Small Business Achiever 105

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Each month in the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief, we reveal strategies and tactics that will enable you to massively transform your business and achieve your goals. Unlike articles you will see in business magazines that are just teasers to get you to call the author and pay them thousands of dollars for their wisdom, in the Business Owner Brief, we spell out step-by-step, what you need to do to achieve your goals. Nothing is left out.

In this next month's Achiever, learn how to:

-Use a Sales Pipeline to Double or Triple Your Sales

-Expose Cross Subsidies that Destroy Your Profit

-Conquered Google in 2 Weeks with New Keywords.

Each month not only do you receive top quality briefs on how you can achieve your business goals and hundreds of dollars of bonuses, you can also participate in Group Coaching with Dr Greg Chapman, the author of
"The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success" where your personal business questions will be answered.

What value do you place on achieving your business goals if you could get a shortcut to success?

The Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief is your Unfair Business Advantage!

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

The Australian Small Business Blog

The Forgotten Majority of Business Owners

An Occasional Editorial by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

In Victoria’s state budget last week, the government claimed to be providing assistance to business owners. Leaving aside for the moment, the fact that they returned in taxes only a portion of the tax increase since the last ‘handout’, even this was received by a minority of businesses. That is businesses large enough to pay land and payroll tax.

What about smaller businesses, the micro-businesses representing 61% of all businesses, and employing 26% of the private sector workforce? The government, as always treats the micro-business owner (those with less that 5 employees) as though they don’t really exist – as if they are not proper businesses.

Now the state government doesn’t really take much from them, so it can’t pretend to give anything back. Short of giving micro-businesses wads of free cash- dream on, what could it do? They could reduce red tape and regulation- but that also appears to be an impossible dream.

The most important asset a micro-business owner has is his or her time. How much time do you spend stuck in traffic? Along with most other Victorians, they suffer due to the lack of investment in road infrastructure. They suffer disproportionately more than larger business owners who have a lot more support so they can focus more of their time working on the business.

The cost of delays due to traffic congestion increases every year. A 2005 study showed that congestion in Melbourne cost business $1.4 billion in that year alone, with the figure expected to double in the next decade.

For the small business owner and their staff who rely on road transport, public transport being a non-option, spending several non-productive hours a day in traffic congestion is a major cost to their business. When business owners spend time in a car, rather than providing a service to their customers or finding new customers, this is a huge loss to their business.

While public transport funding is admirable, small business owners, like all road users, see funds raised through road taxes and charges largely diverted to other government programs. Most small business owners support the user pays principle and are not looking for subsidies. They do expect, however, a higher proportion of funds raised by road users to be spent in improving infrastructure.

The current budget, like all recent budgets before, refers to ever more studies and plans but no actual commitment to invest. There are 270,000 businesses with less than 5 employees in Victoria. The rate of growth in the number of these businesses is 11% per year. Small businesses are also responsible for 70% of the employment growth. Why then are the needs of this group always ignored?

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Segmenting Your Market’s Mind

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

One very well known marketing strategy is to segment your market and provide different offers to each segment specially targeted to that segment. If you were Ticketmaster, you might send information on the new opera season to the older segment of your database, and information on touring pop groups to the under 30’s. (Of course there are people under 30 who like opera, but when you want to get the most for your advertising buck, you go where the numbers are.)

Segmenting your market by age, gender, geography, income etc is done all the time by good marketers, but what if you could segment your market by the way they think? How powerful would that be? Saab have done just that. Unfortunately, I can’t give you a link to this novel online ad which is currently showing in the Faifax media, as they rotate their ads, but I will describe it so you will recognise it.

Have you seen the spinning ballerina test? See an example here. It is a rotating image which can be used to tell if your left brain or right brain dominates your thinking. Psychologists tell us that the person who is left brained tends to be more logical, methodical and organised. The right brainers, on the other hand, tend to be driven more by instinct and emotion and are more creative. They also say if you see the lady rotate anticlockwise, you are left brained, clockwise, you are right brained.

So back to the ad, which starts off with this rotating lady. It asks you to see which way the lady rotates for you and then asks you to select the appropriate button. You then get taken to a Saab ad in which the copy is tailored to whether you are left or right brained. If you are left brained, it tells you how many horsepower the car has and how fast it will accelerate and gives you details on the dimensions. If you are right brained, it explains the experience of power and the thrill you get with the acceleration, and the luxurious feel and comfort that the car gives you.

