If you’ve been paying any attention to the news in recent years you will know that Britain has a productivity ‘problem’.

August publications such as the Financial Times, and The Economist will tell you Britain’s ‘poor productivity’ is ‘holding us back’ as a country on the world stage.

Institutions from the London School of Economics, Economics Observatory and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research put it down to a ‘lack of investment’.

And if you look at the latest Office for National Statistics figures you can see it in black and white.

For every hour we work in the UK we make £46.92, while in the US they make £58.88, Germany makes £55.83 and France makes £55.50. If only we could work harder and more efficiently they bemoan.

But what if we look at those same statistics as a customer. Suddenly the UK looks the best value. All things being equal customers can buy an hour of work in the UK for the less than in some of our G7 neighbours.

When customers are global suddenly that ‘poor productivity’ is not a disadvantage its an advantage. The UK looks cheap.

Now some might argue that I am simplifying too much; economists also use a second measure of productivity and that is Gross Value Added (GVA). Simply put, it’s the difference between a raw product and the output after a worker has turned it into something.

This measure works really well in manufacturing. You just take the end price of a car, minus the cost of the raw materials in making that car and then divide the remainder by the hours worked. If the factory becomes more productive and they produce cars in less time then productivity is up.

But here’s the problem with using that measure in the UK. Our economy is 81 per cent services! Our service sector is an unusually high proportion of our economy. In France it is 70% and in Germany 62%.

Now the thing about services is the human hours generally is the product. And the price people can charge for those hours flexes according to the market.

If the raw materials of a car goes up, the overall price of all cars will go up so companies can make a profit.

But in the service sector, companies can cut back much further if the economy is doing badly because the hours are the only thing they are really selling.

So you can see what I am talking about let’s look at an example.

I run a professional services firm. One of the things my firm provides for its clients is PR services. Broken down in very simple terms we might say to a client that we can generate four high quality pieces of coverage for £X per month. And for simplicity I calculate that it is going to take my team 50 hours of work per month to achieve that.

Now this client is a global client and also needs to achieve the same in the US. Their agency takes the same amount of time and achieves the same result but charges twice as much.

According to the economist which company is more productive? That’s right, if you’ve been following you will know that the US agency has charged twice as much for its time even though the output for the end consumer was the same.

I’m no economist but I do understand value and I know that all things being equal something half as much is better value.

But it’s not just me spotting it, our customers do to. Despite my company being an agency of just 15 people, around a third of our customers are headquartered abroad. We don’t market ourselves outside the UK – they just know they get better bang for buck.

That’s also why after seven years in the UK we are looking to expand into North America. We already have interest in us setting up an office in Toronto.

I will be taking an exploratory trip out next month. And guess what, I’ll be taking two of my ‘unproductive’ British workers with me.

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Could everything you have been told about Britain’s low productivity be wrong?

Over the past two decades I have been lucky enough to work with dozens of business and political leaders.

The best leaders are those that are able to make professional decisions quickly based on the information available to them.

But this does not mean they are immune to procrastination. They are just using tools to manage it.

Most of us if we walk into an ice-cream parlour struggle to choose a flavour.

We have eaten ice cream hundreds of times and know all the flavours. But we still stands there at the counter examining the pistachio, chocolate, cookies and cream and salted caramel in the hope that divine inspiration will come to us.

And that is a simple decision.

Presented with hard decisions, such as where to invest or whether to enter a new market, can be crippling.

Kicking hard decisions into the long grass is the easy option. But it is rarely the right one.

We are told from a young age to not rush to decisions but our gut instinct is usually right.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking he makes a powerful argument for going with your gut.

He showed that geologists at the Getty Museum in California spent 14 months investigating whether a statue was a fake. Within seconds three different art historians could tell that it was. Their years of looking at masterpieces had given them a gut advantage that experts couldn’t match.

As a leader in your own field you have years of experience. Do not underestimate how valuable that is.

While you might want to gather all the information to make the right decision. At a sub-conscious level, within two seconds your mind has gone through thousands of data-points and previous experiences.

More than 90% of the time you will be right in your decision first time. The decisions that are wrong are wastage. Don’t waste time regretting them.

Even if you really sweat a decision, waiting until you have every bit of evidence you possibly can get will fractionally reduce your bad decision making. Even if you really sweat a decision you may only reduce your wrong decisions fractionally.

The extra time it will have taken will have closed other doors to you.

