Friday 27 November 2015

Literally can't give it away!



Giving money away is harder than you think. 

I recently wrote to around 50 Finance Directors, mostly in what are quite large firms, offering them some free money. I was very open about why I was doing it, so that any suspicion about it being a trick of some kind could be set aside. (a transcript of my email to them is below)

These individuals have enormous responsibility to manage the finances of some pretty big firms, so more than anyone should be smart with money. Yet not one of them took me up on my offer.

Now I am sure, if I popped down to my local shopping centre and tried the same thing, all my envelopes of money would be gone in minutes.

So, why did my experiment get this result ? (which, by the way, did not actually surprise me at all)

You see, in my many years of working with Finance Professionals what I experienced is that almost all of them believe they know everything they need to know about finance matters already. This leads to a very close minded approach and a suspicion of anyone who suggests there may be a better way of doing things for their firm. Now of course if you believe someone is trying to sell you something on the back of such suggestions, that is going to make you wary. 

I wasn't trying to sell anything at all and was very clear about that.

This should be worrying for CEO's and shareholders of companies everywhere. Finance Heads should be tuning in to any opportunity to improve their firms profitability. I know that if I had an FD refusing an envelope of free money, I would be giving them a very different envelope. 

An envelope with their marching orders inside



Dear XXXXXXXXXXX

Would you be interested in having some Free Money? 

That's right, would you like an envelope with some bank notes in? 

Why am I doing this? There are three reasons 

  1. Having travelled all over the world for the last 20 years, I have always been one of those people that hangs on to my unspent foreign notes to use on my next visit there. For the moment though I have stopped globe trotting so I thought I would give it all away. 

  1. I want to conduct an experiment. You see, everyone these days is so weary of the endless tricks used by companies selling their wares, that I expect very few people to say 'Yes please, I'll have some free money'.  No one believes that anything is ever really free. 

  1. The last reason is to raise awareness. Most companies are wasting money in the way that they handle their foreign exchange. So I thought I would too, by just giving it away. 

If you want to receive an envelope with free money inside, all you have to do is send me an email with your details, and agree to a have a 5-10 minute chat with me on the phone about how betterFX (my business - www.betterfx.co.uk) can save your firm much more than the money you will get in your envelope. 

I have divided up my bank notes into 10 envelopes, which are all sealed and identical, so I genuinely don’t know now what is in each one.    

First come first served. So, as they say in all those corny Black Friday promotions, when it's gone, it's gone!  




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