So Saab has created an ad which has been crafted for the way you think and you select the ad that is most likely to be a selling success for you!

For the record, I have seen the lady spin both ways.

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Small Business Achiever 104

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Each month in the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief, we reveal strategies and tactics that will enable you to massively transform your business and achieve your goals. Unlike articles you will see in business magazines that are just teasers to get you to call the author and pay them thousands of dollars for their wisdom, in the Business Owner Brief, we spell out step-by-step, what you need to do to achieve your goals. Nothing is left out.

In this next month's Achiever, learn how to:

-Increase Your Sales with Guarantees

-Delegate & Outsource so You can spend Your Time Working ON Your Business

-Use Follow-up eMarketing Strategies to get Your Website Visitors back to Buy from You.

Each month not only do you receive top quality briefs on how you can achieve your business goals and hundreds of dollars of bonuses, you can also participate in Group Coaching with Dr Greg Chapman, the author of
"The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success" where your personal business questions will be answered.

What value do you place on achieving your business goals if you could get a shortcut to success?

The Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief is your Unfair Business Advantage!

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

The Australian Small Business Blog

Get Your Business Organised

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Is this your business? You start your day with the best intentions- to complete an outstanding project which will improve your business. Then when you get into your office, you check your emails. Then you catch up on some paperwork and organising some orders that didn’t get sent out last night.

One of the emails is a complaint which you have to fix. Then a supplier calls to say there will be a delay in your order. Then phone starts to ring with everything from sales people to customer queries. Before you know it is lunch time, but of course you don’t stop for lunch. In the afternoon, it is more of the same- dealing with customers, following up on staff questions, and fixing problems. By the end of the day, you are exhausted. You know you have been busy, but is has been another Groundhog Day, and tomorrow you will do it all again, and if you have time, you might get onto that project.

This is a classic example of an owner working in their business. Everything they do is reactive. They can never get ahead of the game- just a hamster in a wheel going round and round, but getting nowhere. Unless you can find time to work on your business, this will be your fate.

OK, you know all that but how do you break the cycle?

The first step is to recognise that this is your situation. Diagnosis is the first step to cure! Next is to acknowledge that nothing will change unless You are prepared to change. Then you need to work out what outcome you are prepared to commit to for your business – an outcome for which you are prepared to make sacrifices in either time, money or effort – there is no such thing as a free lunch!

Subscribers to the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief learned in Issue 102 the 9 steps that they should take to organise their business. Steps such as working out where they should be spending their time and strategies that will actually create time so they can work on their business.

In the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief all the steps are revealed. Nothing is left out in the turnkey briefs designed for the busy business owner.

Get step-by-step advice that will improve your business every month.

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Use Your Points of Difference to Stand Out

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

One of the biggest problems we all have in small business is standing out. Almost everyone has competitors of some description. It could be the person down the road that promises to undercut whatever price you offer. It could be the elephant in your marketplace- for example, if you are a small telco, the elephant is Telstra.

Or your competition could be a myriad of me-too suppliers in highly competitive marketplaces all driving the prices down to the point where no-one makes any money.

So how do you stand out from all this competition? You make sure your business is different in some way to all your competition, and you make sure potential customers who value that difference, and will pay more for it, know about it. The first step in differentiating your business from everyone else’s is to answer the question:

Why Should I Buy from You?

Can you answer this question? You must have an answer. If you don’t know, you customers certainly won’t, and you will find you are just competing on price and barely surviving.

The answers to the question: “Why should I Buy from You?” are your Points of Difference (POD). This is arguably the most important marketing strategy to get under your belt. In marketing speak it is also called your Unique Selling Proposition or USP. What this means is that you are defining why your product or service is different to everyone one of your competitors. When you have your USP, you actually have no competitors, because your offer is unique.

Great in theory, but just a word of warning. This also means that your product cannot be considered universal any more, and your USP will appeal to a more narrow group of customers, or a Niche.

So what does this mean in practice? You might be the cheapest. This will, of course, attract a lot more business, which will compensate for your lower margins. However, this will not appeal to everyone. Lowest cost, usually means no frills. Jetstar is a no-frills airline, but Qantas still has lots of passengers who want the extras, and are prepared to pay for it. So Qantas and Jetstar promote themselves to different audiences.

Maybe you said your Point of Difference was the quality of your service. I am now going to say something that may shock you:

Quality of service is not a good enough reason for people to buy from you.