Shall we enter these awards for this great work we did? Oh dear the deadline to enter has passed. Decision made: no.

Shall we enter this new market? Oh dear now our competitor is dominating that sector so we can’t get a foothold. Decision made. It’s a no.

Shall we invest in training for this valuable staff member? Oh dear they have been poached by a rival. So that’s a no as well.

In your mind procrastination is putting off a decision. But as a leader a lot of the time it is not just putting off a decision. It is allowing time to make the decision for you and that answer is almost always no.

So here are seven ways to stop procrastinating and regain the most important tool for you as a leader – decision making:

Split your week: Assign yourself days of the week for the jobs you need to do.

(My week is split into Monday and Tuesday clients and new business, Wednesday content creation, Thursday management, Friday finance)

Wedge difficult jobs: If you have a job you really don’t want to do but keep putting it off, schedule it in BEFORE something you do want to do and force yourself to do it then.

Deadline decisions: If you need to gather more information to make a decision, set a clear time frame for when you will get that information.

Do not go back on decisions: Unless circumstances change move on.

Delegate decision making. You have a team; use them.

Minimise distractions. Turn off all notifications on your phone and laptop. Tell your staff that you only look at emails at certain parts of the day and do it.

Two minute rule: Anything you can do in two minutes do it immediately.

Note: To write this article I used techniques 1,2 and 6.

Read more:
How to stop procrastinating and start leading

In 2001 the average life of a British business was 10.7 years. By last year that number had dropped to 8.6 years. In just over two decades the lifespan of British businesses has dropped by 20%.

Part of that drop is down to business failure. Last year the UK fell into recession and with it there were more than 25,000 business insolvencies last year according to Government figures – the highest on record.

This is up from 13,000 in 2020 when companies were propped up by government schemes such as furlough and low interest loans.

But not all the reduction is down to business failure. Mergers and acquisitions account for a proportion of the reduction in the life span of companies.

Since the early 1990s the value of M&A has been growing, at first steadily up to the turn of the century, then in peaks and troughs.

In 1991 M&A in the UK was worth £1.7 billion. Its value peaked at the turn of the century at £29bn, hitting a second peak of £28bn in 2020 before dropping again over the last three years.

But while M&A activity has been up and down over the past two decades, a new business culture has taken hold.

Becoming a ‘multi-exit founder’ has become somewhat fetishised in the corporate community. Business people who have created and sold their businesses proudly advertise this fact.

Stephen Bartlett is one of many influencers who epitomises the new elite of ‘multi-exit founders’.

His Diary of a CEO podcast is the second most popular in all categories in the UK. His book of the same name is a Sunday Times best seller.

Elon Musk is another elite of the serial entrepreneur world having co-founded PayPal before founding Tesla, ChatGDP and SpaceX.

If we focus on the financials alone, far more of the most successful business people in the world today have only really concentrated on one successful business rather than being serial entrepreneurs.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Martha Stewart, Mark Zuckerberg and, looking closer to home, Richard Branson, Richard Dyson and Britain’s most successful entrepreneurs David and Simon Reuben.

Some of the world’s most successful business people never exit. They stay in the successful business they founded and keep improving it.

Through doing so they don’t just generate more wealth for themselves, they generate more wealth for everyone working in them. Founders tend to care more about the businesses they set up.

A 2016 study by Bain&Co found that companies where the founder was still CEO are 3.1x better performing than others on the S&P500.

So what does this mean for you if you are a founder that wants to exit?

Firstly, just because you have had success once does not mean you can do it twice.

It is human nature to dream of starting fresh, or reapplying your energy to a new passion. But achieving success twice is pretty rare.

Secondly, if you were told today you can never sell your business and will have to sit at the top of it until you retire, what kind of business would you create?

Chances are it would look very similar to a business someone would want to buy.

It would run itself, profitably, with little intervention from you. It would have empowered teams growing the business and building its value without you feeling you had to grind it out.

It would be highly profitable with loyal clients. And when it makes investments they would not just be those that offer the short term revenue sugar rush of pay-per-click customers.

Instead, it would invest in robust marketing strategies, bringing in customers for months if not years without paying for them through dedicated strategic communications, PR, public affairs and SEO.

The irony is if you build a business you never want to sell, you will be building a business everyone wants to buy.

