dead?

If you do not know what I mean, then I pity you.

Have you never come home tired from your office, and with a book transported your foolish little mind clear out of the present day?

Have you never learned the joy of surrendering yourself to the companionship of the great men of the past?

Have you never sat in the little London Club and heard Sam Johnson thunder his philosophy of life?

Have you never sailed up and down the American coast with Captain John Smith, dodging the Indians and opening up a new continent?

Are you one of the wretched, poverty stricken souls who have never learned to escape from yourself through the blessed magic of good books?

Have you contented yourself all your life with the companionship of good pinochle-players, when you might have been a familiar friend of Socrates and Milton and Napoleon and Cromwell and Washington and Columbus and Shakespeare and Lincoln and Rousseau?

If so, cut out this from a great man and paste it in your hat:

I would rather be a beggar and dwell in a garret, than a king who did not love books.

There are some marvellous experiences coming to you.

You can in the evenings to come jar yourself out of the petty rut where circumstance has placed you, and become a familiar of the immortals.

You may learn to face the world with a new confidence, a new poise, a new self respect, because you have made yourself a citizen of the ages.

Do some real reading.

Do it for the joy it will give you: Do it for the good it will do you.

“Show me a family of readers,” said Napoleon, “and I will show you the people who rule the world.”

Why is that man Bird so BLOODY INCOMPETENT?

There is a humbling passage in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer - no I'm not THAT old - that I recall from my early years at school, when I was subjected to year after year of organised guilt.

It ran, "We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us."

This sprang to mind because from time to time kindly souls write to point out that I have screwed up one way or another, and sometimes both.

Is this, you may wonder, because I am senile, stupid, forgetful, idle, useless or all five?

If I explain, you will sorry for me. At least I hope so.

The key lies in something I often say and firmly believe: Don't just think about doing things. Do them.

The older I get the more I believe this - but the less time I have to do things. So I have FAR too many things on the go.

So, besides writing copy, making speeches, doing interviews, seminars and webinars ...

I'm preparing for the next EADIM residential course in London - but shamefully haven't quite finished duplicating the 40 plus hours of video from the last.

I'm revising the structure of my Commonsense Learning Programme which may have greater stamina than other similar things, but should be restructured and simplified.

I have a programme aimed at Corporate Marketers - a £20,000 investment that has been lying around - but needs fully reviewing.

I have a new book drafted that I must go through - with a cover design I don't like.

This is not to show what a busy old boy I am - just explain my lapses. I hope it buys a little understanding.

Anyhow, some mysteries are beyond even the keenest intellect.

A client who watched today's webinar said he couldn't on Firefox, but could on Explorer.

Odd, because two of my colleagues were watching on Firefox at that very moment

Some other oddities are maddening to someone as un-teccie as me. For instance, lots of you get these blogs by e-mail, which is just wonderful and much appreciated - but not much help if I try to embed a video.

Anyhow you can see the video mentioned in my last post at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKdeuqFabhQ. Don't ask me why my face is squashed. I have no more idea than you. It just INFURIATES me.

And to sign up for that webinar or all three, just go to: www.draytonbird.com/proper.

Incidentally someone wrote to me asking which webinar system I recommend. That made me laugh. I just said they all stink - but in different ways