Everyone says they have quality service. Have you ever heard anyone say: “Buy from me, my service is lousy?” Quality is a given, a pre-requisite today. Everyone says they offer a quality service. So what’s the answer? Surely ‘quality’ counts for something?

Regular subscribers to the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief will already know who their competitors are. In Issue 101 – where this full article is published, subscribers learned how to create Points of Difference for their business.

In Issue 103 of the Small Business Achiever I explain how these points of difference can be used o the fundamentals of how to increase your prices with your Points of Difference can be used in your ads and on your website.

In Issue 103 of the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief find out:

The Anatomy of Ads that Sell

Creating a Structure that will Drive Your Business Growth

Designing a Website that Generates Leads for Your Business

Get step-by-step advice that will improve your business every month.

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Why You Should Increase Your Prices & Why Most Owners Won’t

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Before I answer this, try answering the following question:

Why are You in Business?

People give all sorts of reasons. Often they refer to some higher purpose, such as helping people in some way or providing for some personal lifestyle needs. This is all very well and good, but all these objectives will be compromised if the one overriding purpose of any business is not met- that is to make a profit!

Why is making a profit so important? If you are not making a profit, you are just breaking even, or more likely, making a loss. (Even when owners believe they are making a profit, they often aren’t as they have not considered the sustainability of their business.)

If your business is losing money, your energies and resources for any other purpose will be drained. You can’t continue helping people if you are going out of business. Likewise, if your lifestyle business is making a loss, it won’t be a very happy lifestyle. So if your business is unprofitable, the chances are very small that you will achieve other objectives through your business.

So let’s agree that making a profit is the prime purpose of your business. What then are your options to make your business more profitable? You can:

1. Reduce your Costs
2. Increase your Sales

Pretty basic really. Lets look at the first – decreasing costs. This is a limited strategy as at some point, you will compromise your sales. Whereas, increasing your sales is a no limit strategy.
There are five strategies you can use to increase your sales. These are the Five Turnover Drivers:

• Increasing Enquiries
• Increasing Conversions to Sales
• Increasing the Average Value per Sale
• Increasing the Number of Times Someone Buys from You, and
• Increasing Your Prices

Good businesses will focus on all five turnover drivers, but the one most find hardest to implement is to increase their prices. Let’s look at why people don’t increase their prices.
When setting prices, businesses look at what their competitors are charging. If they charge too much, they know they will lose business because their competitors are cheaper. But…

Are these businesses really your competition?

Regular subscribers to the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief will already know who their competitors are. (Issue 101 – Standing Out with Your Points of Difference). If the people who you are comparing yourself with are not your true competitors, why should they influence your prices?

In Issue 102 of the Small Business Achiever I explain the fundamentals of how to increase your prices so that the fear of business loss will no longer trap you in the price taker role in which most businesses languish. In fact, this strategy will transform your business!

In Issue 102 of the Small Business Achiever - Business Owner Brief find out:

The Easiest Way to Increase Your Prices

How to Start Getting Your Business Organised

Being Found on the Internet - Paid vs 'Free' Search

Get step-by-step advice that will improve your business every month.

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Who Needs a Business Plan?

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

Everyone in business knows you have to have a Business Plan, but very few have one. Most of those who do, haven’t updated it for years. So year after year people carry on with an out-of-date, or no business plan at all. In fact, they go on so long like this, they even convince themselves they don’t need one!

So let me ask a controversial question. Why have one at all? Aren’t they just an academic exercise? Pretty much everyone who doesn’t have a formal plan says: “I have a plan, its in my head” What’s wrong with that?

If you were going on a month long tour of Europe, would you be satisfied with a plan in your head? Or would you have a daily itinerary showing how you will be getting from place to place and where you would be staying each night. Would you create a budget to work out how you would pay for all this, and how much spending money you will need for meals and other expenses. Would you have a detailed listing of your bookings?

Only when you write all this down, might you see that you have left insufficient time to travel between stopovers, or spending too long in some places and not long enough at others. Then you would re-organise your itinerary until it was right, before you confirmed all the bookings.

Even if you do all that, you know things might still go wrong- planes delayed, connections missed, overbooking, etc. So you would put a little bit of extra money aside to cover such contingencies.

Your itinerary would also be marked for certain highlights that are must sees for you - the main reason for the trip, to make sure that you don’t return home and realise that you missed an opportunity while on tour.

In business it’s the same. The more you write down your goals and plans, the more likely it is you will identify gaps in desired outcomes and capability, and the opportunities you need to find, so that you don’t miss them when they arise.