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Aspire to be a forever founder and the riches will follow

“We need a TikTok account,” I said, to my team of mainly 20-something staff, two years ago. They looked at me blankly and slightly astonished.

Yes I run a communications agency but I’m not really a social media person.

I rarely use social media for personal announcements. And I have taken all social media apps off my phone. At 46 I’m not a digital native and fell like my brain isn’t able to cope with how addictive short social media videos are: ‘Oh My God: A snake eating a crocodile!’ – flick –  ‘Oh My God! A man jumping off a cliff wearing wings’ – flick – ‘Oh my God…Where did the last two hours just go?!’

I like traditional media and always have. As a reader I don’t feel like I’m being assaulted by a Silicon Valley stimulus ninja pulverising my brain into a state where it will buy anything. Literally anything! During lockdown I bought a ball on an elastic band that attaches to your head.

An Instagram video showed someone keeping fit by batting it away with easy punches. I punched it once and it flew back at my face bonking me on the nose. It ended up in landfill soon after leaving me with feelings of guilt both for my health and the environment.

And as a journalist I loved writing into the abyss. Back when readers had to write and post a letter if they didn’t like your article they rarely did. Pure joy.

I’m far too sensitive to deal with readers pulling apart every part of an article I’ve carefully written. (Note to self: do not read comments under this article.)

So hearing that I wanted to actually set up a TikTok account came as a surprise to most.

My rationale was that I thought it would stick around and by getting in early we could pick up followers that way.

I didn’t think I would find any customers there – 16-to-24-year-olds are not the typical buyers of corporate PR services – it might be where we find future talent.

And we could practice our skills for other forms of social media that we were more invested in because grown-ups use them such as LinkedIn.

I thought there would be more clambering from my 20-something staff to become TikTok influencers creating the ‘content’ on their go-to channel of choice. But there wasn’t.

“I watch it all the time but don’t post,” was the refrain.

So it was left to me to lead the charge.

I downloaded TikTok – purely for research purposes – and got watching.

The majority of the videos seemed to be people miming and doing dance moves to songs they liked.

I’m not going to do that. Firstly I can’t dance and secondly I don’t want to look like a prat.

I looked to see what other ‘PR leaders’ were doing.

They’re all miming and doing dance moves in a desperate attempt gain likes. Excruciating!

But I kept looking and found that a significant minority of videos were short but educational.

And that was my eureka moment.

Young people are not just going on TikTok for escapism they are actually using it to learn about the world.

We’ll leave the click bait chasing to others I said. Higginson Strategy’s TikTok account will be a place where people come to learn.

And as we don’t believe our customers, who are generally older, are on there then we won’t bother trying to win them on it by talking about what we do.

But we do think future talent that we might want to work for us will be on there so we will use it as a recruitment tool as well.

Knowing how we want to use the tool and what we want it to do for us gives us clear direction.

Without selling what we do we share useful information and tips on how to be good communicators for other professionals. And we show the fun socials we have to try to attract the best young talent.

That’s it. TikTok strategy devised.

In May 2022, I stood in my suit in front of a door outside our office in Shoreditch and explained what purpose means in business. No singing. No dancing. No tricks. Just a bloke standing and explaining something in a concise way.

It was a surprise hit racking up more than 1,000 views in a few hours despite having no followers or promotion. There was no way I was going to share it with anyone I knew and in fact I hope you don’t watch it. Far too cringe.

But it backed my theory that young people, far more than older generations, aren’t just looking for escapism on social media. It is how they are learning about the world.

Tweaking that formula of sharing useful information has seen us racked up many multiples of that first post.

A post pointing out five things we think should go in every press release is our most popular.

Any dreams of being a middle-aged, middle-class TikTok influencer might not be realised – quite yet!

But by being on TikTok we are helping to fill the platform with information we believe is important to people who might one day want to work with us or even employ us.

And what is more after filling the first few posts, my 20-something staff learned to become less shy and are thankfully filling our TikTok feed far more than me.

Getting a TikTok account is not a strategy I recommend to most clients.

But what I do say is that marketing is not complicated. It is at its best when it is simplest.

Work out who you want to talk to? And keep them at the front of your mind.

Work out what media they consume? And use that to speak to them from the heart.

And lead from the front. Don’t ask others in the organisation to communicate in a way that you wouldn’t. Even if that means swallowing your pride to be a middle-aged suburban dad on TikTok.

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I’m a middle-aged suburban dad – Can I become a TikTok star?