Your Goals are Your Opportunity Finders

Due to the way our brains function, you only identify the gaps and see the opportunities when you write them down. So if you don’t write down your plans, there will be flaws that you will miss while it resides in your head, and you will miss the opportunities that will transform your business.

Now, if you are like most people, you will be saying “I know I should have a plan, but it takes so long to write out a plan, and if I hire someone to do it for me, it will also be expensive.” Several years back I wrote an article called: The Real Truth about Business Plans – What the Consultants don’t tell You! It will probably make you feel a little better, but only a little!

In summary, the article says that even when people produce a plan, they never update it or look at it again because it was such a major effort to produce it, and it was not seen as tool that they would use for their business every day.

A Business Plan in One Hour

What if you could produce a Business Plan in an hour, and it could fit on a single page? Does that sound like a plan you would be prepared to invest your time in and use? You wouldn’t even have to pay someone to do it for you. Well, that is what I am about to show you how to do now.

As for just about everything in life, the 80/20 rule applies to business as well. That is, 80% of the benefit of anything comes from 20% of the effort. The remaining 20% of value coming from an additional 80%. So if you have limited resources, it makes sense to at least to do the 20%! So now I will show you how to do that 20%. You can hire a consultant to do the other 80% if you want to later.

Find out how to create a One Hour Business Plan that fits on One Page in Issue 101 of the Small Business Achiever - The Business Owner Brief

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

Your Marketing Investment

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

When we look at our monthly accounts in our business, we check our sales, gross profits, and then our overheads before we come to our bottom line. In our drive to increase the bottom line results we often focus on our costs, to see how we can reduce them.

We check to see if we can get our phone costs down, can we get cheaper printing, can we find low cost contractors that do what our high price ones do now? All this is good business practice, ensuring that our hard earned gross profit is not lost in overhead blow-outs.

Finally, we get to our marketing line in the overheads. This could be advertising. It could be your website, promotional products or networking organisations costs.

Marketing budgets of 5-10% of sales are not at all unusual. However, there is a temptation to treat them the same way as your other costs. If profits are being squeezed, it is often the first area to get slashed, but marketing costs are different to other costs.

The purpose of your non-marketing costs is to produce the products and deliver your services to your customers. If you can reduce these costs without affecting your sales, that is increase your productivity, you should definitely do that, and see your profits increase.

If your marketing is working, and you reduce these costs, you will, instead, reduce your sales and your profits. Marketing is an investment which should be giving you a high return. Before you start reducing your marketing spend, you need to do some analysis.

• Look at how many customers your ads produce. What is the cost per lead, and cost per sale of your advertising?
• Do your thank you gifts generate repeat business and referrals?
• What business has your networking produced for you?

For each of your marketing activities, you must have a way of measuring results. You may find that some of your advertising works better than others. You have an opportunity either to improve the performance of the poorer advertising, perhaps by getting a copywriter, or dropping it and spending more where the advertising is working.

If the marketing is generating a healthy return, why would you try to save money by reducing it? If you cut successful marketing your sales loss will be larger than the cost saving. By all means, retire unsuccessful marketing that is not recovering its costs, but seek to replace it with higher return marketing.

How do you choose where to spend your marketing dollar? The answer is to test and measure everything. Only when you do that can you truly decide which of your marketing is a cost, and which is an investment.

May Your Business be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

What to do with the voices in your head when you speak?

by Judith Field

When you get up to speak to promote your business, do you find that you sometimes go blank? Or do you start thinking thoughts that don’t help you, like, “Are they listening to me?” “I am boring them.” “I hate the way they are all staring at me.”

If any of these and other negative thoughts are in you head you need to get rid of them as they are spoiling your speech and probably making you forget where you are up to in your speech.
Here are some tips to minimize the voices in your head and make you more powerful:

1 Practise! The more you can practice visualizing yourself in front of the audience, the better you will be.

2 Really look at your audience. The more you look at them the more they will be interested in you, especially f you smile. You MUST look at them or you cannot tell if they are getting your message. So, tell that voice that says, ”I hate them looking at me that it needs them to look at you so you can concentrate on them.

3 Focus on what you are communicating out. If your brain allows thoughts of what the audience thinks of you to come in, you may become self conscious. You won’t be able to give it all your energy. So, turn the ego around. Speaking is not about you but what are you trying to communicate to them! Change the focus and the voices will lessen if not disappear.

4 Keep the words simple. If you include difficult to pronounce words and stumble on them, you can lose confidence and the voices in your head can start to yell. But if you make the words one or two syllables only, you will find them easier to say and the audience can take them in more easily.

5 The more you speak, the easier it becomes! Presenting and speaking is only scary if it is occasional. Nerves are normal. Even competent speakers and actors become nervous. Harness that energy positively and it will become easier the more you do it!

6 Breathe deeply. Most speakers speak too fast and run ideas into each other. If your voices in your head tell you to go fast so you can sit down quicker, you speech is likely to be difficult to understand and follow. Also taking a breath allows you to PAUSE, one of the most important aspects of speaking. Remember, only 120 words per minute.

7 Attend a public speaking course. Many people think the skills of confident communication are impossible to teach. There are many tricks to be learned and the best way to learn them is through a course.

So, go out there. Put up your hand, rehearse, look at them, smile and “fake it till you make it”. Speak often and keep it simple. Focus on them and the rest is techniques!

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Judith Field is the director of Direct Speech and is a professional public speaking trainer.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

The Value of Knowledge

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

When scouring the internet for articles, what we tend to find is half answers. They say the Truth is out there, but it sure isn’t easy to find.

The power of the internet is that it is a huge resource of human knowledge, but it is very disconnected and often highly unreliable. While we may become frustrated at this, we all know it is difficult to complain to anyone, especially when we are seeking free information. While there are good resources out there, the trouble is they tend not to be tailored for your specific needs, even if you can find them.

We have a choice-

We can continue to spend time scouring the internet to find that gem that is going to transform our business, for Free!

Or

We can put our hands in our pocket to acquire information we are confident that will provide us the information we need.

While the first choice may appear lower cost, it is not if you value your time. Particularly if you can’t find the gem you were seeking. Like the people who spend their weekends with a metal detector hoping to find gold in the outback, they are depending on luck, but luck won’t help if you are in the wrong place to start looking. They could consult a geologist on the best place to look, but they would prefer to “save money” and hope for a lucky strike.

Knowledge has a value. The price you pay may be your time to find it, it could be the cost associated through the purchase of a book, a course or seminar or paying for advice from business coaches. There is still a price you pay through the school of trial and error if you “save money” by ignoring all of the previous resources. Its the cost of blind alleys and time and opportunities missed. These costs are very real.

What would it be worth to you to achieve your two year goals in one? That’s how you value knowledge.

For those who are serious, and value knowledge, there is a new resource (that is not free- but not expensive either) that will provide you many of the answers you are seeking. This resource is the Small Business Achiever where you can find, in bite sized chunks, the small business advice you are seeking. The Small Business Achiever puts the “HOW TO” into how to.

Whatever the resource you choose is, decide this year to invest in yourself and your education. Create a budget for this and put aside 5% of your turnover. This is not an expense, it is an investment which you would expect to pay dividends many times the cost.

Define your knowledge gaps and seek out advice or education to bridge them, and don’t be afraid to draw on your budget to pay for it. That is what it is there for!

May Your Business in 2008 be as You Plan It!

Dr Greg Chapman

Over to You. What do You Think? Post Your Comments Below.

Dr Greg Chapman is the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club and is Australia's Leading Advisor on Emerging Businesses and provides Coaching and Consulting advice to Australian Small Business Owners in Marketing & Business Strategies Planning & Systems. He is also the author of The Five Pillars of Guaranteed Business Success.

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The Australian Small Business Blog

One Hundred Year Old Marketing Lesson

by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA

There was a recent article about a book on Alexander Graham Bell and whether he really did invent the telephone. The debate still rages on, but there is certainly no question about who was the better marketer.

Bell’s major competitor was Elisha Gray. Why do we remember Bell and not Gray?

One reason is simply that Bell, not Gray, actually demonstrated a phone that transmitted speech. Gray was focused instead on his era's pressing communications challenge: how to send multiple messages simultaneously over the same telegraph wire. As Gray huffed to his attorney, "I should like to see Bell do that with his apparatus."

Not to denigrate Gray’s achievement, but how many people do you think would have been more interested in the 19th Century in transmitting voice, than in multiple messages over a telegraph wire? The later technology would have enabled an increase in the efficiency of Morse Code transmission a severely limiting communications technology controlled by the nerds of the day.

Bell, on the other hand was producing a technology with an appeal to the mass market. It was easy to understand, and its benefits were very clear, given the obvious consumer problems with Morse Code.

The technological winner was always going to be the one that end consumer would find easiest to use. The expense of the initial telephones was of course high, but tu